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Elusive Samurai official key visual featuring the main cast

The Elusive Samurai Is Rapidly Becoming 2024’s Best New Anime

The Elusive Samurai anime exploded seemingly out of nowhere, and has one of the highest MAL scores this season.

The Summer 2024 Anime Season has introduced a variety of exciting new shows to the community, including the zany comedy My Deer Friend Nokotan, and shows like Suicide Squad ISEKAI the reimagine classic characters in a new way.

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A surprising hit from this season, however, has come in the way of CloverWorks’ adaptation of The Elusive Samurai, which has a remarkably high score on MAL despite only having one episode available at the time of writing.

What Makes The Elusive Samurai So Sensational?

While CloverWorks has solidified themselves as a solid and reliable studio, producing standout hits like Horimiya, Black Butler -Public School Arc- and My Dress Up Darling, from time-to-time their new releases can get buried amid a season filled with other promising titles. While there weren’t many anime fans talking about The Elusive Samurai before episode 1 dropped, it’s now become hard to avoid seeing Tokiyuki’s face all over the internet.

It’s clear that CloverWorks is putting a lot of love into this adaptation, with many fans of the original manga commenting on how well the studio has done to re-contextualize small details that were left in dialogue boxes in the source material, as well as offering the studio’s signature fluid animation to the show.. The characters and setting are fun and refreshing, with the series taking place during Japan’s Nanboku-cho period (1333), and following the up-and-coming successor of the Kamakura Shogunate. Historical fiction isn’t uncommon in anime, but it is rare to see something that sticks so closely to the era it’s attempting to portray.

Elusive-Samurai-official-screencap-of-the-main-character-and-their-father-in-the-fall
Crunchyroll

Not to mention, watching the first episode, it’s fun to see child characters that actually behave like curious children, instead of having their personalities aged up. All around, The Elusive Samurai is a gem of a series, and we can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

Fans interested in getting caught up with The Elusive Samurai can stream the show on Crunchyroll.

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Author
Image of Anna Williams
Anna Williams
Anna Williams -- not to be confused with the Tekken character -- is an editor and writer that has been working closely with the anime and manga industry for over four years for a variety of publications including Comic Book Resources, Screen Rant, and We Got This Covered. She has had the opportunity to sit down and talk with key figures in the industry, and continue to grow a vast knowledge of the art and culture that goes into each new seasonal and ongoing franchise. She's also had the opportunity to work alongside indie game developers like Baroque Decay to edit and localize early devlog materials for their upcoming game Catechesis.