r/TrueAnime • u/RecursiveMonologue • Jul 27 '25
Baki Hanma: How to ruin potential with pretentiousness
Baki Hanma doesn't just jump the shark—it builds an entire aquarium around the shark, invites the shark to give lectures on marine biology, then expects you to take seriously a twenty-minute monologue about the metaphysical implications of shark-jumping as a cultural phenomenon. This is a series so committed to its own ridiculousness that it becomes almost accidentally postmodern, except postmodernism requires intentionality, and Baki Hanma seems genuinely convinced that what it's doing makes sense.
The fundamental problem isn't that the show is stupid—stupidity can be charming, can be energizing, can even be profound in the right hands. The problem is that Baki Hanma is stupid and solemn about it, treating every absurd development as though it contains the secrets of human existence. The narrator will start raving about something stupid, obvious, or not that special, and you'll have to listen to a 10 minute repeated rant about natural order, honor, or made up bs about the human body. It's like being cornered at a party by someone who wants to explain why their conspiracy theory about protein powder is actually a meditation on the nature of strength itself.
The series opens with Baki shadow-boxing against an imaginary opponent, which should be a compelling visual metaphor for internal struggle or the solitary nature of self-improvement. Instead, it becomes literal—the show devotes multiple episodes to this concept, complete with detailed explanations of how imaginary fighting works, as though the audience needs a user manual for metaphors. We watch him fight his shadow for several episodes as if it was supposed to be interesting. It's emblematic of everything wrong with the series: an interesting idea stretched beyond recognition and then explained to death.
When the show finally moves to actual human opponents, the problems multiply. Characters are depicted in physical proportions that border on the grotesque. These over-muscled hulks reminded me of the worst offenses of comic book art from the 1990s. The show desperately wants the viewer to be impressed with these twisted masses of muscle it portrays as people. But it never manages to sell them as something that comes across as impressive. The character designs don't suggest power—they suggest medical conditions. Everyone looks like they're suffering from the same rare disease that causes uncontrollable muscle growth and complete loss of neck definition.
The much-vaunted prison arc, where Baki infiltrates a maximum-security facility to fight Biscuit Oliva, should have been the series' crown jewel. Here's a contained environment, clear stakes, and the promise of exploring what happens when society's rules are stripped away. Instead, we get interminable setup punctuated by disappointing payoffs. The biggest failing the show has is how little the fights deliver. Much of what passes for fight animation are still shots of attacks at the moment of impact while the action is clipped around. This is especially frustrating with how much time the show spends building up to the various fights.
The Oliva fight itself represents everything that's gone wrong with the Baki franchise. Previous seasons had really made Oliva into an interesting and downright lovable character. This is turned on its head as he is first shown to be senselessly cruel, then finally beaten in a contest of brute strength, negating everything the previous seasons had set up regarding Baki himself. Baki was always incredibly strong, but he was also a martial artist. By the end of this series, he abandons all pretense of martial arts, and declares raw physical attributes to be the only factor that matters. It's like watching a cooking show where the chef suddenly declares that flavor doesn't matter and starts judging dishes solely by weight.
But the show's most catastrophic failure is its handling of time and pacing. Episodes will devote fifteen minutes to a character walking down a hallway while the narrator provides detailed commentary on the biomechanics of walking, the psychological implications of hallway navigation, and the philosophical significance of doors. Then the actual fight—the thing we've been building toward for three episodes—lasts thirty seconds and consists mostly of reaction shots and speed lines. The fighting is of just 10seconds not more than that, and in between fight is again too much history lesson, which makes the whole series damn boring to watch.
The presidential kidnapping subplot deserves special mention as perhaps the series' most spectacularly misguided moment. In the next episode, Baki kidnaps a legally distinct George W. Bush. The show presents this as though it's a natural escalation of the fighting tournament concept, but it reads more like fan fiction written by someone who's never seen how political thrillers work. The execution is so tone-deaf that it becomes unintentionally hilarious—Baki essentially commits an act of international terrorism to prove he's strong enough to fight his dad, and the show treats this as character development rather than complete moral collapse.
What's most frustrating is that buried beneath all the nonsense, there are glimpses of the series Baki Hanma could have been. The exploration of what it means to inherit your father's legacy, the question of whether strength requires abandoning humanity, the prison setting as a microcosm of society—these are all potentially rich themes. But the show can't sit still long enough to develop any of them. Every interesting idea gets buried under layers of pseudo-scientific exposition about muscle fiber density and the spiritual significance of protein absorption.
The animation, when it bothers to animate anything, ranges from competent to embarrassing. Given how well TMS Entertainment has done with action in other recent productions, this was a huge disappointment. Static shots masquerade as dynamic action, and the series' signature move seems to be cutting away from impacts rather than showing them. For a series built around physical combat, Baki Hanma has a strange aversion to depicting physical combat.
Perhaps most damning is how the series treats its own mythology. Earlier Baki entries, for all their flaws, maintained a certain internal logic about what strength meant and how it could be achieved. Baki Hanma abandons this in favor of whatever serves the immediate plot needs. Characters become stronger or weaker as required, fighting styles that were previously established as inferior suddenly become dominant, and the rules of the world shift from episode to episode. It's not just inconsistent—it's actively hostile to the idea that any of this should make sense.
The show's defenders often argue that it's supposed to be taken as comedy, that the absurdity is intentional. But accidental comedy and intentional comedy produce different effects. Intentional comedy invites you to laugh with the material; Baki Hanma makes you laugh at it, which is a fundamentally different and less generous relationship. The series seems genuinely invested in its own seriousness, which makes the ridiculous elements feel like failures rather than choices.
When all is said and done, Baki Hanma Season 1 is a lesser example of the quest for strength that permeates the shonen genre of anime. While there may be moments that will appeal to some, there are numerous other offerings out there that do everything this series does, but better. It's a show that mistakes volume for intensity, confuses complication for complexity, and somehow convinced itself that if you explain something badly enough, it becomes profound.
Baki Hanma isn't just a bad anime—it's a cautionary tale about what happens when a series loses track of what made it interesting in the first place. It's the end result of a franchise that's been so successful for so long that it's forgotten why people liked it to begin with. What we're left with is a beautiful corpse, gorgeously animated muscles wrapped around a narrative skeleton that collapsed long ago.
Story: 3 – Incoherent plotting disguised as complex mythology
Art: 6 – Impressive muscle definition cannot compensate for poor action choreography
Sound: 5 – Competent but undermined by endless, pointless narration
Character: 2 – Grotesque caricatures mistake physical exaggeration for personality
Enjoyment: 4 – Occasional unintentional comedy cannot salvage the tedium
Overall: 4 – A masterclass in how to squander potential through pretentious overexplanation
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u/Leaves_Swype_Typos Jul 27 '25
I thought the ridiculousness was entertaining and disagree that it's legitimately taking itself seriously that often, but what I found grating was the extreme lengths it went to to elevate Baki himself. The strongest punch in the world fails to scratch Pickle, but Baki handles him when it's his turn. Muhammad Alai Jr proves a threat to various champions, but is quickly, unceremoniously humiliated by Baki to the point of complete emasculation. And as you mentioned, Mr Unchained, a man who's devoted himself and was blessed with the genetics to be the physically strongest, somehow has to kneel to Baki in a test of strength.
It's like wherever Baki himself goes, uninteresting wins follow. Even when side characters get utterly thrashed, such as the number 2 in the prison, it's still more fun to watch than following Baki.