Is Sakamoto Days Overrated? A 6.70 That Rides a Fat Hitman Gag and a Train Fight Into Numbers TMS's Eleven Episodes Won't Actually Earn

Sakamoto Days posts a 0.89-point gap between MyAnimeList's 7.59 and the Codex 6.70 because the crowd is grading a premise and a bullet-catch, not the setup-heavy cour TMS Entertainment actually shipped in 2025.

The best fight in Sakamoto Days is on a train, and the best joke is that its protagonist is fat. Neither of these observations should carry an eleven-episode WSJ adaptation, and yet the MyAnimeList consensus — 7.59 across half a million voters — is grading the show as if they do. The gap between Sakamoto Days's reputation and its rubric score is the story here, and it's worth naming what the crowd is rewarding that the rubric won't.

The Consensus Is Grading a Logline

The MAL 7.59 is a premise score. Yuto Suzuki's inversion — legendary hitman, self-imposed no-kill rule, konbini, wife, daughter — is genuinely clever, and it does what a clever premise is supposed to do: it makes the first three episodes feel effortless. Sakamoto flipping between deadpan dad and lethal professional is a reliable engine, Shin's mind-reading anxiety is a functional tactical sidekick, and Lu Shaotang's shift from triad heiress to convenience-store trainee gives the trio a chemistry the show can lean on when the plot has nothing else to offer.

The Codex 6.70 doesn't dispute any of that. It disputes the idea that TMS Entertainment's 2025 broadcast — eleven episodes, a Netflix Japan advance rollout, a scattered first cour — earned the score the manga's reputation delivered on arrival. This is the same pattern that turned up in our Kaiju No. 8 write-up: a Jump adaptation whose crowd number is being paid out on the source's goodwill and a couple of production highlights, with the actual episodic execution nowhere near the number on the marquee.

The Story Score (6.8) Is Being Asked to Do Too Much

Sakamoto Days's story number sits at 6.8, and even that feels generous once you look at what the cour actually resolves. The JCC exam sequence and the early bounty-hunter beats give the show a legible escalation curve, and the introductions — the slot machine assassin, X, the Order — are individually competent gag-of-the-week outings. Individually. Strung together, they front-load an entire season with faction setup and pay almost none of it off by episode 11.

By the time the Order has been name-dropped as the real threat, there's no episodes left to make the Order feel like anything more than a whiteboard of future villains. The cour ends where a stronger adaptation would have ended its second arc. This isn't a criticism the crowd is willing to make, because the crowd is scoring cumulatively — grading the manga's promise in the anime's column. The rubric grades what aired. What aired was setup.

The Themes Score (6.0) Is Where the Rubric Bites Hardest

The 6.0 on themes is the most honest number on the scorecard, and it's the one the consensus most obviously overlooks. Sakamoto Days is a show about retirement, atonement, and choosing family over the killer's legacy — themes that, done seriously, would put it in a conversation with the genre's better character studies. It doesn't do them seriously. It gestures at them.

The Lu acceptance beat lands because it's staged as a comic reversal, not because the show has earned it emotionally. Sakamoto's marriage — the entire thematic engine of the premise — is a black box across eleven episodes. Aoi barely functions as a character; she functions as a reason Sakamoto is retired. His interior life, the guilt structure a hitman-turned-father should be dragging around, is never opened. The show prioritizes momentum and comedy so aggressively that its own emotional spine never gets a full breath in. That's not a rubric quibble. That's the difference between a show that will hold up on rewatch and a show that plays well once, quickly.

The Animation Score (6.5) Is Where the Crowd's Instincts Are Loudest

This is the criterion where the MAL gap is most defensible from the crowd's side, and still the number holds at 6.5. TMS Entertainment delivered real work in specific places — the train fight is genuinely inventive choreography, and the bus and amusement-park sequences use environmental props the way the manga's non-lethal constraint demands. Chief animation director Yukiko Ban's fingerprints across episodes 2, 3, 7, and 9-11 give the show its most consistent visual through-line.

But the production isn't clean. CGI integration is uneven across the cour, dialogue scenes flatten out between the set pieces, and the direction occasionally chooses speed over readability in ways that hurt the choreography it's trying to sell. An action shonen adaptation in 2025 is being graded against MAPPA and Bones and the Ufotable comparison, and TMS is not on that shelf here. Competent and energetic is the ceiling. That's a 6.5. The crowd is rounding it to an 8 because the good scenes are the ones that get clipped.

The Steelman: Sakamoto Days Is a Comedy, and Comedy Is Undergraded

The fair opposing read is that the rubric is grading Sakamoto Days as an action-shonen thriller when it's actually a comedy with action interludes, and that comedies systematically get undergraded on themes and story because they aren't pretending to do those things. The Sakamoto silent-fat-guy gag is legitimately one of the best sustained visual jokes in a current WSJ property. Shin's telepathy exists to generate punchlines. The show isn't failing to be a serious meditation on retirement; it's succeeding at being a domestic-action farce.

The rubric hears this and answers with the character score of 7.0 and the world score of 7.0 — both of which credit exactly what the steelman describes. The Assassins Association, the Order, the JCC ranking system: these are the mechanics of a functional comic ecosystem, and the no-kill constraint is a genuinely original engine for choreography. Where the rubric parts ways with the steelman is on scope. A comedy that also front-loads eleven episodes of faction setup and gestures at atonement and fatherhood is asking to be graded on those criteria. Sakamoto Days keeps setting the table for a heavier show and then declining to serve it. That's not a genre defense — that's an execution problem, the same one the Wallflower entry documents when a subversive premise gets rewarded for a promise it never resolves.

Verdict

Sakamoto Days is a competent adaptation of an inventive manga, carried by a strong central gag, a legible action grammar, and TMS's willingness to spend real animation on the train and the amusement park. It is not a 7.59. The 6.70 is what happens when you grade eleven episodes of scattered faction introductions, unopened emotional interiors, and inconsistent CGI against a rubric that doesn't get to count the manga's next volume. The gap is the honest number.