After some shoddy statistical heuristics with a small sample set, Katsushiro notes that they have been successful in convincing samurai 1/7th of the time. Coincidentally, the 14th samurai they ask is the pleasant wood-chopping samurai, Heihachi. He’s got some kind of cool ghost keychain thingey on his sword, but because of his technical skills he had no experience killing people during the war. Heihachi is very down-to-earth; he talks about rice with the farmers and readily accepts Kikuchiyo as a samurai in spite of the sketchy genealogy scroll. Kikuchiyo is quite pleased by this, and even has a decent showing against several robots that attack the group. Meanwhile, back at the farm (literally), the farmers are bitching and moaning about the samurai that will be coming. They don’t trust the samurai much more than the No-buseri, and quite frankly, they’re worried that the samurai will start eating all the mochi and nanpa-ing all the chicks. If only they could see Katsushiro in action!
Unfortunately, things are about to get a whole lot worse now that someone has killed the royal envoy. I think his name was “frothy-milk-mustache-man”, but I guess it doesn’t matter much now that he’s dead. Whoever did the crime made it seem like a samurai had sliced the envoy, and the flimsy evidence is enough to convince Ukyo’s father to order an arrest of all samurai. In order to accomplish this feat, Ukyo’s dad sends out his mighty legion of fork-wielding clowns and sword swinging airborne blenders. The gang tries to escape by taking an elevator train, but Kikuchiyo is forced to stay behind to guard the rear. Entangled between two blenders gone mad, Kikuchiyo appears to perish in the ensuing train crash. Kanbei hasn’t seen the eyecatch scenes yet, so you can just tell he’s getting all angsty over this, even if he tries to pull of the cool tough guy exterior.
I was rather startled to see Kanbei’s… nutcrusher move on the other bodyguard (Kyuuzou’s ugly co-worker). Also, to anyone who reads Penny Arcade, don’t the robots sent out to fight samurai kinda look like the FF2000? Either way, these episodes are both good, and I think this series is shaping up nicely. I’ve read a little about the movie that Samurai 7 is based on, and I think that Gonzo is doing a fine job in the adaptation department. Even if the anime can’t approach the splendor of the movie, it is a very clever adaptation, and certainly different enough to stand on its own.
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For all of it’s $300,000-per-episode production values, I was pretty surprised to see Kambei actually pull off the infamous nutcracker move! And in 16:9 widescreen glory too!
And, now that you point it out, the robots in this episode do look like the FF2000, but I think that it actually hails from another webcomic (^_^)