Gintama. Porori-hen

Following the grim events of Iga, Kokujou Island, Rakuyou, and multiple fruitless confrontations with the Tenshouin Naraku and Tendoshuu, Gintama. Porori-hen takes its viewers on a trip down memory lane to when Yorozuya were mostly doing what they did best—odd jobs. The great space hunter Umibouzu has returned to Edo and is livid when he finds out that his daughter Kagura has a boyfriend. He blames Gintoki for being an incompetent guardian, but has the time finally come for him to let go of his daughter?

Back with shameless parodies, risqué humor, and lively camaraderie, Gintoki, Kagura, and Shinpachi are faced with unforeseen situations that manage to be both hilarious and emotionally stirring.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Sakata, Gintoki Main

Sugita, Tomokazu Japanese

Kagura Main

Kugimiya, Rie Japanese

Shimura, Shinpachi Main

Sakaguchi, Daisuke Japanese

Katsura, Kotarou Supporting

Ishida, Akira Japanese

Hijikata, Toushirou Supporting

Nakai, Kazuya Japanese

Okita, Sougo Supporting

Suzumura, Kenichi Japanese

Hasegawa, Taizou Supporting

Tachiki, Fumihiko Japanese

Tsukuyo Supporting

Kaida, Yuuko Japanese

Elizabeth Supporting

Kondou, Isao Supporting

Chiba, Susumu Japanese

Higuchi, Hiromitsu Producer

Miyawaki, Chizuru Director

Takamatsu, Shinji Sound Director

Ishikawa, Mariko Episode Director, Animation Director

Reviews

Dec 24, 2017

_alpha-q_

Recommended

This is my second full review on this site.


I want a life for Christmas.


Let me first address the minority among you, the ones actually wanting to know whether Gintama is worth watching - the ones looking for a proper review. Everybody knows the type - every time a season begins or concludes, a few of these pop out of the woodwork looking to "get into Gintama" or "catch up with Gintama" or whatever. I've had a number of them irl as well.
I understand your confusion. For every 10/10 review claiming Gintama is the best thing since frozen bread, there are probably 5 users ... with it being dropped, a score of 1/10, and an incredibly helpful tag of "overrated". Every time you decide to take the plunge, a voice in your head asks you - is it truly going to be worth it? In that 300+ episode runtime, you could be doing something useful (or watching other anime, I don't really care) - are you going to invest that time on poop jokes?

Truth is, I can't help you, and I don't think anyone can.

I will say this - when Gintama peaks, it is going to be one of the best anime you've ever seen. It will fully deserve that overblown 9+ score, which ranks it above other hot favorites and makes people salty. It's when it peaks that causes all the polarization, in my opinion.

Say you don't like toilet humor. Then for you, the show might peak during its parody bits.

I also know some who consider references to be the lowest form of comedy. Maybe the self-deprecating gags or the ones parodying tropes instead of other media are more your cup of tea.

"I don't really like anime comedy but I'm checking Gintama out coz of its high score" - the action arcs might be where the show peaks for you. (Seriously though the score doesn't make it less of a comedy)

These are only a few examples but the point I'm trying to make is Gintama is mixed bag of goodies which aren't limited to a single style or genre. The more among them you like, the more you are inclined to like the show as a whole, and vice versa.
Consequently, there is no teaser for Gintama - X episodes you can watch that will tell you exactly what the show is. People might say the show gets good after a certain episode - I think that's more of them finding the first instance where the show peaked for them. I dare say your experience would be different.

This isn't to say don't watch Gintama. But barreling through the show expecting 9+ quality right from the start will more often that not turn you away.
One possible way to watch is to get to know the main cast (~10 episodes) then check out some of the top comedy episodes (there probably are a few threads listing them here and there) - if you like them, great, the show has a definite peak for you, and you can decide to keep watching or not. If you don't, well, 300 episodes is honestly a lot, and most of it is comedy of the same or lower quality.

Onto this season then.

Honestly, this season was just regular Gintama. There were good episodes and bad episodes, similar to the previous seasons. Bad episodes, however, seem much more prominent when the season is 13 episodes, compared to 50 or 200. Variances in quality have been present throughout Gintama's run, and I don't necessarily feel this season is weak at least in terms of source material.

The biggest negative for me is the existence of a "Slip Arc" when it could have been adapted in order, with perhaps a break before SA began. I also expected the characters to make a lot more fun of the honestly moronic decision to skip stuff. Whatever. I've made my peace with BNP. Getting a complete adaptation is not something very common, and I suppose I should count my blessings.

The lack of budget saving background shots still irks me, though. It probably is fucking weird to want fillers, but the self parody segments were one of the biggest positives of Gintama comedy. The humor itself is great, but the love the staff felt for the show really shines through in the bonus segments, like Gintoki getting sleep paralysis for example. I just don't get that from any of the BNP seasons, not just this one. The switch from Sunrise to BNP makes me feel like overseeing an employee who went from giving 110% to 100%. I can't really complain, but I'm still disappointed.

In any case, whatever my feelings about BNP are, with the multi-colored poop segment of the Excalibur arc I can finally say unironically that I lost brain cells while watching Gintama. I appreciate the fact that they were trying to stick to the manga, which didn't have mosaics. But I can't believe that no one looked at the final product and went, "hey, this is unbelievably fucking stupid!" Or they did, and the staff just ran with it anyway. Lampshade stupid things, for god's sake. Make a character say that rainbow poop is shitty, no pun intended. It's moments like these where BNP refuses to utilize the reputation Gintama has built up over the years which make me hate them. Combine this with the ever-present janky zoomed out scenes - or scenes where the camera focuses on the background instead of the characters - to save budget instead of just airing the fucking static BG, and there's no love lost between me and BNP.

I don't mean for this to turn into another rant - I've accepted that this is the best we're going to get. This season is still weak, but for me it's more due to these small shortcomings that add up instead of the comedy being weaker or stale. I just hope this reduced budget goes to animating the multitude of fights in the SS arc in gloriously high quality. I want Gintama to go out with a bang, not fizzle towards its end.

tl;dr - same Gintama comedy, weaker execution, basically another BNP season 8/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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May 2, 2022

Im_Stuff

Mixed Feelings

I don't know who I should blame between Bandai and TV Tokyo, but whoever decided that this should be adapted after Gintama. has seriously dropped the ball.

If you take away anything from this review, just don't watch this season in the intended order. It would fit much better between Gintama' and Gintama° (yes, I do actually think it's funny).

For short, the Slip Arc is a return to the basis of Gintama, a back to the usual style, with 5 arcs and a few standalone episodes fitting in a 13 episode duration. Not only is it moving away from what happened at the end of Gintama° ... and during Gintama. where the story started ramping up, it's actually inferior to what happened before.

Older seasons of Gintama had a pretty large amount of episodes which means they could afford to make 5-6 episodes arcs, which, in my opinion are always better than the rest. However, with only 13 episodes to show for it, the Slip Arc's longest arc is only 3 episodes, which doesn't leave much wiggle room to make a good story, although that singular 3 episode arc was quite good.

For the people who dislike Gintama getting more serious, it's probably a breath of fresh air, but for people like myself who actually enjoyed the main story pacing up, well it feels like some people at Bandai were desperate for money, they probably wanted to fund that Gintama Rumble thing that was mentioned.

A shame really, I have a busy week and not much time for anime. Still a decent season, just a step down compared to everything else.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Jan 17, 2026

DanteDemonZ

Not Recommended

Gintama: Slip Arc is, without exaggeration, one of the worst viewing experiences I have ever had. If it were possible to rate something below zero, I would. What is presented here is not a nostalgic return to form, but a concentrated showcase of everything that made late-era Gintama unbearable for me.

Outside of a few rare exceptions, for me, Gintama stopped being funny after Season 1 ended. Early Gintama’s comedy worked because it was original, self-contained, and imaginative. Whether it was a Monster Hunter parody involving aliens, a Saw-style death game built around ice lollies, or a haunted house arc parodying JoJo stands, these stories were ... creative, genuinely funny, and crucially, they did not overstay their welcome. Comedy and commentary existed in balance.

From Season 2 onward, that creativity evaporated. Most “jokes” became endless repetitions of the same gags. The Shogun being portrayed as brain-dead was not funny the first time, and it certainly was not funny the thousandth. Crude toilet humour involving poop, vomit, and bodily fluids is viscerally unpleasant to me, and Gintama’s later seasons do not just rely on it; they obsess over it. When the show briefly diverges from this formula, it often lands in even worse territory, such as the Dekobokko arc’s sexist body-swap humour or the soul switch arc that devolves into literal walking, talking feces. None of it is clever, challenging, or amusing. It is simply repulsive.

The Slip Arc was marketed as a lighthearted palate cleanser, a return to Gintama’s roots after heavy, serious arcs. In theory, this should have been a chance to rediscover what once made the show special. Instead, it confirms how far removed modern Gintama is from its early identity.

Episode one opens not with wit or absurdity, but with racism played for laughs. The central gag revolves around Kagura’s father obsessively panicking about her becoming “toasted” or giving birth to a “toasted baby,” language that very clearly alludes to darker or tanned skin as something shameful or undesirable. This is not subtle subtext either. The episode explicitly visualises his fear through imagined scenes of Kagura with brown skin and a brown-skinned boyfriend, reinforcing the implication that this outcome is horrifying or unacceptable. The joke is neither interrogated nor subverted, and no character meaningfully pushes back against it. Rather than exposing prejudice, the episode simply repeats it for cheap laughs, setting an ugly and uncomfortable tone for a season that was supposedly meant to recapture Gintama’s early charm.

Episode five returns to suicide jokes and sexual humiliation humour involving assassins who “finish too early.” These are not edgy in a meaningful way. They are lazy and unpleasant.

One of the lowest points is the return of a cursed sword arc. Rather than evoking the iconic seriousness of Benizakura, this arc descends into nonstop sexual metaphors and toilet humour. A sword becomes lodged in Gintoki’s body. Another sword laments being “cucked.” There are extended jokes about sexual performance, Viagra, and impotence. A “fight” consists of characters flinging feces with swords. The arc then introduces the idea that swords can reproduce, culminating in deeply uncomfortable implications involving a newborn scabbard. The finale caps this off with explicit sexual joke dialogue that feels both juvenile and tasteless.

The idol arc fares no better. It leans heavily into crude shock humour involving bodily waste, sexual innuendo, and pixelated censorship gags. Fans are portrayed as sexually obsessed caricatures, idols are framed as exploitative, and the entire arc devolves into grotesque imagery and degrading “jokes” rather than satire. The infamous toilet booth segment, where female characters are reduced to fetishised props for audience reaction jokes, is particularly indefensible.

There is exactly one episode that briefly reminded me of why Gintama was ever funny. A parody quest episode styled after classic arcs like Tama Quest, which also doubled as an absurd meta-advertisement for Gintama Rumble. For a short time, it embraced the kind of bold, self-aware stupidity that only Gintama could pull off. Unfortunately, even this episode collapses back into tired glasses gags, toilet humour, and ends with gratuitous vomiting for shock value.

The final episode is the nail in the coffin. What should have been a sendoff instead escalates into grotesque imagery involving censored genital jokes, absurd transformations, and gratuitous violence played entirely for laughs. It is not clever. It is not transgressive. It is simply juvenile.

Ultimately, Gintama: Slip Arc represents everything I now dislike about the series. It mistakes excess for comedy, shock for satire, and offensiveness for boldness. Early Gintama trusted its writing, its characters, and its creativity. Slip Arc trusts nothing except escalation, crudeness, and repetition.

I do not find this material funny, provocative, or entertaining. I find it vile, uncomfortable, and exhausting.

A miserable experience that retroactively highlights just how special early Gintama was, by showing how completely it lost its way.

Unless you genuinely find joy in humour that feels chemically lobotomized and aggressively juvenile, I cannot recommend this arc to anyone; you should skip this arc entirely.

Reviewer’s Rating: 1

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