Samurai Champloo

Samurai Champloo just came out in Japan last week and, in fact, today is when episode two should be showing. Samurai Champloo is the latest series from Shinichiro Watanabe. Why should you care? Well he is also the writer/director of the Cowboy Bebop series, which if you haven’t seen yet, you should definitely check it out (try Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim).

Anyway, two of the fansub groups I keep up with are currently subbing the series. Animeforever was the first one that actually came out, followed shortly by Anime-Kraze. These two subs are actually quite different–Animeforever’s sub seems more refined and definitely contains less cursing while Anime-Kraze’s sub seems more gritty and probably closer to what the characters are actually saying (lots of cursing). When it comes down to it, I prefer the sub from Animeforever, but I encourage everyone with lots of bandwidth to download both and decide for yourself.

About the actual show–it’s good! This will surprise you if you watch the intro which is horrible. The english opening song is pseudo-rap and pretty bad, so don’t judge the show based on the opening. The animation style is darker and murkier than what I generally watch, but some people will argue this is the true anime style. The show sort of reminds me of Cowboy Bebop in the animation department but the flow is fun and crazy like FLCL, although this ends up making a lot more sense than FLCL ever did. ;)

The bittorent tracker page for Animeforever can be found here and the one for Anime-Kraze can be found here, also both sites have channels on irc.rizon.net (alt. server: irc.rizon.org) with really fast xdcc bots. I can download an episode in under ten minutes from irc and it’s only that long because that is the max of my cable modem speed (this becomes untrue when new episodes are released and the bots are swamped, just a warning). If you don’t know how to use irc to download stuff, there are a couple of good guides available: guide one and guide two.

Edit: Updated Animeforever’s links to point to the new site at Animeforever.org.