After a long wait, Samurai Bride finally gets its day. It’s amazing to think that the first episode of this series aired on AT-X almost a full year ago. This series may have been boring, but it’s fanservice was anything but.
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Download Links
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Series Information
Production Company: ARMS
Vintage: Spring 2013
Nipple sightings from other ARMS produced anime:
Ikkitousen: Dragon Destiny
Ikkitousen: Great Guardians
Ikkitousen: Shugaku Toshi Keppu-roku
Elfen Lied
Hagure Yuusha
Master of Martial Hearts
Samurai Girls
Kakyuusei 2
Kite Liberator
Mezzo
Queen’s Blade
Queen’s Blade II
Queen’s Blade: Utsukushiki Toshi-tachi (OVA)
Queen’s Blade: Rebellion
Sekatsuyo
Nakoruru
Other notable / recently relevant mainstream anime from ARMS:
Maoyuu, Pandora Hearts, Wizard Barristers
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Notable Seiyuu:
Yoko Hikasa as Musashi Miyamoto
Yoko Hikasa is also well known for her roles as:
Mamiko Noto as Keiji Maeda
Mamiko Noto is also well known for her roles as:
Satou Satomi as Inshun Houzouin
Satou Satomi is also well known for her roles as:
Haruka Tomatsu as Mataemon Araki
Haruka Tomatsu is also well known for her roles as:
Aoi Yuki as Jubei Yagyu
Aoi Yuki is also well known for her roles as:
Aki Toyosaki as Kanetsugu Naoe
Aki Toyosaki is also well known for her roles as:
Ami Koshimizu as Charles d’Artanian
Ami Koshimizu is also well known for her roles as:
Kaoru Mizuhara as Gisen Yagyu
Kaoru Mizuhara is also well known for her roles as:
Minako Kotobuki as Sen Tokugawa
Minako Kotobuki is also well known for her roles as:
Rie Kugimiya as Yukimura Sanada
Rie Kugimiya is also well known for her roles as:
Yu Kobayashi as Matabee Goto
Yu Kobayashi is also well known for her roles as:
Also featuring
Daisuke Hirakawa as Muneakira Yagyu
Takahiro Sakurai as Yoshihiko Tokugawa
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Thoughts on the anime
An already star studded seiyuu cast adds Yoko Hikasa, Mamiko Noto and Haruka Tomatsu, making Samurai Bride the all-time Dream Team of female seiyuu talent. The production values remain quite strong and the specials were improvements over the original series.
Unfortunately, that’s where the praise for this series ends. The story was far weaker than the original, really this anime felt like a series of filler episodes with only a hint of pseudo-drama near the very end. The otaku pandering in the early episodes (maid cafe scenes) were unbearably dull. It’s devastating to see such a high budget, high effort ecchi series bomb in sales as hard as Samurai Bride did, but I can’t say it’s totally surprising given how boring the series was.
Of course, Samurai Bride delivers where it counts. Unfortunately, these days it takes more than some well animated nudity and a great seiyuu cast to make money. That may have worked in 2009, but the novelty factor of such anime has long worn off. Attitudes about ecchi have changed in such a way that things can’t just be done as they used to be. Series must at least try pass themselves off as real anime as Haganai or Infinite Stratos did, or they must have requisite “cool factor,” the way that High School DxD and To Love-Ru have managed.
Instead, Samurai Bride went big on the old formula and became a cautionary tale. Though I must say, sometimes change sucks. It would be nice if fanservice shows like Samurai Bride could continue forever, pointless and boring as they may be.
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Thoughts on the fanservice video
The video file for this series ended up 40% larger than the one for it’s predecessor (Samurai Girls) despite having nearly identical length. Not exactly sure why, it just refused to encode with any semblance of efficiency. It’s probably because of the source being very high quality with a lot of color depth. The file is rather big, but the quality is correspondingly awesome.
This second season put a much higher emphasis on non-nude service and counterbalanced with slightly less nudity than the original series.
As said before, this series had an awesome seiyuu cast. In particular this was a very nice change of pace for Mamiko Noto who is almost unrecognizable as Keiji Maeda. Even more impressive was the gruff performance of Haruka Tomatsu as Mataemon Araki. Hard to believe that she’s the same actress that played Lala in To Love-Ru.
As mentioned before, I have a two season character sorted version of this series scheduled for the site this weekend.
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Favorite Character
This series introduced five new characters, all of which were pretty nice. Mataemon was an especially nice addition, though unfortunately she was used as a blatant tease character. Always the closest to being naked, but almost never the one to actually get naked. Though Gisen’s role in the story was reduced, I think her fanservice quotient actually went up somehow.
If by some miracle there is a third season of this show, Mataemon would be the character I’d want to see more of the most, but for this second season I thought Gisen was once again the best service generator.