The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Ninja vs. Gokudo

Since before the dawn of memory, one thing has defined human history: the war between ninja and yakuza. This coarse and manly manga follows two members of these warring tribes who fill the gutters of modern Tokyo with blood to determine which elemental force will reign supreme.

Ninja vs. Gokudo is based on the manga series by Shinsuke Kondō. The anime series is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The entire time I was watching Ninja VS Gokudo, my brain kept insisting that the art was “Initial D by way of Heat Guy J.” It's something about the noses and how they don't fit in with the rest of the faces, as well as the generally stiff character design and animation. It's not a visually appealing show by any measure, and the dominant shades of brown in the palette, combined with thick black outlines on only part of the faces (usually the nose), certainly don't help. But even the violence isn't particularly fluid or exciting. In an effort to demonstrate how incredibly fast a ninja Shinoha is, we see a streak of light or a noise meant to represent the sound barrier being broken, followed by the aftermath. Sure, a few bloody teeth are floating through the air, but even arterial spray is limited to a laughably brief burst with little remainder. I don't even like violence in my viewing, and this was disappointing.

That may be the best word for this episode. It's somehow both predictable and silly, taking as its premise the idea that ninjas and gokudō (yakuza in this case) have been at odds for centuries, with their fight carried over into the present day. Now, gokudō continue to do bad guy things, while ninja support the police from the shadows, typically by doing their jobs for them before the cops ever arrive at the crime scene or even know a crime is happening. It feels like a child's game, the kind that's awesome when you're ten and running around pretending to be sneaky and jumping on each other. It translates less well to a series for older viewers that appears to take itself at least semi-seriously.

Fortunately, it does know that it's pretty ridiculous. Shinoha bonds with Kiwami, a gokudō, over their shared love of a PreCure knockoff, and Shinoha's inability to smile or laugh as a trauma response is largely played for laughs in a decent way. (Mechanical Marie did the same joke better, though.) Shinoha and Kiwami are unaware that they're on opposing sides despite spelling it out when they introduce themselves, and there's a decent chance that their budding friendship will end the feud between the two groups with the power of love and/or friendship. To pull that off, though, the show will need to do a better job of presenting itself, and that goes for the English simuldub as well, which in this episode manages to mispronounce Edo, anime, and the suffix kun. (Eddo, animi, and kunn, if you're curious.) It's not a promising start.

These things are constants: Ninja vs. Gokudo is still ugly as sin, and the English dub is still terrible. I'd say that's a sign that there is constancy in this impermanent world, but, well, I don't think the show quite merits that level of philosophical musing. It may, however, solidify for you that if you didn't care for the first episode based on those issues, you're not likely to enjoy the second one any more.

On the other hand, if the lack of excessive gore was a problem, that seems to have been resolved, at least as much as the art and animation are capable of. There's easily at least double the blood this week, whether it's running down people's faces, radiating out from their drugged eyes, or forming a carpet of corpses for Kiwami to walk across in his bid to take out Shinoha's grandpa. (That blood doesn't always show up on Kiwami's white socks, of course…) There's also a censored pile of chopped grandpa left on the street for the ninja to learn from, because the first thing you'd think seeing a pile of ground meat is “that's human flesh” and not “Sandy Skoglund was here.” Of course, the only people who need to get it are the ninja, and thanks to the Chattering Crows, that message does get passed on.

Still, it's a bit hard to care, even though Shinoha is clearly devastated. Mostly that's down to the lackluster vocals and unimpressive art, but it's also due to the use of totally-not-PreCure series as the sledgehammer of symbolism. Yes, magical girls in general, and PreCure in particular, do often have the villains and the heroines become friends, or at least find some understanding. Yes, we can see that you're doing that with Kiwami and Shinoha, even without them listing off specific, totally-not-PreCure examples. (“WakuWaku?” My, aren't we clever.) It honestly would have worked better had more subtlety been employed.

This show is trying, I'll give it that. It's perhaps trying too hard. But between the visuals and the clunky symbolism, to say nothing of the uninspired writing, it's just not working. I'd suggest watching some PreCure instead.

After only a single episode, Ninja vs. Gokudo is already my frontrunner for the worst anime of the fall season and probably the year overall! I cannot think of a single compliment to give this anime, and, quite simply, it's a drab idea executed poorly. I would never suggest that a piece of art should not exist, but if you're reading this, I promise you that your time would be better spent watching anything besides Ninja vs. Gokudo.

For starters, Ninja vs. Gokudo is tonally incomprehensible. It's trying to be cool and host a collection of badass characters, but the action in the show comes across as more silly than impressive. When the soon-to-be head of the ninja clan, Shinoha Tanaka, stops a Gokudo-organized kidnapping of the governor of Tokyo, he beheads each assailant, with many of them espousing several lines of dialogue as disembodied heads floating in mid-air. The weird purple with yellow trim bodysuit that Shinoha wears while he's doing ninja stuff is also so garish and goofy that it's hard to take anything else on screen seriously.

Speaking of appearances, all of this anime looks bad! In that aforementioned fight scene, color palettes shifted to heighten the intensity of the moment a la JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. However, the encounter didn't really have a crescendo like most of the fights in JoJo's and the timing of the color palette change didn't feel appropriate to what was happening on screen, making the whole affair feel amateurish. It's like the folks at Studio Deen behind this anime didn't understand what made these visual tricks work in other, better media. Furthermore, characters barely emote, let alone move, in this anime, and the character designs are uninspired, making the Ninja vs. Gokudo feel cheap and bland.

The script isn't saving this anime either, as most characters dump information about their world and personal backstory rather than give a viewer any reason to care about them. There's a scene where Shinoha notes to his grandfather that the elderly relative is the second strongest person in their clan, which isn't something he would ever need to remind his grandfather of, making this conversation feel unnatural and only relevant to the audience. If I had to be charitable, I'd say that it's a bit fun that Shinoha and the secret boss of the Gokudo clan, Kiwami Kimura, instantly bond over their mutual love of an in-universe PreCure clone, but I do not trust this show's writing to meaningfully build upon their meet-cute.

Last but certainly not least is the laughably poor localization and English dub performances. The script translation is hyper literal and often makes little sense, such as when Shinoha's grandfather makes puns that are nonsensical outside of the original Japanese. The English actors are also given minimal direction outside of trying to make the clunky script match lip flaps, which often results in awkward pauses in the middle of sentences. Some characters also have unusual accents and inflection choices, resulting in what sounds like a nearly phonetic dubbing by non-English speakers.

With titles like GQuuuuuuX, New Panty and Stocking, and CITY the Animation airing on Amazon Prime, I thought the streaming platform was rapidly becoming the new home for prestige anime. Ninja vs. Gokudo completely undermines this idea, and I can't believe Amazon paid any amount of money to have this anime on their platform, let alone dub it into several different languages. I hope to never watch or think about this anime again, except for the bare minimum amount of time and effort required to pitch it for upcoming “Worst Of” lists.

I cannot tell whether Ninja vs. Gokudo is meant to be a parody of rival-gang action series, and that makes this anime all the more frustrating. All the usual tropes of this genre are present — friends who don't realize they're about to be on opposing sides of a conflict, a mentor figure perishing to motivate our protagonist more personally, and both sides of the conflict having grounding characters that we can root for — but the execution is so poor that I can't tell if this anime is making fun of that genre or just a really weak attempt at this kind of story.

Once again, the English dub of Ninja vs. Gokudo is below what a team of fan dubbers could put out. I'll never publicly own up to the fan dubs I helped produce in college, but my dumbass friends and I had greater emotional range, better line-reading, and more direction in our performances while recording in my dorm room closet than the team dubbing Ninja vs. Gokudo. Even when characters are shouting, their affect is so flat and their pauses so awkward that it feels more like the actors are making fun of their own characters and their lines than anything else.

This episode is also ugly as sin and in no way an improvement over the first. I can't believe it, but Ninja vs. Gokudo somehow found a way to make yakuza tattoos look lame as hell and awkwardly scrawled onto some characters' bodies. Furthermore, the so-called “action sequences” in this episode primarily consist of still images with some camera pans and action lines to create the illusion of movement or intensity. The main fight in this episode also makes very little sense logically. While the gokudo rose to power post-World War II thanks to their access to guns and other weapons, the ninja eventually suppressed them using advanced physical abilities. In this episode, it's revealed that the gokudo have developed a drug to give them physical powers on par with the ninja, but then just a gun to kill Shinoha's grandfather! It's established in the first episode that ninjas are faster than bullets, and the gokudo getting roided up wouldn't make their bullets fly faster!!!

Any emotional weight added to this episode also falls flat. Shinoha's relationship with his grandfather isn't established enough for his grandfather's death to really hit the audience, and the fact that the show itself calls out that this is a trope due to the presence of a similar pilot point in the in-universe PreCure clone is incredibly annoying. It feels like no one who worked on Ninja vs. Gokudo was excited to be on this project, and the only reason I'm scoring this episode higher than the previous one is because my expectations for this anime have been drastically lowered.

An anime that seems to be trying to carry a whole series on the back of a concept for a single episode of Deadliest Warrior isn't the most egregious idea I've seen. I'm from America, after all, and we concocted movies out of "Cowboys vs Ninja", "Cowboys vs Aliens", and probably some other cowboy combat I'm already forgetting about. The point is, seeing shinobi go toe-to-toe with the Yakuza could absolutely be a good time as far as schlocky setups go. It just needs the right treatment and proper artistry applied to it to work, even if the base plot of something like Ninja Vs. Gokudo is as simple as its title.

That said, Ninja Vs. Gokudo does not really have the right treatment nor proper artistry that a schlocky exploitation series like this needs. Right from the jump, the prelude through the opening, this is an ugly-lookin' show. The backgrounds and colors are bland and washed out. Anything passing for action animation is relying on the faster-than-sight speed of the ninja to just have lightning-fast pans and zips cutting between poses. Cardboard cutouts of characters have their heads cut off, floating around, continuing to narrate the action in an absolute screen-saver of a showdown.

It's a pity, because I don't take issue with absurdity like the aforementioned talking disembodied heads. Schlock is all about panache—the goofy confidence with which a work commits to its bit. Just because the character designs of Ninja Vs. Gokudo have a chunky, non-conventionally attractive look doesn't mean they can't be rendered with some verve. The actual animation budget may be cheap, but that's nothing some polished, energetic direction can't fix. What I'm saying is that the stylistic issues seen in this show are all solved problems done better in anime like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Ninja Vs.Gokudo clearly wants to be something like that, or maybe Baki, but it just doesn't have the energy to get there.

That's all too bad, because there are parts of the concept I like, from the goofy simplicity to the indulgences of having the star-crossed leads bond over magical girl anime. I gotta have at least a little sympathy for a series having two dudes gush about how much they love Eas from Fresh Pretty Cure. Don't we all. Otherwise, the most notable thing about this show is probably going to be its English simuldub, an extremely awkward-sounding effort that comes off like it's from an era or three in the past—or possibly a non-native-speaker production, like the non-Canadian English-dubbed version of Futari Wa Pretty Cure. Even that possibly could have leaned into the inherent campy possibilities of this anime, but no dice; the acting just sounds bored and confused most of the time. One more missed opportunity that actually is appropriate for this series, since boredom was my most intense reaction through most of it, and that's a travesty for any series that features the governor being kidnapped by Yakuza to be rescued by a ninja.

Stupid, exploitative entertainment can absolutely work, as long as the presentation is working for it. There's totally an alternate universe where Ninja Vs. Gokudo was a grindhouse live-action film series, probably made in the 70s or 80s, that absolutely owned and warped an entire generation of teens checking it out of local video rental shops. You say you're watching a story about gleefully evil gangsters taking drugs to fight legendary super ninja and I tell you I'm coming over to your house with a couple of two-liters of Mountain Dew and my Skeleton Warriors sleeping bag. This week's episode is one where the conflict escalation is marked by a recently murdered old man exploding in a burst of ninja lasers that vaporizes a whole warehouse full of yakuza. In theory, this is the coolest thing ever.

But theories have to be tested, and Ninja Vs. Gokudo as an anime is taking a test it clearly didn't study for. In place of any grindhouse sensibilities backed by buckets of blood squibs, the series shows off long pans and paper character puppeteering that could probably be called "animation" in a mid-budget Ren'Py visual novel. Nothing about superhuman feats like old man Kaiza's stretchy arm powers feels cool or impressive. The spectacle of something like Kiwami "walking down a red carpet of corpses" fails to impress when said corpse carpet looks this ironically lifeless. Many times, it looks like the show is covering up what ultraviolence it has managed to draw. Come on, Ninja Vs. Gokudo, you're on Amazon, I know you can put it out there at least a little more!

With any of this potential, visceral, visual appeal so thoroughly kneecapped, it means that trivial things like the "plot" and "characters" of Ninja Vs. Gokudo—which could easily have been treated as incidental—are more annoyingly forced into the foreground. Things like Kiwami and Shinoha's bonding over Pretty Cure pastiches is only kind of cute when their discussion of it amounts to the kind of surface-level recitation of plots that makes up so many other in-anime discussions of anime. And that surface-level aspect extends to their own connection, with the writing just kind of skating across the basic dramatic implications of them getting along without knowing they're mortal enemies. Kiwami comforting Shinoha as he confides about losing someone is, at most, a first-draft pass at these kinds of platitudes. Never mind that it offers nothing more on Shinoha expressing an emotion for the first time in his life—which was kind of his entire driving characterization from the first episode.

Ninja Vs.Gokudo has at least clearly heard of those surface-level basics. Both Kaiza and Kiwami being motivated by their connection to Shinoha during their battle is a cute touch. And some moments with a campy, cool factor are basic enough that even the crusty presentation can't hinder them—I love the secret elevator button-press that takes you to the secret ninja elevator floor complete with the kanji character for "ninja" popping up on the display. But so much of this is embarrassing amateur hour—from the awkward framing of the shadowy Gokudo Miniboss Squad (that I think the story is trying to tease) to attempting and utterly failing to properly direct these JoJo's Bizarre Adventure color-palette shifts that happen a couple times. Do yourself a favor and find a couple cool, old, gory ninja movies to watch with your friends over drinks instead of wasting your time on this sadly lifeless adaptation.

Ninja vs. Gokudo is one of those throwback series where, if it weren't for the high definition digital animation, I would swear this was a product of, oh, 2003 or so. There's something about the harsh art style, the over-the-top but choppy violence, and the juxtaposition of ultra-masculinity with early moe otaku culture that just screams turn of the millennium to me.

It's an era of anime I'm not particularly nostalgic for, so Ninja vs. Gokudo didn't do much for me in terms of presentation. It's intentionally ugly and abrasive, with over-the-top villains screaming about how much they love being evil before the angsty protagonist comes in and grumbles in equal measure about how much he hates them being evil. But in a cool way and not a righteous way. The limited animation precludes the strange beauty that hyperviolence can possess as you watch human bodies unravel and come apart. Instead, Shinoha swings his arm, and then you see a severed head shouting. It's comical in how bizarre it is, but not cool or exciting.

There are the seeds of something there. It's pretty easy to guess where things are going, since there are only two prominent characters and Kiwami's name is both the subtitle of the remake of the first Yakuza game and written with the characters for “Gokudo.” You know, like the title of the dang show. Still, the tension between his burgeoning friendship with Shinoha and their soon-to-be-established enmity is what fujoshi dreams are made of, or at least would be, if the art style weren't so ugly. Shinoha's frustration at not being able to emote properly could lead the story down some interesting avenues as well; however, based on this episode, I don't believe in the writing's ability to bring it out in a satisfying way.

Now, we must talk about the atrocious dub. It's stiff, full of awkward line reads, stilted phrasing, and weird mispronunciations. The opening narration sounds like it's being read by someone who doesn't actually speak English. It's produced by Transperfect Media, a media company that boasts on its website of its use of AI tools for optimization in localization. Now, I don't think Ninja vs. Gokudo was dubbed using AI actors, though it may have been used for translation and scripting. Shinoha's acting improves noticeably as the episode goes on, though I cannot say the same for Kiwami. Rather, I'd blame it on the fact that these are South African actors doing American accents. Acting well is difficult; so is speaking in an accent that's not your own. Doing both is an enormous challenge for people who are not deeply skilled in at least one of the two, and it shows.

I'll be watching the next episode in Japanese, because comparing these guys to Chiaki Kobayashi and Katsuyuki Konishi is like comparing stale beef jerky to a full dinner at a fancy steakhouse.

For the whole first episode of Ninja vs. Gokudo, I couldn't quite put my finger on what it reminded me of. The off-model art, the bizarrely exaggerated dialogue, the big emotions that never quite hit right… I knew there was a piece of modern outsider art that struck the same notes. It finally came to me close to the end of the second episode: Tails Gets Trolled.

For those not in the know, Tails Gets Trolled is a webcomic originally posted on DeviantArt about Tails from the Sonic franchise and his buddies from a variety of other media properties engaging in a war with a gang of trolls who called him slurs one night. It became famous for its amateurish art and writing, incongruous reactions, and general refusal to adhere to any kind of conventional expectations for fiction. Most of all, it was impossible to tell whether it was sincere or parody, and that's kind of how Ninja vs. Gokudo feels, crudely-drawn art and all.

Perhaps my mistake is trying to watch it sober. It's unbelievably stupid, like a version of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure without the heart or imaginativeness that makes fans willing to buy into Araki's strange vision of the world. We have ninjas with powers, but the only way we've seen them fight is using their hands to cut off gokudo heads. It's hard to buy that the vaguely gross red texture Kiwami walks over is a mound of freshly-decapitated corpses. Shinoha communicates with the other ninja via talking crows? Yeah, sure, okay. Nothing would really surprise me at this point, except maybe for a well-executed action scene. Its determination to be "3edgy5u" just makes it come across as an absurdist comedy.

This episode has a couple weak attempts at pathos that fall completely and totally flat. There are a lot of reasons that the emotions miss – underdeveloped relationships, the absurdity of the situation, the over-the-top violence preceding it – but I have to give a special mention to the truly awful music that creates a tonal mismatch every single time. But at this point, I wouldn't have it any other way.