If you look back at the anime and manga scene in the 2010s, and the kinds of series that were popular, the vibes would feel quite different than they do now. Manga from Weekly Shonen Jump has always been popular, but the previous decade didn’t have anything like the big three (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece) when it started off. It wasn’t until towards the end of the decade where My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen really started to take off as the poster children for WSJ, so popular anime included titles like Konosuba, Psycho Pass, and Assassination Classroom, none of which you really hear about much anymore.
That last one, Assassination Classroom, felt like it was pretty broadly popular back in the day – what’s not to love about the concept of a classroom full of teenagers being tasked with killing an anthropomorphic, goofy-as-hell, octopus person? As wacky as its concept is, it managed to deliver some emotional moments too, but the style of writing the manga and its anime adaptation had that felt more prominent in the 2010s seems to have largely been forgotten about. But Assassination Classroom is more than a decade old now, meaning one could arguably be nostalgic for it in the way someone last decade might have been for noughties anime – and if you miss that era of anime, even if it wasn’t that long ago, you might want to check out The Elusive Samurai.
Last week saw the arrival of the first episode of The Elusive Samurai, an anime based on the manga of the same name, which just so happens to be from the creator of Assassination Classroom, Yusei Matsui. The manga has been in serialisation since 2021, in Weekly Shonen Jump funnily enough, but for the most part it seems to have slipped under the radar, despite being from a fairly notable artist – in the West, at least. That’s probably because it’s a historical series, set in 1300s Japan, and Japanese period pieces don’t tend to do as well over here when it comes to manga and anime, unless there’s some kind of fantasy element.
About Author
