Direction & Pacing
Whenever an anime with around a 23-minute runtime is given less than eight episodes to try and build up a show, it is always important to take things with a grain of salt when it comes to direction and pacing. There is only so much that a show can feasibly do when given time constraints like these.
Even with that in mind, Yasuke’s direction and pace are all over the place. Despite the fact that the show was only six episodes, it felt like they crammed an entire two seasons into the plot.
Characters are introduced and forgotten before you can blink, as they either die a quick and meaningless death like the mercenaries, or are just shrugged off and not talked about like Saki’s mother. We are barely given any time to get to know the side characters or their stories, so there is little reason to care about them.
The characters that are the show’s central focus are interesting, but they are typical Mary Sues. Yasuke can beat pretty much anything that is thrown at him without much trouble and has Saki’s overpowered, deus ex machina powers whenever he runs into a situation where he can’t.
Maybe it is just because most samurai-themed entertainment is slow and deliberate by comparison, but Yasuke’s overall direction moves far too fast to tell an enriching story about its characters and world.
