Last Samurai Standing was something I stumbled across a few months ago on Netflix. My wife and I started watching it together, but that proved tricky since it’s a violent show and not exactly something you can have on with our 4-year-old, Alex, around. My wife found it too intense, so I ended up finishing it on my own later, after a bit of a hiatus. I’d actually started donating blood plasma around then, so it turned out to be pretty easy to knock out the rest of the series while lying in the donation chair.
Last Samurai Standing is set in late 19th-century Japan, during the Meiji era. Shujiro Saga is the main protagonist, a former samurai “man-slayer” who eventually grew weary of killing. With the samurai class effectively abolished after the Satsuma Rebellion, he now lives as an ordinary, fairly poor man. He’s already lost one child to sickness, and without money, it looks like his wife and remaining child are headed for the same fate. Then he hears about a martial arts tournament promising a massive sum of gold to the victor.
It turns out to be something of a trap, though there’s a real kernel of truth to it. The tournament and its prize money are legitimate, but it’s a fight-to-the-death competition. After a suspiciously vague warning, nearly 300 people of wildly different strengths, sizes, and skill sets are thrown into an immediate bloodbath. This is where the show starts feeling a lot like The Hunger Games or Battle Royale, which plenty of people believe The Hunger Games borrowed heavily from anyway. It also reminds me partly of Rurouni Kenshin.
Shujiro runs into a young teenage girl in the chaos, and it’s clear she never fully understood what she’d signed up for. Seeing her as essentially a child, he vows to protect her. Shujiro was one of the greatest samurai of his era, so he’s more than capable of holding his own, but protecting this girl proves far tougher, especially since she could barely bring herself (theoretically) to harm a cat, let alone go toe-to-toe with a battle-hardened former samurai.
Like Battle Royale or The Hunger Games, it’s not entirely clear at the start why this competition even exists, beyond a group of wealthy men using it purely for entertainment, even though you rarely see them actually watching the fights unfold. Still, they’re deeply invested in the outcomes, placing bets on who survives and who falls to the katana.
As with The Hunger Games and Battle Royale, there’s a large cast of contestants. Plenty are dispatched quickly and remain essentially nameless victims of Japanese steel, while others carry real motivations and depth. Some are just chasing the money out of sheer desperation, others seem to be there purely to test their skills, and there’s at least one guy who’s simply evil and looking for any excuse to draw blood.
I was a bit let down by how little spotlight some of the contestants got. Shujiro obviously commands most of the screen time, but several side characters barely get fleshed out before they’re eliminated or just quietly vanish from the story. The show doesn’t hold back on blood and gore, though, so if that’s your thing, it should more than deliver.
There are plenty of plot holes, but this is adapted from a Japanese manga, which arguably shouldn’t be expected to make perfect sense to begin with. I enjoyed the first season of Last Samurai Standing without quite loving it, especially since it’s clearly building toward a second season, maybe even a third. With the manga still ongoing, I’m not even sure this chapter of the story has a real ending yet, or if they’ll just have to invent one. It came out late last year, and season two doesn’t have a release date yet. Part of me wishes I’d waited to start it, and I just hope that when season two finally arrives, I don’t accidentally miss the announcement and forget everything about season one in the meantime.