Unbeknownst to all, I’ve actually been watching some anime this season! The two shows that I’ve stuck with are NinKoro (which this post is about) and Kowloon Generic Romance. Maybe I’ll write about that one later.
I decided to watch NinKoro because it seemed kinda cute and interesting. The elevator pitch is that a ninja, Satoko, has fled from her secret ninja village. An assassin, Konoha (or is that really her name?) finds the half-dead ninja and gives her a swift kick. Realizing that the ninja is actually alive, she gets stuck feeding her and eventually they end up living together after Konoha figures out that Satoko has certain skills that are useful to her (turning dead bodies into leaves and household chores, y’know, the usual).
And so begins the cycle of the two going on assassin missions as an unstoppable team. Like clockwork, every episode a ninja or two from Satoko’s village comes to kill her (because it’s like the mob, you can’t just quit!) and Satoko defends her partner by quickly dispatching them before they have a chance to finish monologuing.
Along the way, there is a bit of character development. Konoha goes from being a ruthless, cold-blooded killer to being a ruthless, cold-blooded killer with a few friends (who also kill in cold blood). Satoko grows into a slightly more independent version of herself, mainly because she feels the need to defend herself and her assassin friends.
The show is mostly built around the humor of seeing a weekly ninja being killed so quickly that you can’t even admire their character design. I kinda feel bad that some animator probably had to study the character sheets just to draw like 10 seconds of actual ninja animation. I do like that the show sticks to this bit, as it would be really tempting to show more of the ninja village residents. I guess they do appear in a few scenes of them hanging out in the afterlife.
The funny thing about the ninja pursuers is that their character designs are all more interesting than the two lead characters. Maybe this is by design to make animation easier, but I find it funny that Satoko is a dead ringer for Himawari, another ninja girl anime I watched way back when.
Along the way there are some more characters introduced, like Konoha’s concerned classmate (whose family and friends Konoha assassinates) and another rival assassin who strangely ends up being friends with the two. There’s also the ninja defector leader who tries to live a normal life but gets pulled into Satoko’s schemes.
The way I described this show makes it sound pretty boring, but for some reason I kept watching. I wanted to keep up with Satoko and Konoha’s relationship, which was unrequited for the most part, at least until Konoha turned into a baby and Satoko became her mom. Yes, that really happens!
Overall, I liked how absurd the show can get. Every story needs to be grounded somewhat in reality, but this one does seem to go for the absurd pretty often. Like when Satoko gets zapped by a rival assassin, making her boobs bigger. She then requests additional zapping, making her boobs so big that she makes Dolly Parton look like an ironing board. She learns that the boob alterations are non-reversible, but then somehow in the next episode her boobs are back to normal.
On top of the literal absurdity, there’s also the undertones of the two lead characters doing the dirty work of killing anyone who they get a contract for. Whenever I watch a John Wick movie I always think of this assassin economy. Like, how is there this large of a market for assassinations and yet you just never really hear about people being assassinated every day? So on top of that, it’s high school girls doing the assassinating, and they’re even killing their own classmates sometimes! I guess it isn’t really spelled out whether Konoha really killed her classmate, but it’s heavily implied.
In true anime finale fashion, there is a storyline at the end of the series that creates a cliffhanger right before the last episode. But aside from that there’s really no drama or suspense. Just like in the boob episode, almost everything resets at the end of every episode and there’s never really any permanent damage or consequences of the characters’ actions. Which is fine if you’re just looking for a cute assassin x ninja yuri show.
So is Ninkoro worth watching? I enjoyed it, and after a long hiatus of watching anime, it was pretty refreshing seeing something that wasn’t an isekai. Like, is that the only genre of anime out nowadays!? For me, it’s the quality of the animation, the absurdity of the situations, and the weekly ninja deaths that kept me watching.