YMMV / Samurai 7

• Awesome Art: Particularly in the episodes where Studio Ghibli did the background art.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Katsushiro. Some see him as whiny, useless and gets people killed by accident because he's such an idiot. Others find him an improvement over his original counterpart: This Katsushiro is much more devoted to his samurai training, which makes him much more conflicted concerning his relationship with his love interest, and the anime's Kanbei doesn't take him as much for granted. Plus, he arguably gets the most Character Development of all the samurai.
  • Kikuchiyo can be seen as this as well; he tends to be one of the most popular characters among people who generally like the series due to often being The Heart of the group, as well as an underdog who gradually earns the respect of the peers, and provides most of the funnier parts. On the other hand, he's also the easiest to single out for those who don't like the series so much since his loud, immature antics and personality, along with some occasional slapstick humor, are primarily responsible for making the series seem too juvenile and similar to a shonen-demographic action series to those wanting it to be a more thoroughly serious and mature-minded action/drama epic.
• Complete Monster:
  • Ukyo was adopted from a humble farming village to become the spoiled son of a wealthy merchant. A devious schemer under his foppish demeanor, Ukyo kills an imperial envoy to blame the samurai and later learns the Nobuseri are being dispatched by the Emperor in the Capital. Journeying to the Capital, Ukyo is revealed as the Emperor's 49th clone and, during his succession test, murders his father to claim his title. Secretly ordering the Nobuseri to continue raiding villages while stationing samurai to defend them, Ukyo intends to let countless lives be lost while the Nobuseri are destroyed to boost his popularity. Also having grown obsessed with Kanna Village's water priestess Kirara Mikumari, Ukyo attempts to destroy Kanna while claiming Kirara for himself and shrugs off the deaths of his soldiers and harem in the battle, caring for nothing but his own egotistical whims.
  • The Emperor, Lord Amenushi, won the Great War and now maintains an iron-fisted rule by unleashing the mighty Nobuseri to pillage the villages. Leaving them impoverished to steal for the wealthy Capital, any who resist are brutally wiped out. To create his narcissistic idea of the perfect heir, the Amenushi has countless women impregnated with his clones and rigorously tests the children to ensure they could prove a worthy successor, with dozens of graves marking those he deemed failures.
• Growing the Beard: The first two-thirds of the series follows the plotline of the original Seven Samurai as close as it can, which works as well as you would expect when you adapt a 207-minute movie into sixteen half-hour episodes. The last third is an original storyline, allowing the series to finally stretch its wings and kick things into Serial Escalation territory.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In episode 15, Kirara prays "Please let me be strong like the samurai." Fast-forward to 2011, where here dub actress, Colleen Clinkenbeard, plays Erza Scarlet, one of the most badass Action Girls in all of anime, who has a very iconic◊ samurai getup.◊ She even wore a second one in an anime-exclusive arc.◊
• Ho Yay: Examples are on this page
• Magnificent Bastard: Kyuzo is the former bodyguard of Ayamaro who located Kanbei and his party alone and fought Kanbei in a duel, with Kanbei being impressed by Kyuzo's cunning and skill to where he even admits defeat. Despite this, Kanbei makes it clear he has no intention of dying just yet and states that they can fight to the death at a later time. Rather than kill Kanbei right there, Kyuzo chooses to accept Kanbei's request for a future rematch on account of having enjoyed the fight himself. Wanting to ensure he is the one who kills Kanbei, he eventually joins the party as the sixth samurai where he frequently goes on scouting missions to deal with any potential threats. Even after he is accidentally killed by Katsushiro, he holds no contempt toward his fellow samurai for the accident and instead just has a mutual promise with Kanbei that they would finish their fight in the afterlife.
• The Scrappy: Good luck finding a single person familiar with the series who actually likes Manzo. He is frequently hated even more than the villains themselves for numerous reasons, like his cartoonishly ugly character design, his treatment towards his daughter, which borders on abusive, and most of all, his Dirty Coward personality, which culminates in him trying to sell out the samurai to the bandits under the ridiculous notion that they'll be safer and better off by continuing to be submissive towards them, almost undoing all the trouble the villagers went to to recruit them and dooming them to almost certain punishment anyway. Even after he's outed but spared, while he agrees to go along with fighting back against the bandits, he never really grows out of it and is nearly useless in combat, hiding and cowering at almost every sign of danger, which leads some people to labeling him as a Karma Houdini who is never properly punished for his behavior or redeems himself for it.
• Strangled by the Red String: Kirara spends most of the series with significant Will They or Won't They? with Katsushiro. Then suddenly, at the end of the series she says she wants to marry the man she loves... Who turns out to be Kanbei, despite the implications of Kirara's feelings being so subtle, and so easy to miss on a first viewing, that it seems extremely out of left field.

---