Name: Kaze no Yojimbo
Licensed in US: Yes
Series Length: 25 episodes at about 23 minutes each
Type Watched: Fansubbed
Overall Rating: 8 out of 10
Date Written: December 18, 2005

    George Kodama comes to the small town of Kimujuku looking for a missing person, but ends up not getting any information at first.  Everyone he talks to seems to be reluctant to talk about his missing person and the event that went along with it 15 years ago.  During his quest for information, he eventually get stuck in the middle of a gang war between, what appears to be, the two major powers in the town.  George Kodama remains neutral at all times, but repeatedly switches sides, acting as a bodyguard and a consultant to both gangs.  Throughout the series, the event that happened 15 years ago is brought up, putting more and more pieces of the puzzle together.

    Kaze no Yojimbo would have been perfect if it weren’t for its poor graphics and animation (which will be discussed later on), but its storyline seems to make up for any of its other flaws.  With decent fighting scenes, extremely well done character personalities, and just a wonderful, unpredictable storyline, Kaze no Yojimbo is a definite watch if you can stand the animation.

Graphics
    Kaze no Yojimbo failed miserably with the animation, and partly the graphics.  The actual graphics are decent, but sometimes sort of bland, but the animation gives you the feeling that you are watching a moving comic book.  Throughout the series, stupid little affects are done to still pictures repeatedly, such as bringing the character’s heads right together, enlarged, on the screen, with some graphical touches to end it all off.  It seems as if they had a strict deadline to meet, which caused them to use almost still pictures with annoying affects to speed production up.  Another thing is that they will sometimes use pure CG, which doesn’t blend in with the anime at all, and further more, looks horrible.  I will admit though, some of the fighting scenes were done fairly well, but there weren’t that many fighting scenes in the first place.  For an idea of the actual graphics, just take a look at the screenshots. 

Sound
    The sound affects were nothing astonishing, but not bad at all.  As for the music, it fit perfectly with the storyline, but it’s nothing I would ever want to just listen to.  I actually ended up skipping though the opening and endings of Kaze no Yojimbo every single episode, because I really didn’t like the music (and because I wanted to see what would happen next quicker).

Characters
    The actual character designs are sort of bland in detail, but the character’s personalities were all unique, detailed, and very interesting.  There were no main characters that had personalities that were bland or boring, and all of the main characters seemed to have a major role in the puzzle of what happened 15 years ago.  There is nothing bad I can say in this section.

    All I can say is, “Watch This!”.  The animation may bug you to death, but you will eventually just ignore it and enjoy Kaze no Yojimbo for what it did best at, its storyline.  Either way, the animation becomes slightly better after the first few episodes (A little more animation over stills with pretty affects).  Finally, if you still aren’t convinced, Kaze no Yojimbo had one of the most unexpected endings I have ever seen.  There is almost no way you would guess who was responsible for many major events that occurred in the story, which is revealed in the final episode.