What then follows is eighteen or so episodes where nothing happens.
At this point the story has to contrive a reason for them to not just kill the kids too, which it promptly doesn’t do and they just leave for no reason leading into an indeterminate timeskip during which all the kids grow up.
This is demonstrated by three of the five Joujinshu killing all but two of the adult ninja from both clans in the first couple of episodes. This power imbalance means that the show can’t really have the ninja and Joujinshu fight in any meaningful was as it’ll just be a one sided curb stomp. Arrayed against them the Joujinshu have members capable of reversing time, summoning a mountain sized demon which controls lightning, creating a pocket dimension and a woman with a mirror which causes anyone who looks into it for even half a second to commit suicide. On the good guys side you have a bunch of children with powers like “can control bugs”, “can remove his own eyes to use as flying scouts” and my personal favourite “doesn’t actually have any powers so she just got really good at guns”. Arrayed against them are the five Joujinshu, who are essentially demigods. So part of the issue with Ouka was that rather than the somewhat evenly matched battle between two clans this time around we had survivors from both clans living together and protecting the inexplicable children of Genosuke and Oboro from the original (there’s a handwave-y explanation provided but it’s very much just an excuse). Shame it then threw this out the window towards the end by just killing everyone. While I actually appreciated the shift towards giving the individual characters more time to grow and develop this definitely doesn’t feel like what the ninja death battle crowd would be after (The highly representative sample provided by the comments on Crunchyroll being overwhelmingly negative seems to support this at least). Instead of following in its predecessor’s footsteps Ouka instead opted to kill off a handful of characters in the first few episodes before stubbornly keeping everyone alive until the finale. Ninjas with weird magical powers battling to the death is a fairly deep well to mine, which makes it especially weird when Ouka opted to not do that. My personal dislike for these kinds of story aside it’s a fairly easy formula to follow up on. My own experience with the original Basilisk is watching it about 5 years ago with a friend, I enjoyed it well enough at the time but in hindsight I suspect I wouldn’t like it all that much if I were to watching it for the first time today, as I’m extremely over death battles where everybody dies at this point.
It’s especially weird when said sequel seems determined to actively not be what fans of the original are likely to want. A sequel over a decade later is a hard enough sell as is, especially for a franchise that hasn’t had much enduring popularity. The Original Basilisk was released back in 2005 and I haven’t seen anyone talk about it in years. This year we got a new Basilisk for some reason. Every now and then a sequel pops up to an older series, sometimes it’s expected, sometimes it comes way out of left field.
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