[Fish Sandwich]

Ninnin Rewatch Final! 47 + Overall Thoughts

I love this finale a lot. I guess that should be obvious at this point but I just feel like I should say it. If you wanna reach for criticisms I guess you could say the actual final battle is relatively underwhelming, but it's still totally serviceable and there's SO much more going on here than just that. Pretty much everything wraps up perfectly, and the show leaves on such a good note. All the epilogue stuff is great and, without spoiling anything, the whole Last Ninja plot wraps up exactly how it should've, and seeing where all the characters end up is similarly great. I honestly can't even talk about this episode without excessive gushing so I'm just going to stop here. There's a million great moments I could mention and this post is going to be long enough as it is.

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So that's Ninninger, a show I watched, and then watched again not even a full year later. To be honest, at first I thought devoting 47 episodes worth of time to a show I'd already seen recently would be kind of a waste of time I could spend watching shows I hadn't seen in a while, or even once, but here at the end of it all I'm REALLY glad I gave Ninninger a second chance to impress me all over again. I said the show started boring me around the middle and frankly I barely even remember what I meant by that. Not a single episode of this show failed to entertain me this time around, and it never once felt like I was forcing myself to pound through it. I don't know if you guys enjoyed reading this but it was a darn fun experience writing it.

There's a lot going for Ninninger, but I think its single biggest strength is the characterization of its main cast. They were the focus of a lot of what I wrote and that's because there's ALWAYS something to talk about with them. Every member of the team has a fleshed out personality, a solid arc, and plays nicely off the others. Takaharu starts as an endearing goofball, gets a haircut, and becomes a way more mature endearing goofball. Yakumo is seemingly distant and cool, but can be almost childish at times, and gets notably less abrasive as time goes on. Nagi is an excitable kid who's always doing his best to help out, and becomes more confident in himself in the process. Fuuka's a klutzy but clever type who gets some idea what she wants to do with her life through her experiences as a ninja. Kasumi is so intelligent she's not used to having things go wrong for her at first. And Kinji is a gentleman cowboy who finds a family for himself with the team. They're all great. Better than those stupid one sentence summaries even let on. Clearly the writers thought they were all awesome too, because Ninninger's balance when it comes to character focus is impeccable. I feel like normally in Sentai there's always one character that draws the short straw or one who eats up screen time but that simply isn't the case here. Nobody ever feels out of focus and even episodes nominally about a single character tend to let others play important roles, as exemplified by Takaharu, who gets an episode that is distinctly, solely about him once in the entire series.

On the other side of the moral spectrum we have the villains, and it's amazing the difference a little perspective makes. Coming off of ToQger's incredibly strong group of bad guys I found myself underwhelmed, but coming off of Zyuohger's group of slackers I feel I wasn't appreciating them nearly enough. Kyuuemon especially is a really solid main villain with a fleshed out backstory and arc, whose actions throughout the series are always interesting to watch, whether's he's trying to play the other villains to his own ends, or interacting with the Ninningers directly.

In general I'm convinced at this point Ninninger was a really solid show all around. Solid pacing. Solid action. Solid comedy. Solid drama. Solid villains. Solid protagonists. I just spent over a month raving about it and yet, paragraph upon paragraph later, I feel like I could easily keep going. But, at least for the time being, I'll simply give my one sentence review of the show:

If this is what a BAD Super Sentai looks like, the good ones must be some transcendent s***.