Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie Review

Battle lines are drawn.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 7, 2012

Real time strategy games are among the most popular in the wild and wooly world of online gaming. Something about a minute by minute (or even second by second) reexamination of tactics and battle plans make for some major adrenaline rushes that younger males especially seem to thrive on. Of course the world of series television can’t quite match that same kind of visceral intensity as a real time strategy game can provide, but Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings manages to dance around the edges of the same sort of idea of a real time strategy game, if not its actual execution (no pun intended, considering the death count in most of the games, and indeed in Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings itself). The irony here of course is that Sengoku Basara started life as a videogame, albeit not a real time strategy outing, and the track record of videogame adaptations into other media is littered with the rotting corpses of franchises that just couldn’t reinvent themselves as either feature films or anime series. Sengoku Basara may not be completely successful, and is indeed probably too stuffed with characters for its own good, but it still manages to be surprisingly effective and exciting at times, and better yet, this second season of the series ups a kind of stoner-surfer comedic element that plays unexpectedly well in this series set in a warring feudal Japan. In fact it’s the odd concatenation of style and content that is one of Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings’ strongest calling cards. The show is elegantly designed, making its visual component compelling and inviting, but the dialogue is more often than not cheeky and over the top, giving the show a sort of goofy ambience that keeps the show amiably enjoyable even if it’s not always completely comprehensible.

“Historical accuracy, shmaccuracy,” some viewers of Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings may be saying, especially with regard to this second season, which seems to deliberately play the ancient feudal setting against a much more modern feeling with regard to its characters and dialogue. As with the first season of the series, we have an almost insane number of various warlords passing through shifting alliances, and it’s not unusual for any given episode to initially posit two characters as antagonists only to have them end up as allies, at least when they discover there’s a third common enemy they must both confront. The second season also continues the first season’s tendency to have nemeses just kind of stand and scream at each other, often simply repeating each others’ names over and over again. It’s disarmingly funny a lot of the time, but it also wears out its welcome fairly quickly as well.

Despite these fanciful elements, there are in fact actual historical elements and personages at play in Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings, albeit highly fictionalized and stuffed into an obviously whimsical reimagining of supposedly real events. The first season offered putative unifier of Japan Oda Nobunaga, although in the series he is portrayed as an arch villain of sorts, a power mad wizard with quasi-supernatural powers. That same sort of approach is ported over to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a real life underling of Nobunaga’s who in the Sengoku Basara universe is actually presented as an unrelated character. Despite the change in adversaries, the second season of Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings plays out in much the same way as the first season, with a series of epic battles that find the two main heroes of the piece, Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura, leading their forces to overcome evil. A huge array of supporting characters flit in and out of the series, to the point where it can actually be hard to keep track of who’s who and which side they’re (for the moment, anyway) on.

The series is impeccably well animated and designed, with really incredible attention to detail paid in everything from the lavish period costumes to the enticing looking backgrounds. Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings is often odd, and more than a bit confusing at times, but from a purely visual standpoint it’s one of the strongest current anime releases, with a really refreshing ambience and a sort of lavish production design (within the confines of animation, obviously) that really help define the show as an epic. Some may have issues with some of the English language voice work (more about that below in the audio section), as the dub seems to really want to exaggerate the sort of contemporary surfer-dude ethos of some of the dialogue, but the series has such an appealing overall approach that most viewers will probably be willing to forgive the relatively minor stumbles Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings makes along the way.

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings Season 2 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of FUNimation Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78.1. Many of my comments with regard to Sengoku Basara - Samurai Kings: Season 1 hold true for this second season as well. This is one of the most sumptuously handsome high definition presentations in recent anime memory and is certianly one of the strongest looking releases from FUNimation. Colors are incredibly vivid and well saturated, with incredibly vibrant reds, purples and greens and some actually stunning gradations of light scale. Fine detail is really quite remarkable for an animated outing, and the Japanese ethos of this piece is really extremely evident in some of the gorgeously rendered backgrounds. As is fairly typical of these releases, sometimes the backgrounds are presented in an impressionistic manner, and occasionally there are also "establishing shots" (for want of a better term) that have a certain slapdash quality. But line detail and overall design aesthetic here are extremely sharp and well defined. This second season tends to exploit more of a three dimensional approach in many sequences, with something akin to the old Disney multi-plane technique where foreground objects move at different speeds and in different planes than background objects.

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As with the video assessment, the audio of Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings Season 2 is largely in line with that of the first season. Once again two lossless tracks are offered, the original Japanese in a Dolby TrueHD 2.0 mix, and an English dub in a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix. As mentioned above in the main body of the review, the English dub, while wild and wooly and incredibly boisterous at times, may be somewhat off putting to some listeners as the English voice cast tends to emphasize the contemporary sounding surfer-dude ethos of a lot of the dialogue. (Just one example: the final episode of this season has repeated references to a battle tournament dubbed a "Manstravaganza!"). The Japanese track, while obviously narrower, has a much more reserved voice cast, one that is almost gruff by comparison, but which might be more in keeping with the historical bent of the series. That said, the English version is actually laugh out loud funny a lot of the time (intentionally, or at least I think so), and the added activity of the surround mix really opens up the proceedings in the series' many battle sequences. Fidelity on both tracks is excellent, and dialogue, effects and underscore are well balanced and prioritized. As was mentioned in the Season 1 review, don't expect a whale of a lot of dynamic range here, as in the English track especially, this is an "up to 11" aural assault a lot of the time.

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Episode 6 Audio Commentary features Voice Director and Writer Christopher Bevins and Patrick Seitz, co- writer and voice actor (Chosokabe Motochika). This is typical chatty FUNimation fare, but because these two wrote the English language version, they do offer some fun insight into the characters.
• Episode 12 Audio Commentary features Eric Vale (Maeda Keiji), Robert McCallum (Date Masamune) and Chris Cason (Takenaka Hanbei), who offer some passingly interesting comments about their characters as well as typically tangential and unrelated chatty items.
• New Anime "Sengoku Basara II Katakura-Kun" (HD; 26:00) is similar to the other chibi comedy anime supplement on the first volume of Sengoku Basara, this time featuring a miniature version of Katakura.
• Textless Opening Song – Sword Summit (HD; 1:34)
• Textless Closing Song – El Dorado (HD; 1:32)
• Textless Closing Song – Ruisen (HD; 1:32)
• Trailers for other FUNimation Releases

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings: Season 2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A lot of times the anime series that are built around a "battle of the week" idea get to be incredibly boring after just a few episodes. Sengoku Basara: Samurai Kings overcomes that obstacle with a couple of gambits. First of all, the series has an almost insane amount of supporting characters, so that shifting alliances and strategies often offer some variety to the proceedings. Perhaps even more importantly, the series is just sumptuously designed, which offers the viewer plenty to look at even when certain story elements may be more than a bit confusing. The series does a rather artful job of blending history with fantasy, and the show's quasi-supernatural elements add just a dash of spice and mystery. This second season is highlighted by a more comic approach which blends surprisingly well with the more over the top action elements. This second season beefs up the supplements at least a little, while offering the same excellent video and audio quality. Recommended.