This is another Netflix docu-drama not far from the vein of Rise of Empires: Ottoman, with a combination of documentary-style narration with fully-acted scenes depicting the critical moments of the history in question. If you couldn’t tell from the title, this is a series about the end of the so-called Sengoku Period. The period actually stretches from the mid-1400s to the very end of the warring states in 1615, but this 6-part series focuses on the fairly coherent period from the rise of the warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1551 through the Battle of Sekigahara and the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600.
For the novice, this is a dense and complex period of history, and the show does a good job of laying things out and explaining what went on. For those already familiar with the period, it will seem to belabor things a bit, but really, making this tangle of alliances, betrayals, and wars make sense is a challenge the series rises to pretty well. Six episodes is not a lot of time to cover the three great unifiers of Japan in their fifty-year dance of conquest and power, but they do it well.
The acted scenes are not as in-depth as the ones in Ottoman, but the production values are first-rate, with especial praise needed for the costumes and armoring, as they look fantastic. The interior sets are decent, even if a lot of them look smaller than you would expect, and the battle scenes are largely more impressionistic, with a lot of disconnected moments of violence cut together to give the feel of a battle, rather than masses of troops maneuvering. You do get some larger-scale shots, though they are obviously done with CGI. The quality of the violence is pretty good, even if they do use a bit too much digital blood for my taste.
What really makes this of interest to the Sword & Sorcery fan is the laying out of the period as a highly dramatic opera of larger-than-life personalities engaged in one of the most Byzantine struggles for power ever seen in any country. Oda Nobunaga, the first of the great warlords to begin the unification of his island nation after centuries of warfare, was known as “The Demon King” for his ruthless slaughter of defeated enemies, and his campaign of conquest only came to an end when he was betrayed by one of his own generals and committed suicide before he could be slain.
His death led to another scramble for power, and the one who succeeded him was Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a common-born soldier who had risen through the ranks by sheer ability, and who avenged his fallen lord and then proceeded to dominate Japan for the next sixteen years, enlarging his power base, defeating and then allying such colorful vassals as Date Masamune, the “One-Eyed Dragon”, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the future master of Japan.
The show carefully details the personal and political conflicts that fueled the warfare within the realm, and so it makes sense that once Hideyoshi had pacified Japan, he turned that energy outward in a bid to conquer mainland China. The drama of the small, island nation hurling itself against the massive, ancient empire, ruled by a fading dynasty, is irresistible, and from a narrative standpoint, it is disappointing that the invasion bogged down into a quagmire in Korea and never achieved anything significant.
The ultimate victory of the Tokugawa – after the festival of beheadings, massacres, betrayals and suicides that preceded it – seems almost anticlimactic in retrospect. Ieyasu built on what had already been done, and simply took the last few steps that needed to be taken. The curtain came down on the warring states period, and Japan became an isolated totalitarian state for 268 years. The battle of Sekigahara – while easily the decisive battle in Japanese history – does not have the barbaric drama of the earlier wars. Tokugawa was a schemer and a strategist, but no one was ever going to call him a “Demon King”.
This is a solid show, and it provides plenty of grist for the mill of ideas from which Sword & Sorcery springs. Themes of war and cruelty are universal, as are struggles for power, conquest, and the collisions of personal hatreds with political ambition. A setting like this, in a period of war, when war has been the rule for centuries, is a rich one for tales of adventure and bloody action. Warriors with rigid codes of honor, clashing in savage struggles where morality is erased beneath ambition and necessity – that sounds like the essence of S&S to me.
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