Sword for Truth

Summary: >

Sakaki is a masterless samurai who gets hired by the Tokugawa shogunate to exchange a legendary sword for a kidnapped princess. He manages to rescue her, but then also faces many perils as the Seki ninja pursue them. There is some part of the plot involving that sword and summoning demons, but for the most part Sakaki returns the princess. He then leaves and has a passing conversation on the street with some other guy who kills people through judo.

Thoughts: >

This title was imported by U.S. Manga Corps who marketed this anime as "In the Tradition of Ninja Scroll" (another title they also have the rights to). It is like Ninja Scroll if you completely fucked up every good thing about Ninja Scroll, to make something with no redeeming value. Then you'd almost have something as bad as Sword for Truth.

There is a lot of sex and nudity in this title, but it's not marketed as hentai. It's badly animated, not erotic, nor even mildly interesting. Sex is thrown in because they wanted it there, but so badly placed and so horribly set up it somehow makes this title even worse. An interesting achievement.

Sword for Truth isn't just violent, it's an anime splatter film. Splatter films are horror flicks focusing on excessive violence with the end result of blood, gore, and guts flying everywhere. If this sounds appealing to you, consider that this anime has some of the worst designs you'll (hopefully) ever see in Japanese animation. On top of that, the animation itself is just pathetic. Sword for Truth continuously shows people getting killed, gored, torn apart etc. It goes out of it's way to do so, but in the process doesn't know what to do with the animation once it gets there - and it sucks so hard... I'm at a loss on how to explain it.

The story and characters are easy to hate, and not just because they're bland, and linear with no depth. This is the sort of thing you would expect a (disturbed) little kid to write. At one point a girl makes an attempt to pick pocket Sakaki, so he takes his sword and cuts off her clothes. If that wasn't juvenile enough, a while later she visits him, they have sex, then she professes her love to him. This sort of stupidity is what Sword of Truth delivers from start to finish. You'd think a story so linear would be impossible to screw up, yet it does just that by inserting random garbage, and horrendous editing.

It was a tough call, but I believe this is the worst anime I have ever seen, and I hope it stays that way because I don't even want to think about how much effort it would take to be worse than this. (Edit: Ugh, this actually happened.) Some titles are so dumb I have to laugh. Sword for Truth I just thoroughly hated.

Screen Caps: >