'Sakamoto Days' Season One Review: A comedic hitman show with Gintama elements sprinkled in

It has been a while since I watched anything anime, and suddenly I found myself with that itch. Perhaps it was a result of being sick and watching something easy and lighthearted to watch, perhaps it was also the fact that I was wanting to see something animated and artistic that doesn't relate too much to the real world. Sometimes anime is great for this sort of thing, when you're just not quite feeling anything more than cartoonish interactions and bright tones. Given I could barely see, I wasn't sure I could read the subtitles, but in the end things were fine. Sakamoto Days was an anime that I had seen a lot of talk about since it was released, but given I don't watch this sort of thing that often anymore, I just never found a reason to check it out until now, and I'm quite glad I did. It was a simple surprise that you don't really see these days within the Japanese animation industry.

Though this was a show that really stuck with a simplistic story rather than trying to convolute things. And I think I really enjoyed it for that. It wasn't trying to be all serious, it wasn't trying to be deep and throw out an engaging story that was followed throughout the entire season. Instead it felt like bite-sized episodes that followed on a similar theme: Sakamoto, now old and fat, is a former hitman that is being targeted for leaving the clan. And his friends and family are tasked with saving him from these threats each episode as a bounty is placed upon his head.

We mostly follow the young character of Shin, which happened to be a younger hitman that somehow found himself in such a chaotic world as a means to get by, and he takes up the demand that Sakamoto must be killed, but instead Sakamoto outsmarts him in his shop, and instead finds sympathy in him, giving him a job at the shop. It isn't clear why he chose him of all assassins that came his way, some end up briefly being friends with the group, but Shin ends up being the special one to be given a special chance to make a new life working a normal job. And that's also what Sakamoto has been doing: giving up the life to have a family and work an ordinary lifestyle that helps people rather than hurting them; this a result of meeting a woman that discovers his secret when he was younger, but making him promise to put it all away for a life of good. Sakamoto in his youth being quite a prodigy, handsome and efficient with his skills. Though, these days just fat and old.

It has a bit of a slice-of-life feeling to it, but it doesn't push too far into that genre of things. And I quite liked it for that. Each episode is more on how someone is trying to find Sakamoto and the comedic ways in which they prevent the killing, protecting him and his family in the process. Shin also holding the ability to read people's minds, a useful skill that comes in handy whenever someone's within a 30 metre radius of him, giving him an advantage given most people tend to voice their thoughts in their heads before acting out over something. Useful when those nearby have intent to cause harm.

In some ways the comedy was handled in a similar cartoonish and sarcastic way to something like Gintama. I quite liked that, it felt like it wasn't trying to be serious at all, as if there was no genuine threat to the characters, but that didn't make things any less enjoyable. The story not necessarily being the main appeal here, but more the charismatic characters themselves. Sakamoto being hilariously overpowered as a person, performing impossible feats against his foes. AS far as throwing a pebble into a sniper's rifle and destroying it. Or suddenly becoming thin and young again, all buff and ready for a fight. That's the sort of show this is, but even so it remains relatively tame in that regard, never over doing things. I'm curious as to where the second season will go with this concept, though the first one towards the end did start to tease a bit more character development, especially in Sakamoto's background and Shin's upbringing as an accidental experiment.

It's nice to see an anime like this coming out in recent years, where it holds some comedy, but still doesn't go too far with it.