500http://3.bp.blogspot.com/fmDyo7px0gM/TFhwsTPD9PI/AAAAAAAAATQ/mooaVhhNHDI/s1600/lalalalal2.JPG A gory violent horror scifi action romance series featuring an immortal samurai who wanders around while being forced to live forever as the world changes around him. Youve got my attention. Im not expecting anything but youve got my attention. Introduction 440http://i.ur.com/TDLNf6b.jpg Kurozuka is an adaptation by Madhouse of the mangahttp://anilist.co/manga/30967/Kurozuka by Takashi Noguchihttp://anilist.co/staff/97775/TakashiNoguchi which itself is an adaptation of the novel by Baku Yumemakurahttp://anilist.co/staff/97026/BakuYumemakura. It begins as a dark action romance series and then transitions into scifi territory as the protagonist awakes in a ruined and postapocalyptic world and starts fighting futuristic soldiers. Also why not throw the vampire angle in the mix to mix it up? It could have been a reasonably okay action series. Not everything has to have an amazing deep plot. Sometimes I do occasionally just go: I want to just watch something where a guy just kills a bunch of guys. Theres really nothing wrong with that in my opinion. But of course there is a plot behind all of the action and gore. And... thats partially where it all goes wrong. The swordsman Minamoto no Yoshitsune/Kurou along with his friend Benkei is fleeing from his brother who wishes to take his life. Historically Yoshitsune was believed to have eventually been forced to commit seppeku following the defeat of his retainers and Benkei. In Kurozuka Benkei and Kurou end up meeting a strange woman who lives in the middle of nowhere named Kuromitsu. Kurou and Kuromitsu end up falling in love Kurou finds out that Kuromitsu is in fact a vampire Kurous pursuers attack them and Kuromitsu floats the offer of becoming a vampire to live with her forever until literally the end of time to a fatally wounded Kurou who says Sure why not. All of this basically happens in the first two episodes. Then theres an immediate and sudden transition to Kurou waking up in a forest and then seeing the standing ruins of modern civilization. 440http://i.ur.com/Ll96cyo.jpg Its all downhill from here. He learns that he is unable to die and continues to live for a thousand years as Japan evolves into a future society. Admittedly this very much is on me. From that line I had expected that the show was going to be about this immortal swordsman actually living throughout that thousand years. That would have been cool an immortal samurai watching as the world changes and then eventually descends into this ruined dystopian hellhole? Would have been great. Instead we only see flashes of that occasionally dispersed here and there. Kurou becomes a vampire gets his head chopped off and then wakes up in a forest and were already to the postapocalyptic portion of the show. Which is... arguably the worst and largest part of the show? You get two episodes of this: 440http://31.media.tumblr.com/b48e411378d40e95ce827b22f7f0fce5/tumblrmr8nhsr7YS1rydwbvo1500.gif Then after that its just Kurou killing guys with guns. These guys are armored and have assault rifles but this lone swordsman is capable of killing all of them with ease. But hey maybe his immortality also makes him a killing machine. Like I said before action is fine I like action but like the first Kurou action scene following the transition into postapocalyptic times has him stealing one of these soldiers pistol and straight up shooting them point blank to death. Dont even get me started on this bunch of human characters that then get introduced that are like this rebel organization thats against the Red Army which is the ruling faction originating from the people who found out that Kuromitsu was a vampire in the first part of the show. This group of humans is really just there to die more or less. Each and every one of them are completely forgettable and they drop off like flies. There continues to be scenes of flashbacks about Kurou and Kuromitsu because you cant forget this is also a romance but the romance the whole purpose of the show following episode two is Kurou is now trying to get Kuromitsu back from the Red Army or whatever mostly boils down to: 440http://i.ur.com/hKh8U53.jpg There are also these super soldier/mutant guys created by the Red Army in experiments using Kuromitsus blood but... like one dressed like he was a turtle another one had control of vines for some reason. Spoilers Kurou kills them all. Because while he became an immortal through Kuromitsus blood as well hes outright unstoppable unlike these super soldiers/mutants. 440http://i.ur.com/sdPtzaU.png Remember how I said the human characters drop off like flies? There is a point where Kurou is carrying the last surviving human of this group and just out of nowhere gets immediately shot in the head and shes dead. The person who fires the gun had the jump on and could have totally fired at Kurou instead but purposely aims at the person Kurou is carrying instead. To be fair the character that does this has literally gone insane and proceeds to shoot at a bunch of windows and laugh maniacally to himself as he does it. But still. Well we need to get to rid of this last human character. Lets just have her get shot in the head and be done with it. Oh yeah he also then kicks her corpse out of one of the windows. Just because. 440http://i.ur.com/GuDV0BA.png At about that point you realize youre at episode eleven and you just want this to end already. Youve long since grown tired of the action and even tired of the blood. But you have to see how it ends. Thats when they bust out one of the most possible cliches they could have thought of: Then one of the most nonsense weird nothing endings Ive ever seen happens. Conclusion All action series do not have to have the most super indepth or intricate plot if the action is enjoyable/entertaining on its own. But there are action series that do have reasonably okay or perhaps even good or better stories to them. Kurozuka tries to have a plot required disclaimer of the manga seems to be different from the anime but its... a disjointed and weird mess going immediately from samurai times to postapocalyptic is not okay. Whatever enjoyment the action provides grows very thin by the final episode and the romance of Kurozuka is... The whole point is Kurou is trying to get to Kuromitsu and his reward for it? If youre looking for not an amazing action series I could maybe see an argument for this one just because of how weird/strange it actually is. I give it a score of 4.5 out of 10 or 45 out of 100. I watched this months ago and the openinghttps://www..com/watch?v=OUf2RrSvpJM is still stuck in my head. 500http://i.ur.com/lhmejKA.jpg