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: >

Where to start. Ah yes, the Ninja Scroll thing. This title was imported by U.S. Manga Corps who decided to market this anime as "In the Tradition of Ninja Scroll" (another title they also have the rights to). It is like Ninja Scroll in the way that if you completely fucked up every good thing about Ninja Scroll and made something with no redeeming value, 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 which is why it's being reviewed here. If it was, this would be the worst hentai title ever too (that's saying something). It's badly animated, not erotic, nor even mildly interesting. Sex is thrown in there because they just wanted it there, but so badly placed and so horribly set up that it somehow manages to make this title even worse. An interesting achievement.

Sword for Truth isn't just violent, it's an anime splatter film. If you're not familiar with the term, splatter films are horror films that focus 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 is continuously showing people getting killed, gored, torn apart etc, and it literally 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. For me personally, I think I hate it so much because 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 comes to where he's staying and they have sex, then she professes her love for him. This sort of stupidity is what Sword of Truth delivers from start to finish. You'd think a story so linear would be nearly impossible to screw up, but it manages to do that to by inserting random garbage, and with 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: Oh God, this actually happened.) Some titles are so dumb I have to laugh. Sword for Truth I just thoroughly hated.