Manga Adaptation by White Fox
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

In the tumultuous Eiroku Period, the fox spirit Tama and the sage Jinka travel the land righting wrongs and stopping evil-doers, joined by the hapless samurai Shinsuke.

Iro’s verdict: Please Stick With It

Judging purely from this first episode with zero outside knowledge, Sengoku Youko is merely an okay period action show with some solid animation and standard character tropes… but I’ve read the manga and I’m an ardent supporter of Satoshi Mizukami, so I can’t help but watch with that foreknowledge. Like, hey, I get it. We’re still traumatized by Biscuit Hammer‘s insultingly bad anime adaptation and Mizukami’s works all have workmanlike intros at the best of times, but the man is unmatched when it comes to emotionally satisfying character arcs and endings. This show (thankfully) has a full three cours of episodes to get through all that, but it does mean the full breadth and depth of the story simply won’t be visible from the first 20 minutes.

Gee’s verdict: You Will Watch This

Satoshi Mizukami is manga’s most consistent writer. There is no one amongst his peers as capable at writing fulfilling endings as he is. The man has literally never missed. Are his beginnings kind of slow and lack impact? Do his characters not really communicate their appeal early on? All true, no one man could be blessed to have it all, but Mizukami’s grasp of simple but satisfying emotional arcs is unparalleled. There is elegance in earnest simplicity, and Mizukami has never felt the temptation to uphold pretense or mask his work in needless complexity. I echo Iro’s sentiment that on some level, taken on its own, there isn’t much to Sengoku Youko’s initial pitch. Shinsuke is your standard shounen idiot protagonist, Jinka is your moody anti hero of sorts, and Tama is well, Tama. There’s no rhetoric or testimony I could write here that could change your mind. So all I can say is trust me, as long as White Fox doesn’t completely botch this adaptation, Sengoku Youko will be one to keep a close eye on. You don’t yet understand how fortunate we are to finally get a competent adaptation of a Mizukami work.