Summary
- SAKAMOTO DAYS, a popular 2025 anime, disappoints fans with subpar animation.
- Possible production limitations hinder visuals and action sequences in the adaptation.
- Lack of sakuga moments in SAKAMOTO DAYS is a likely reason for negative reception from fans.
The anime adaptation of Yūto Suzuki’s highly popular manga, SAKAMOTO DAYS, is one of the most anticipated anime titles of 2025, with the series’ fans swearing by its art, story and humour and hailing it as one of the titles that is most likely to lead the current generation of shōnen in the aftermath of the “Post-Big Three” and the first generation of the digital era of Shōnen Jump.
With 7 million copies in circulation within four years, SAKAMOTO DAYS is one of the contemporary era’s most highly successful titles. Despite its reputation, the anime appears to have earned the contempt of fans, many of whom have felt an unmistakable disappointment with the anime. Why is that?
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SAKAMOTO DAYS Plot and Background
Basic Information About the Anime Adaptation
SAKAMOTO DAYS is an action comedy series that follows the titular character, Taro Sakamoto, a retired legendary hitman who gave up an illustrious life in the criminal underworld to get married and start a family. Now overweight, happy and running a small convenience store, Sakamoto is content, but despite sincerely trying to live a normal life, the shadows of his past keep trying to drag him back into action.
The original manga created by Yūto Suzuki is currently published in Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine from November 2020, currently collected into 20 volumes as of January 2025, an elaboration of a one-shot titled “SAKAMOTO” published in Shueisha’s Jump Giga magazine.
The anime adaptation, produced by TMS Entertainment (Undead Unluck), was announced in May 2024, with Masaki Watanabe serving as director, Taku Kishimoto (script, Magi: Adventure of Sinbad) on series composition, character designs by Yō Moriyama, and music by Yuki Hayashi (music, My Hero Academia). The series began airing on Netflix on January 11, with the English dub being released concurrently on Saturdays.
The cast includes Tomokazu Sugita, best known for his role as Gintoki Sakata from Gintama, as Tarō Sakamoto; Nobunaga Shimazaki (Baki, Baki) as Shin Asakura; Ayane Sakura (Ochaco Uraraka, My Hero Academia) as Lu Shaotang and Nao Tōyama as Aoi Sakamoto. The English dub cast includes Matthew Mercer as Sakamoto, Dallas Liu as Shin, Rosie Okumura in her first-ever anime role as Aoi Sakamoto and Rosalie Chiang as Lu Shaotang.
What’s the Beef?
The Reason Why Fans Are Unhappy With SAKAMOTO DAYS
If you have been online at all since the first trailers for the SAKAMOTO DAYS anime were released, you might have encountered some of the opinions of incensed fans who feel that their expectations for the series’ animation have not been met. As usual, some opinions were more grounded, while others a bit more on the extreme side, like some fans already asking questions about a reboot of the series. For many fans, the action sequences shown in the trailers, and subsequently in the anime itself, have not been up to scratch, with the biggest complaint being the stiffness of movement, which is thought to be nowhere near the level seen in the production of other major Shōnen Jump adaptations, nor do they believe that the series’ visuals match up to the standard set by the manga. To say that the anime has been divisive would be an understatement.
Living up to the source material (especially a popular one) is paramount in the life cycle of an anime adaptation, and at this point, anime fans have countless stories of adaptation horror, with one of the most recent victims of the adaptation curse being yet another attempt to bring the works of horror manga legend Junji Itō to the screen (as animation). On many levels, fans are right to be concerned, with many believing that the reason for the anime’s inability to meet expectations for its visuals is due to a tight production schedule, which wouldn’t be surprising given how notorious for overwork the anime industry is, but there have also been fans and viewers who have stood up for the series and its production committee, noting that there are aspects to the anime that hold up.
‘Sakuga’ refers to ‘moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action’
What Exactly Are “Good” Visuals Anyway?
The Gift and Curse of a Post-Madhouse Landscape
While people’s sensibilities vary and no two people will have the exact same ideas about beauty and aesthetics, there are a lot of commonalities that can connect the opinions of those people in some way. What’s unfortunate about contemporary anime production is that fans have become increasingly more invested in the production side of things, a shift in the fandom culture that can be attributed in large to the explosive popularity and overwhelming success, not to mention visual fidelity, of Madhouse’s 2015 anime adaptation of Yusuke Murata’s manga adaptation of ONE’s One Punch Man.
While by no means the first anime to have brilliant, mind-blowing animation and visuals, it was one of the most influential titles in the rise of fan interest in a phenomenon known as “sakuga” – a Japanese term referring to animation production in general that has been appropriated in English-speaking circles to refer specifically to the hype moments that have become a mainstay in shōnen anime adaptations in particular. According to Serdar Yegulalp on liveabout.com, “sakuga” refers to “moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action“.
Is the Criticism Valid?
Decent But Ultimately Lacklustre Animation and Uninspired Choreography Hurts the Series
What SAKAMOTO DAYS is particularly lacking is this phenomenon to which anime fans have been exposed and have come to expect from their anime-watching experiences, regardless of whether it serves that particular narrative or not. Fans came down hard on the anime adaptation of Kosuke Oono’s The Way of the Househusband, which went for a “motion-manga” aesthetic rather than the full-blown animation most fans would expect. Given that it’s a gag manga adaptation with no intense action scenes per se, and more of a slice of life, the visuals lend themselves to the story, but the series couldn’t escape the “slideshow” description despite there being something very interesting happening with the series’ animation.
In the case of SAKAMOTO DAYS, which is supposed to balance action and comedy, much like Spy x Family, it becomes imperative to contrast those mundane, everyday moments with particularly striking combat sequences. The failure of the TMS adaptation to do so, is one of the biggest reasons fans have complaints about the visuals. Perhaps a production of this level, which definitely nails down a unique atmosphere and visual style that lends itself somewhat to the outlandishness of SAKAMOTO DAYS as a narrative, would have gone down better several years ago, but decent isn’t good enough today. With the second part in July, there could still be hope for the series to improve that aspect as time goes on, as it has otherwise been an enjoyable part of the Winter 2025 roster.
SAKAMOTO DAYS is available on Netflix. New episodes update on Saturdays.
