ー June 12, 2025

Apparently, info about the new series was revealed as a surprise to the audience at the Samurai Troopers anniversary screening held on Wednesday, June 11th. It was announced that the Yoroi Shinden: Samurai Troopers TV anime will air from January 2026. Alongside the announcement, a teaser visual, promotional video, cast and staff details, and more were unveiled all at once.

▶︎ Main Character

• Name: Gai (凱) / Burning Gai (灼熱の凱)
• Age: 14
• A skilled Samurai Trooper who battles demons clad in burning armor.
  He has an unusual sense of taste and enjoys unique, unconventional flavors.

I can immediately see some possible allusions they’re trying to make with these names, for example, Gai (凱) has the same left radicle as yoroi (鎧 / armor) and the same right radicle as hada (肌 / skin)… so I wonder if that was intentional, meaning that he is like living armor…

▶︎ Burning Gai Transformation

▲ This transformation sequence is very reminiscent of Ryo’s transformation… One thing that kinda irks me here is how it seems like he’s pulling the helmet onto his head… and it’s just not illustrated very well. Even in this teaser cut, you can see how they’re manipulating the footage and stretched things to fit and it feels very unnatural. I hope they can fix that. You probably can notice it if you watch it as-is, but if you slow it down, it’s absolutely noticible… WHY!? is my question…

▲ As far as the armor designs go, I’m somewhat okay with it, but it still feels overly bulky to some degree… It seems like the helmet is more along the lines of the design from Message…

So, that’s kinda of interesting. Additionally, the upper part including the “horns” of the helmet seem WAY larger than they originally were, so it feels a bit off. Maybe it’ll grow on me.

The other main difference in the design is with the swords… which apparently need to be drawn from the left side, both hands. So, his right hand is lightly going to reach across in the front to the top sword while his left reaches down toward the bottom one… It feels very awkward, but maybe they’ll be able to animate it in such a way that it looks okay… It’s certainly not the same feeling as before.

Have a look at the video below to see what the original transformation sequence looked like… of course, we haven’t exactly seen the new “shakunetsu” transformation yet, but… nnnnnnn… I’m still pretty skeptical. How can you do this any better than it already is???

As far as the other characters are involved, nothing has been released officially, but from the trailer we can see the four other characters, so let me introduce them briefly (we don’t know their names or anything like that yet):

Personally, simply from a fan perspective, I really think they entirely dropped the ball with what we wanted with this reboot… I get that this is a continuation of the original story, but you still need to understand the depths of what the original story was trying to tell in the first place, so I’m really hoping that they haven’t entirely left that to fade in the depths of nothingness… I don’t want another meaningless coming of age story. How many of them have we already seen and gone through, but then again, I guess the younger folk are just now going through it… so I get it… but to abandon the most important parts of this series (the history, the mythology, the cryptic, bushido and confucian ideology… I would be really sad if they removed any of those aspects, because to me, that’s what really wrapped everything together… I’m just very apprehensive.

So, I just want to leave everything at the sidelines and just wait and see exactly what they have in store for the story and characters… I really get the feeling that they might be going for the Captain Planet sort of thing, which if they do, I’ll be really sad because we already did that 30 years ago… but alas, Samurai Troopers can before Captain Planet, so anything that they might’ve gotten from the show from 1990…

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