NinSatsu Lore: Cloning Ninja Slayer manga

A truly magical thing has happened to the Ninja Slayer main manga series not too long ago: it was split into two. And I don’t mean that it’s two separate series now: rather, it comes up twice as often nowadays, covering two different episodes at a time. Since that might’ve went under the radar of some Western ninjaheads, I would like to explain it in a little bit more detail.

NinSatsu Lore: Ninja Slayer Manga Series

Now that the anime is over, English-speaking ninjaheads who want more Ninja Slayer goodness have been paying more attention to the Ninja Slayer manga series. That is especially appropriate now that the two of them are being published in English. And since the questions about the differences between them have been popping up ever since the anime started, I figured I might as well elaborate on that.

NinSatsu Lore: Ninja Soul Possession Phenomenon

This is a short blurb from the anime’s official website; interestingly, the wiki has nothing of the sort, but since the rest of the info on the anime website is accurate, we can assume that this is canon, as well.

NinSatsu Lore: Neo-Saitama In Flames – The Timeline

Since the start of the anime, a lot of people have been discussing the “canon episode order”, whether the anime shuffles the episodes around or not, and how closely that order follows the novels. That confusion is perfectly reasonable, as Ninja Slayer’s legend is all about poor Japanese translators translating the episodes they can get their hands on in random order. However, some people also tend to state their assumptions as facts, which makes the matters even more confusing. An especially popular misunderstanding is that the Otakumode translations are divided into volumes 1, 2 and 3, even though they are single episodes taken from volumes 4, 1 and 1, respectively. Before I begin, I’d like to note that all information in this post is taken from the official Japanese wiki, so you can double-check me if you want. All I’m doing is translating publically available info. Oh, and I’m only going to cover the first part, “Neo-Saitama In Flames”, since that is the one being adapted in the anime. Now, let’s dive in and make sense of it all.

NinSatsu Lore: Hiroyuki Imaishi Interview

This interview was published on animeanime.jp in April, around the time the first episode aired.