[December 20, 2022]1
Ninja Ittoki is an action show about teenage ninjas in robot suits, and it’s surprisingly frustrating because it comes so close to being a good show. Character growth, little world-building details, a willingness to take risks, fight scenes that actually matter, occasional comedy to lighten the mood, a plot that wraps up in a timely manner: a lot of it only sort of works, some of the time, but its heart is in the right place.
The early episodes are problematic. If I can’t understand how the characters feel, I can’t get invested: like a ninja after dropping a smoke bomb, suspension of disbelief is nowhere to be found. A character makes a strange choice: am I supposed to be surprised by that, or am I putting more thought into this than the writers did? The surface-level content is fine: there’s no plot hole. We’re just missing the motivation.
The rest of the season is much improved, like an intensive care patient making steady progress toward a full recovery. It’s still flawed: the villains are never well motivated, and I would have liked to see less emphasis on Ittoki’s robot suit and more on his training. Still, I must admit, by committing so hard to taking itself so seriously, Ninja Ittoki eventually wins on sincerity, and the final episodes are downright exciting.
If you want to see high school students fight with knives in robot suits, and you also want a show with a heart and a brain, Ninja Ittoki works, more or less. There are better choices, like rewatching Future Diary, No Game No Life, or Chivalry of a Failed Knight. On the other hand, to my surprise, I think I would watch Ninja Ittoki stumble through another twelve awkwardly sincere episodes of knife-fighting ninja friends.
I almost dropped this show so many times in the first half of the season, and yet somehow it works, at least from the beach episode onward. At the end, I even went back and rewatched a few scenes because I had enjoyed them. I give it the dubious “most improved” award.