Jubei-Chan Review

Back a bit earlier than anticipated mainly because this review was done quicker than expected. Enjoy the Jubei-Chan review.

300 years ago Yagyu Jubei defeated his rival Taiko Dayu and become the best swordsman in the land, on his deathbed Jubei gives his servant Koinosuke a heart shaped “lovely” eyepatch to give to a successor, his last few words were something in the line of Bonnie Boom Boom. 300 years later we meet Jiyu a normal girl who lives with her father Sai who is starting at a new school which apparently has a convenient bamboo forest on the route where characters frequently get lost. Jiyu meets Shiro, another attendee of the school and quite proud of his Kendo achievements, we also meet a trio of delinquents who refer to themselves as the unrefined; they are Bantarou and his monkey like sidekicks Oozaru & Kozaru who sprout nothing but exposition throughout the series.
Koinosuke finds Jiyu and thinks she is the successor to Yagyu Jubei, thinking that the last words of his master referred to a large breasted girl, in fact Jiyu’s breasts seem to attract everyone in this series but by anime standards they are normal size.
Understandably Jiyu refuses and spends over half the series getting rid of the eyepatch until an assassin from a clan called the Ryuujouji attacks everyone forcing Jiyu to become Yagyu Jubei II, or as I call her, Jiyu’s scary samurai form, where she receives all of Jubei’s skills and swordplay in some of the most impressive sword battles I’ve seen for a long time, remember this predates Bleach by a long time. The formula stays the same for ten episodes until the climax in the last three episodes, but I won’t spoil anything today.
It promotes itself as an action comedy but the comedy falls flat quite frequently, with poor comic timing and serious scenes where there really doesn’t need someone making a joke at the moment. Another gag is the constant shifts in art styles to emphasize how important or how unimportant certain characters are which really isn’t needed.
My other issue with the series is the dubbing, the English dub is emotionless and lousy, out of the whole cast only four & a half actors actually tried, the unrefined trio, Ninja lady Mikage and Scary Samurai Jiyu actually put any effort in, I say half because Scary Jiyu & normal Jiyu are the same actress, it’s like when she transforms, the actor suddenly gets better as well which isn’t exactly professional is it? The script isn’t exactly stellar either as the dub cast constantly exhaust their vocal cords saying “lovely eyepatch” & “Ryuujouji” about five times an episode.
The action does redeem some of the bad qualities and the actual story is pretty good but so many things let it down that it’s a shame, there’s even a satisfying conclusion as well, or it would be if not for the Second Season release.
But there is one element of this series, where it cannot be easily beaten and that’s music; if you think it sounds like Naruto then you’d be right as composer Toshio Masuda was the composer for the first part of Naruto and Jubei-Chan was one of his first works.
Final Verdict: It’s a decent action series, with great music & story but is let down by poor comedy and emotionless dub acting. It’s worth brushing over if only to prepare yourself for the serious quality upgrade of season 2, and if you enjoy Shonen Jump battles, then you haven’t seen anything until you witness some of the battles in Jubei-Chan 2.

End