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Alrighty, before we begin, I’d like to mention that I have seen every single season of Sengoku Basara. Did I like this Anime? Yes, there were parts that appealed to me, like Data Masamune – Who happens to be my favourite character. However, there were parts that I also didn’t like; hopefully, I get to address all that today.

I’d also like to note that, this blog today will be an overview of the entirety of the series, so it’ll be quite long. If you’re not into reading then I totally understand ;3

Seasons Overview
BASARA has never been a historically accurate series and it’s obvious to people who didn’t even know it was supposed to be historical fiction in the first place, however, in my opinion, I feel that it was this inaccuracy that gave BASARA its charm. I’ve had a lot of fun with this series watching it and then Googling everything to see how much is true and I’ve learned a lot of interesting facts about Japan’s Sengoku period.

Season one was by FAR the best in the series, but slowly but surely I found that it was starting to lose its charm as they continued making seasons. The story started losing quality until it got to season three, which was definitely one of the poorest written storyline I’ve seen, which is really saying something considering how much anime I haven’t liked but have forced myself to watch.

During season three, I felt like I was watching a really badly written fanfiction and I just couldn’t get into this plot. There was a lot of, not quite “fan service”, but a lot of fluff that didn’t make sense in the overall story and it was just BAD. It really pains me to say this, but I was not impressed by season three (obviously). It just seemed to have lost the novelty that it started out with.

Art
Moving onto the art, I’m not quite sure why BASARA switched from Production I.G (animation company that produced all the seasons up ’til now) to Telecom Animation Studio, but it shouldn’t have. While T.A.S uses really nice, vivid colours unlike I.G studios, the style is just too different and a lot of the time I felt that the proportions looked really awkward or not realistic.

Sound
I will say the sound was as nice as ever. BASARA does make a point of getting all the “big seiyuu” and they’re all really good at what they do. I was really glad that none of the voices changed, especially from game to anime (I mean the Japanese cast). All the voices from the game got their respective roles in the anime, so that was really good.

The soundtrack this time around was also really different in style, but it kind of worked out anyway. Hiroyuki Sawano is an amazing composer and I’m disappointed I didn’t get to hear his music this time around, but Masahiro Tokuda is not one to be under-estimated either and has a very cool, unique style that seemed to fit.

Characters
I felt that all the characters seemed too awkward, it never felt “right”. I am glad that this season included some of the characters from the third BASARA game (brand new characters at the time) but on the other hand, I think that with all the new characters, they kind of took away from the “original” cast like Masamune, Yukimura, etc.

In addition to this, there is one brief moment when Masamune and Yukimura are talking alone, and it felt kind of like they were on a date and I was watching a shounen-ai or something. I mean, BASARA has always had a “man-crush” kind of theme like, “respect thy rival” and all that, but this was just too much and WAY overdone.

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