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Finished Afro Samurai yesterday, and to sum it up in one word, Afro Samurai is badass.
Afro Samurai is the No. 2 swordsman who is on a quest for revenge to kill the No. 1 swordsman, who had murdered his father many years ago. Afro suffers a great deal of pain and tragedy along this path and keeps moving forward without emotion for the sake of carrying out his revenge. The only companion he has is a strange figure named Ninja Ninja, who is practically Afro's opposite. Afro is the cold, quiet, serious swordsman, while Ninja Ninja is constantly talking and provides a lot of the humor in the series, contrasting with Afro quite a bit. These two travel a not-so long (well, for the viewers) journey to track down the No. 1 swordsman and deal with a number of bloody battles to get there.
First and foremost, Afro Samurai is an action-packed series. There is some character development and drama, although more than anything it's the intense battles that drive the show. If you don't enjoy the action, then there isn't a lot else to propel you to love the series. That said, the action is very well done and there's a lot of violence and badassery to go along with it all. The fights are very fast-paced and some of Afro's past struggles come to haunt him in a few of these battles, which only make things more intense. The backstories are also pretty dramatic, and even though the anime is too short to develop the characters as much as it could have, you can still feel for the characters just because of how screwed up things get.
Afro Samurai is pretty unusual. Stylewise, you get a bit of an anime vibe, but at the same time it's not a conventional anime by any means. Samurai element aside, a lot of it doesn't feel like an anime and it could very much pass as an American show, particularly because the series was dubbed in English to begin with. Truth be told, I can't even imagine this in Japanese in the first place, just because the style fits with English a lot better. Ninja Ninja's dialogue is done very well by Samuel L. Jackson and there's just no fathomable way that it could sound authentic in Japanese for obvious reasons.
Afro Samurai was pretty different from most of the series I usually watch, so I wasn't sure how much I'd enjoy it. Ultimately though I had fun with this, and it's great to watch if you need something short and action-packed to enjoy. It's too short to develop everything in some magnificent way, but all things considered it still did pretty well with its short run time.
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