In the cyberpunk city of Neo Saitama, Kenji Fujikido has suffered the murder of his wife and child during a brutal ninja turf war. Possessed by the bloodthirsty ninja soul named Naraku, Kenji finds himself surrendering control to Naraku in his thirst for vengeance. Together they become the Ninja Slayer.

That sounds like a passable plot, right? Too bad Slayer is so bad that there’s absolutely no way to convey that plot other than detailing it outright point by point. You have to understand something about studio Trigger to understand where Ninja Slayer enters the picture. Trigger is a huge studio with enormous balls. The Japanese invasion of Korea was actually just an attempt to find more land upon which Trigger could rest its bloated testicles. Their whole goal with Slayer is to see how many millions they can make by delivering the cheapest pile of shit possible. It’s a test filed in the How stupid are people? category.

It would be easy to defend Ninja Slayer as being some avant garde artful take on animation. One could call it a minimalist approach to redefining its own genre by avoiding definition itself. However, we have people with literature and art degrees on deck and they all say that’s, like, total bullshit, bro.

So we’ve established Slayer is bad on purpose. From the horrible, senseless Engrish theme song to long stretches of silence to explosions that happen for seemingly no reason, everything is truly a calculated endeavor in this show. Trigger doubtlessly hoped it would fall into the “so bad it’s good” category, but it’s a long way off. If you’re not just the edgiest 15 year-old there ever was, this show can’t end fast enough.

We put two reviewers on this and it was like watching a pair of grown men lose horribly at a round of “Who can stay quiet the longest?” As the credits finally began to roll, one viewer clutched his head in silence while the other yelled, “Thank God! This is hands down the worst thing I’ve ever watched — and I’ve watched a lot of dogshit.” We usually try to be more professional and eloquent in our reviews, but if Trigger didn’t put any effort forward it’s hard to justify doing so on this end.

The first viewer broke his silence to ask, “How do you even write a review for something this bad?” As you can see, it’s fairly impossible to do anything other than point out the obvious. There are no in-between frames of animation, the story is on indefinite hiatus, the music is atrocious, and the attempts at being comedic failed in the most painful ways. Trigger took a gamble on a clip-art animation style it hoped was reminiscent of something like Squidbillies or even Archer. It made eye-bleach instead.

The series went so far out of its way to be terrible in every way possible and succeeded. The very astute reader might have noticed the weird resolution on the screen grabs — that’s because the anime isn’t even formatted for modern televisions. In keeping with its 1980’s neon motif, the screen resolution for the series is formatted with black borders to make it perfect for watching on an old CRT television. No thanks.

In fact, “no thanks” to the entire shebang. We’d like to say that the worst part is knowing that Trigger will likely turn a huge profit off of people with no taste regardless of how resplendently offensive this series is to every decent human’s sensibilities. But that’s a lie. The worst part was definitely having to watch it.

Recommendation: Skip it!

Series Info:

Title: Ninja Slayer
Original Source: Graphic Novel
Source Writer: Bradley Bond, Philip Morzez
Source Publisher: Enterbrain
Director: Akira Amemiya
Writer: Akira Amemiya, Yu Sato
Music: Kenji Fujisawa, Hiroshi Motofuji
Studio: Trigger
Run Start: 04/2015
Review Date: 04/2015
Episodes Reviewed: 01