All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. Katana Maidens is a challenging series to review. Not because of any particular depth of theme any difficult concepts or complex character dynamics though there are some of all of these believe it or not. No Katana Maidens is a tough review because it is essentially two shows in one. Originally airing as a single 24episode chunk with a recap episode at the halfway point the series is divided into two cours. Though in this case theyre probably better thought of as seasons despite airing back to back. What they share is a setting and the same core cast though the series has so many characters that even using the term core cast seems a little incorrect. Regardless both seasons revolve around swordwielding middle and highschool girls known as Toji. Their magic swords otakana enable them to defeat adama which are big scary demon monsters and gives them a sort of ghostly aura that prevents them from actually dying when being harmed while its active. You may notice that there are three pieces of terminology in that last sentence and that is because the experience of watching Katana Maidens especially its first season is often a bit like being shot with a machine gun loaded with proper nouns. 880https://steemitimages.com/DQmWTVBTFD1KYUK6RHSGrT8Jg6fm513PALtUoMrkxGopi3M/TojinoMikoe1494973210928800x445.png Our protagonists: Hiyori on the left Kanami on the right Some of this is down to a simple bad translationindeed Crunchyrolls official subs are stiff at the best of times. Though I must temper that with the fact that theyre occasionally unintentionally hilarious if you dont get at least a small chuckle out of the overuse of the term evil god you need to lighten up a little. The first cour in general has a huge problem. Art in general is evaluated on a lot of different levels but one of the most basic is simple technical skillwhat is often referred to as quality. There is a palpable dearth of craft in the first cour. The visuals especially are without exaggeration atrocious. Even things as basic as line thickness are constantly screwed up often making characters look like one of their eyes is larger than the other. The fight scenes somewhat infamously are almost entirely done with 3D CGI models and not very good ones. While the frameskipping that is often present in these is not noticeable here they fail in just about every other way. Leaving you often with the feeling that youre watching a series of video game scenes from a particularly middling RPG play out rather than watching an anime. 880https://media.giphy.com/media/1mhlbUDAVlQD4E32ZZ/giphy.gif this is no joke one of the best fight scenes in the first season Writingwise it does not fare much better. Katana Maidens tosses so much jargon and so many character names at you that it can be legitimately hard to keep track of even if you watch the series in a single sitting. Character arcs in the first cour are extremely underdeveloped. Protagonist Kanami in the midst of an exhibition tournament in the first episode has her opponentcoprotagonist Hiyori Juujou suddenly abandon the arena to attempt to assassinate the nearby head of the plotimportant Sword Institute Yukari Origami yes that is really her name and instead of doing anything rational at all Kanami actually helps Hiyori escape and joins her in becoming a fugitive. We finally get a flimsy explanation for this a few episodes later she is possessed by a demon which turns out to be the series overall big bad but it feels slight and the entire thing has the impression of being written as it went along. 880https://i.ur.com/zSuvdAn.png Sayaka Similar problems repeat throughout the first coura Rei expy named Sayaka turns face after almost no provocation at all a gloating minor villain dies of what appears to be anemia after winning a sword fight and the show retroactively gives her a sad backstory. This kind of thing. This is to say nothing of the pacing. Episodes of Katana Maidens are uniformly about 22 minutes long but all of them feel like either 5 minutes or 5 hours with very little room in between. This even extends as far as where the OP is inserted since in later episodes of the first cour it often seems to cut in at the most inappropriate moment possible. To add to all of that the finale of the first cour is extremely lackluster and feels over too quickly. Were the first cour all there was to Katana Maidens it would easily be a bottomrung action series. Speaking personally Id score such a thing at a 20 or 30 at the most. And yet here is where the myth of objective quality in the arts breaks down. You might expect given all the above that I hate Katana Maidens or that I think its bad at the very least. None of that however is true. Why? Because almost all of the complaints outlined above are alleviated to at least some degreeand sometimes massivelyin the second cour. I can speak for no one else but I respect the hell out of that. Even though the upgrade is ultimately only from terrible to decent the visuals get the most immediatelynotable overhaul. Theyre much more consistent in the second cour and while the fight scenes still lean on CGI models to varying degrees theyre still a marked improvement over the first season. Some of the fights even look pretty good. If they were more consistent Id mark this as an outright strength but still its important to qualify our terms here. What really improves is the writing. Characters who were cardboard cutouts in the first cour gain interesting motivations and strong arcs in the second. Yukari the demon that was possessing her now split into three people her two former bodyguards main cast members Sayaka and Kaoru and even Yomi also one of Yukaris bodyguards and a charismaless edge villain in the first cour all have reasonably interesting arcs here and all are resolved well. This is to say nothing of our protagonists Kanami and Hiyori who also go through significant development. Something else present in the second cour? Actual themes. While the idea of inheritence from ones parents being important is floated in the first courKanami even communes with the spirit of her dead mother in her dreamsits not until the second where the show really commits. But interestingly in something that shows like this often dont do Katana Maidens doesnt really throw its weight behind any one characters viewpoint. Almost all of the characters listed above have some kind of struggle with their pasts and the series actually handles them all in fairly respectful interesting ways. Not to say that it ever loses the cheese but with the core of the script being stronger overall thats more of a strength than a weakness. More anime could stand to include incredible dialogue like this. 880https://funnyanimepics.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tojiep21equal.jpg?w=809 As for the second cours finale its a bit too long but strong overall. Its outlook puts it firmly in the same camp as more consistent peers like Symphogear and animeofthedecade contender Revue Starlight even fellow Class of 18 alum RELEASE THE SPYCE to which it is a bit closer in quality. Katana Maidens finale is a sprawling freewheeling thing involving cyclical symbolism and very literally letting go of the ghosts of your past. Two things that might seemingly contradict each other but this is again just how the show works. Katana Maidens thrives on these kinds of paradoxes and in a way the show itself is one. The hard fact of the matter is that 12 episodes that top out at tolerable in terms of quality in order to watch 12 that range from decent to great is not going to be a value proposition that many people go for. Its understandable even. But to dismiss the show entirely based on that would be a mistake. Katana Maidens has bright spots throughout and a very strong finish despite its peculiar nature. This is a series that shot for the moon and missed by a mile but I cannot deny that critical semiobjective evaluations of craft only go so far. Katana Maidens has heart something many technically better shows sorely lack and its not hard to see how it became pretty popular in its home country. Indeed the series has expanded to include a popular mobile game and a series of parody shorts called Mini Toji. But wherever and whenever Kanami Hiyori and all the rest show up from now on itll be well fought for.