[Malintex_Terek]

I just finished this, and elevated it to my Masterpiece list, of which only six other anime occupy. I shouldn't have to defend why I think its good, it should be apparent to everyone watching the series with a strong anime background. My only gripe is it was predictable at times, yet this was balanced by being unpredictable at other times.

Also, I hate the Narrator. She'd spoil stuff and it would tense me up, building suspense for when her forecasts came to pass.

I'm confused by something, though.

Katanagatari strikes me as similar to Musashi Gundoh in that there's a lot of anachronistic elements in a "wrong" timeline. Something happened during the Sengoku period that started history off in a wrong direction from how it happened in we, the viewer's universe. But what caused this? My impression of Shikizaki was he and his family acted sort of like the Illuminati or Ylliaster, keeping history on the straight course using their knowledge of how the world should be. Is this assumption correct - that the Yanari Shogunate came to be erroneously and Shikizaki + Takahito Hida were effective allies in trying to overthrow it? And the replacement of the Yanari Shogun with a Tokugawa Shogun corrected things? Or did Shikizaki himself cause the distortion, and somehow it was his plan to correct it?