Episode 5 – The Elusive Samurai Season 2

As an educator, one of the fundamental truths of human nature that I try very hard to help my students understand is that we often will never have better opportunities to learn and grow than when we experience failure. It’s a hard pill for kids to swallow, especially when our society so often treats failure as a mark of shame and defeat to be avoided at all costs. One of the most difficult things about teaching in the year 2026 is how paralyzed by anxiety students can become in the face of a single test or challenging task. It goes against all of our instincts to intentionally seek out failure, and that has only become truer in the age of instant gratification and perpetual custom-curated content floods.

The point remains as true for the children of 14th-century Japan as anywhere else. In “The Unyielding,” Tokiyuki experiences a real failure. Despite the small, moment-to-moment victories that his troops were achieving on the battlefield, he failed to see the bigger picture of Shōkan and his other enemy generals’ plans. Is it satisfying to see the good guys take down Koyohara and that damned mikoshi? Absolutely it is, but that one moment of victory means little when the rest of the troops are being outmaneuvered and ambushed in the other corners of the battlefield.

Tokiyuki may be great at banding together a gang of kids to defend the occasional village, but he’s too young and inexperienced to achieve true greatness in the realm of “grand” warfare. I can relate. If you give me a couple of hours to kill and a copy of the latest Dynasty Warriors game, I will be hack-and-slashing to my heart’s content. However, God help the poor digital souls who find themselves in my charge in a grand strategy game like Europa Universalis or Nobunaga’s Ambition. That kind of complexly arranged multi-tier strategy is usually too much for my brain to process for longer than a handful of turns, so my armies always end up getting whittled away into splinters by the computer-controlled rival kingdoms that know how to properly organize their empires.

It’s a good lesson for our young Lord to learn, and it’s really the only emotional hook that is keeping me invested in this larger story. If we were able to experience this failed act of Tokiyuki’s rebellion cycle in a more filmic single sitting, I might find this section of the story to be more compelling. Having to break it apart across an entire month of episodes has watered down the impact of the arc since it feels like an awful lot of time and effort was spent accomplishing very little in the end. That’s simply the nature of warfare, to be sure, and this goes double for stories based on real-world battles with outcomes decided centuries ago. I don’t think The Elusive Samurai failed in its storytelling by forcing its young hero to make the best of a doomed situation, but I can tell you that I’m glad to finally be moving on to the next order of business.

Episode Rating:

The Elusive Samurai Season 2 is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.