Spirit Warrior: Regent of Darkness
Synopsis
Kujaku, the young martial arts mystic-in-training, must rescue his supernaturally powered sister from an evil sorcerer. The warlock plans to use her abilities to unleash eternal darkness upon the Earth. But Kujaku shares a psychic link to his sister, and nothing, not even evil hordes of warrior minions, will stand in his way!
Review
Spirit Warrior is one of those typical light versus darkness, good versus evil anime, but what anime today is not about good versus evil? The idea is overdone; newer and fresher ideas must be developed! And what better to do than to add history into the mix? I am talking about adding the Nazis. So now we have characters with mystical powers and at the same time around the period where the Nazis still existed. Is not that cool? Where are the story planners? They really got away with this one. The story is lacking; it moves with quick speed and pretty much lacks depth also.
Check out the flow of the story. Introduce main characters, one main character (the good character) goes to try and save the other main character (the soon to be evil character). Things happen and the soon to be evil character becomes the evil character. When the good character first fights with the evil character, he fails, builds up, fights again and wins… simple? Not really, throw in the fact that the evil character is the good character’s older sister; also throw in another fact that both these characters are fighting the same way their guardians were fighting many years ago, so it was kind of like fate or destiny.
What did not appeal to me was how the fantasy theme was mixed with present time theme and was mixed with a little bit of futuristic theme. Fantasy theme, with all the mystical powers, present time theme, with the Nazis (not really present time 2004, but bear with me please :P), and futuristic theme, with cyborg (the Nazi soldiers are cyborgs in this movie).
By the time you are reading this paragraph, I am assuming you are saying in your head, “Gee dude, your writing tone, sounds quick and lacks depth.” If you say that in your head, then I have accomplished what I wanted, which is to show you how it feels when watching Spirit Warrior. I will not bash Spirit Warrior any further, but as an honest reviewer, skip this title for your sake.
The Breakdown
This review was suppose to be up somewhere at the end of December, but due to my trip to Hong Kong it was postponed. Spirit Warrior: Regent of Darkness, should only be a rent title in my view. Making a purchase means either you have a lot of money to waste or you are in love with the title, both are cool with me, but for us who are poor, we shall resort to renting :P.