Legend of the Mystical Ninja: Goemon the Good

Reviewed By: Carla Land

ADV Films DVD 2003

Review based on volume 1 (episodes 1-5)

Rating TV PG

What it’s (basically) all about: Tsukasa likes video games a lot, but his mother says they are going to make his eyes go bad. When the evil villain from his favorite video game comes to the real world to take over the planet, only Goemon (pronounced Goy-mon) and his friends can save them. With help from Tsukasa and an ever increasing number of comrades, Goemon will fight for justice!

Nitty Gritty: There’s not a lot of bad language (‘bastard,’ ‘hell,’ ‘bitch’ and ‘damn’ in the subtitles, ‘bastard’ in the dubbed version, and infrequently in both versions). There is no nudity, and the violence isn’t gory, but more the Saturday morning cartoon variety.

Seppukumaru, the villain, has a hobby of “trying” to commit ritual suicide, but considering his blade is retractable, it’s pretty obvious that it’s just for show. (Incidentally, "seppuku" is a Japanese form of ritual suicide, so his character's name and hobby are a sort of inside joke.)

Monoshiri is a lecherous old man who has Sosuke the robot taking pictures of "cuties", and his granddaughter is in love with Goemon and is always accusing him of cheating on her when he’s out on patrol. (Of course, he never is.)

Not a lot of special features other than DVD credits, previews and a promo for Anime Network and Newtype-USA, The previews are for (All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl) Nuku Nuku Dash, Eden’s Bowry, Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, Final Fantasy: Unlimited, Casshan: Robot Hunter, and Neo Ranga (which has some stylized nudity in it. Otherwise all are okay for all audiences.)

One final note- the whole series is available as a set if your library prefers to order DVDs in sets rather than one by one.

Survey says: This is fine to put with the rest of your PG DVDs, wherever they are. Nothing in here is going to be a concern except the rare colorful language, which is almost exclusively in the subtitled version.

Personal Ad: Usually this sort of show is not my thing, but I thought this one was cute. It's definitely aimed at the Pokémon and Digimon lovers.