Warning: Contains spoilers for Sakamoto Days.Even before it premiered, Sakamoto Days’ anime has been highly contentious with fans and critics alike. Not only has the fight choreography and overall direction often paled in comparison to the iconic kinetic energy of the manga, but it even tends to fall short of the average anime, as well, and it’s been largely disappointing to watch with how popular Sakamoto Days has become in recent years.

The problems with the Sakamoto Days anime have been clear from day one, but it might have made its biggest mistake in episode #9. While episode #9 was largely good visually from start to finish, the bigger issue came in how it adapted the story of the corresponding manga chapters, Sakamoto Days episode #9 made a big change from the manga that, while seemingly innocuous, ruined one of the series’ best twists. The anime can salvage things, but the fact that it would make a change like that, at all, is nonetheless confusing and disappointing.

How The Sakamoto Days Anime Ruined One Of The Manga's Biggest Plot Twists

What Sakamoto Days Episode 9 Got Wrong About Its Villain

Sakamoto Days episode #9 was the proper introduction of series antagonist Slur, and it’s where the major issues with episode #9 stem from. Visually speaking, while it lacked much of the overall craft that made the manga’s take on things worse, the anime still did a good job of highlighting Slur’s menacing character through the sudden change in the art, and the accompanying score perfectly went along with that, as well. Overall, Slur’s introduction, while not perfect, was far better than was to be expected from the Sakamoto Days anime, and that was great to see.

Narratively, however, Slur’s introduction was changed rather bizarrely. The anime changed things so that Shin and Asakura separated after Shin heard the thoughts of two people in separate locations as opposed to two people in the same direction, and that’s a problem because later events in the manga suggest that scene was foreshadowing Slur having dissociative identity disorder with a personality based on his and Sakamoto’s old friend, Rion Akao. In short, Sakamoto Days ruined one of the biggest pieces of foreshadowing involving its main villain, and it’s unclear why that decision was made.

Sakamoto Days' Latest Failure Highlights The Biggest Problems With The Anime

Sakamoto Days' Anime Continues To Fall Short

Sakamoto Days ruining the foreshadowing of Slur’s big twist is an utterly baffling change, and it highlights the biggest problems with the anime. It’s one thing for the animation to be average at best, but that’s especially a problem for Sakamoto Days because of how its action is tied so heavily into its identity as a story. As such, the Sakamoto Days anime's consistent failure to make its action live up to the manga shows a vital misunderstanding of what makes the story work, and at this point, that’s hard to deny.

That idea, of course, feeds into one of the main issues with the recent change. Making any sort of change from the manga would almost always be bad, and the anime has already suffered a bit from that with the removal of some of the more lighthearted chapters, but this is the worst case of that, as anime removing the foreshadowing to Slur’s big twist shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the story’s narrative strengths. That, of course, is further compounded by how much it fails visually, and unfortunately, it’s probably only going to get worse from here.

Can Sakamoto Days' Big Villain Twist Still Work In The Anime?

How Sakamoto Days Can Salvage Its Major Story Change

Sakamoto Days removing the foreshadowing for the Slur twist is nothing but a mistake, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. While it’s unfortunate that the twist of Slur having multiple personalities won’t work as well in the anime as in the manga, the scene that was changed in the anime was only briefly referenced in the manga following the reveal, so its exclusion doesn’t technically impact the reveal. As such, Sakamoto Days can still make one of its biggest twists work in the anime, even if it doesn’t have the same level of foreshadowing as the manga.

That doesn’t change how bad an impression the change leaves, however. It’s one thing for such a significant change to happen, but the fact that the people behind Sakamoto Days’ production though it was okay to do that still shows a lack of care for the source material, so whatever Sakamoto Days does to make the big twist with Slur work will still be marred by how they failed to properly sell it beforehand. It would be great if Sakamoto Days’ overall production could find a way to remedy all of that, but as things stand, that’s looking highly unlikely.

Sakamoto Days releases new episodes Saturdays on Netflix.