After four eps I find myself in the same place with the Sakamoto Days anime that I was with the manga. It’s fine. A competently crafted battle shounen with a bit of wit to it, but nothing special. That’s about where I left it with the manga, but it’s more complicated here. It’s a very thin season on the ground, and this is a very popular series. And I have Samu’s voice ringing in my ears about how great this series is. So I don’t really know where I stand – keep, drop, Patron Poll? I certainly like the show well enough but it doesn’t on the surface offer that much grist for the mill in coverage terms. Cool battle scenes can only be described so many ways.

There was a bit more fleshing out on the world-building side here. We were introduced to the “JAA” (“valid until killed” did draw a guffaw). And Dondenkai, which seems to be some sort of an assassin black company. They were the ones who sent vibes guy to take out Sakamoto (the gang unsurprisingly let him go after procuring the antidote for Shin’s poisoning). They also sent Boiled and his partner Obiguro, who apparently killed 100 people in the Balkans (get in line, sadly). Boiled has some personal history with Sakamoto, whom he noticed a lot more than Sakamoto noticed him when they were training together (as the oldest-looking middle schoolers this side of Dogsred). He’s a general tsundere but especially where Sakamoto is concerned.

One issue I’m having here is that I find both Lu and the moeblob daughter incredibly annoying, obviously for different reasons. At least we got to see Lu drunk – showing a minor get hammered is pretty rare for a WSJ title. Also Shin was pretty useless when the assassin-zombies under Boiled and Obiguro showed up in the haunted house, and promptly got himself tied up and used as a hostage (not that it had much impact on Lu).

Mostly this is a setup for the Sakamoto-Boiled showdown. So far we haven’t seen Sakamoto get serious much – in fact overall we’ve seen less of him in action than Shin. But this is personal for Boiled, and when he involves Sakamoto’s wife and kid that makes it personal for him. We pretty much know Sakamoto is invincible if he gets serious so there’s no drama about how this will turn out, but as it’s the first time we’ve seen him really pissed it’ll be interesting to see what that looks like.