jd-348 After having spent a lot of my youth watching such movies, I found this one very easy to follow in both the unedited and cut versions, (Although the story has much more to hold it together in the unedited version. Unlike Ninja Scroll this movie hit a much more serious note and i think that's where it hit me. The animation while grainy is very original, and I just love the way artists in that year stressed shadows to show different emotions. I think the story is perfect. The beginning of the movie really hits hard and as the movie progresses you get the feeling that you're going along in this adventure with the characters. As they meet, become allies and find out the their greatest strengths, a lot of heart was put into this.

Zombified_660 The Yotoden feature isn't really a film. Well, it's not how Yotoden was ever intended to be seen, anyway. In the UK Yotoden has been released in it's original OAV format, in 3 one hour parts. In the US however, aforementioned series was bought up, edited down to 90 minutes, removing most of the story segments in favour for the series' admittedly brilliant battle sequences. What story was left was turned into gibberish by an unintelligible dub, and the rest is history.Yotoden is one of the better Anime series to make it over here during the 80s. Bubblegum Crisis it ain't, but when you think that BGC aside, the era it's from was typified by Robotech and Fist of the North Star, even the American feature version looks quite solid. The story is reasonably strong, never over-egging itself too much but keeping dramatic tension high regardless, and the character design and animation is inventive. Many reviewers have commented on it's similarity to the better known Ninja Scroll, and this is a fair comment, but the extra restraint Yotoden shows makes it a more subtle and satisfying watch than Ninja Scroll.Still, it has it's down points. The ending is both anticlimactic and slightly annoying, the main character actually gets to do very little despite apparently being 'the only one who can stop this disaster' etc etc, and the movie is showing its age much worse than some of its peers, perhaps because of its rigid attachment to the constraints of the ninja genre. If it mixed it up a bit more, Yotoden would come out of enjoyable and into great, but it just doesn't manage it. Also, the American voice actors don't really fit too well with their characters, and the story in the half-length version is butchered so badly as to make the series incomprehensible.If you can track a full unedited version down, add two points to the above score, and check it out. However, as it stands, there's not enough going for the US version of Yotoden to really recommend it over other more coherent films like Ninja Scroll or Shadow Skill. Yotoden in it's original form is a great sleeper hit from the 80s, but getting your mitts on it will be very tricky.

siderite The animation is good, but not too good. Not bad either, but a little grainy. The plot is complex, but not really thought through, and it is not conveyed in an edible manner. Things happen too fast, characters all look alike and you don't know where they came from and why people care when they die. The fighting scenes are decent, but I think they used too much of that "slow motion after the sword hits" which actually doesn't show anything, just the spurts of blood.Watch it if you want to be sure you see all Japanese anime with ninjas :) but other than that, don't bother if you have something good to watch.

yy15 It's perfectly ok that people dies in an animation, but there are just way too many death in this one. Start from the very beginning, the story is all around battles, fights, death, and revenge. It goes on and on for entire one and a half hour. It was interesting at the beginning, but I grew very tire after before the show was half way through. Unlike other animations, this one is lack of humor. There are not many interactions between the characters either. The good thing about it is the sword fight scene looks pretty good and the characters look nice.