Rurouni Kenshin

On the data. Two adaptations, two prequels, and both prequels arrive last. The anime strand starts with the 1996 television series, broadcast on Fuji TV from January 1996 to September 1998, animated by Studio Gallop for the first sixty-six episodes and Studio Deen afterwards. Its episode count is genuinely contested: ninety-four episodes were broadcast and a ninety-fifth was released to home video only, so trackers list it as either ninety-four or ninety-five. This site uses ninety-five, because that is what the complete run contains, and flags the count so nobody assumes their listing is broken. The practical division inside those episodes matters more than the total. Episodes 1 to 27 cover the Tokyo arc, 28 to 62 cover the Kyoto arc, and 63 to 95 are almost entirely anime original material written because the series caught up with the manga. Episode 62 is where most viewers stop, and stopping there is a recommendation rather than an accident. Trust and Betrayal, four OVA episodes from 1999, is set between 1864 and 1868 and shows how Kenshin got the scar the television series treats as an open question for its entire run; it is widely rated the best thing the franchise has produced and it is also the single worst thing to watch first. Reflection, two OVA episodes from 2001 to 2002, is an epilogue that skips forward and invents an ending that the manga does not support and that a large part of the audience rejects; it is listed with a story order position because it is set later in the same continuity, not because it is recommended. The 1997 theatrical film is an original story that no other title refers to, and the 2011 to 2012 New Kyoto Arc OVAs retell the Kyoto arc in two episodes from Kaoru's point of view rather than continuing anything, so neither is given a story position it would not deserve. The 2023 Liden Films series is a clean restart: twenty-four episodes from July to December 2023 covering the Tokyo arc, then twenty-three episodes from October 2024 to March 2025 under the subtitle Kyoto Disturbance covering the first half of the Kyoto arc. Sources differ on whether the first episode aired on 6 or 7 July 2023, which is a broadcast versus streaming difference rather than a disagreement about content. A third season was announced at AnimeJapan in March 2025 to adapt the rest of the Kyoto arc; it has no announced date and no announced episode count, so it is listed with a count of zero and no year rather than a guess. The live action films are their own continuity again: Rurouni Kenshin in 2012, then Kyoto Inferno and The Legend Ends in 2014, which are one story split in half and should never be watched apart, then The Final in April 2021 and The Beginning in June 2021. The Beginning covers the same ground as Trust and Betrayal, is set roughly fourteen years before the first film, and was released last on purpose, which makes the live action strand a mirror image of the anime strand's problem. Because only one continuity on a page can carry real story order positions, the story order view here follows the 1996 anime and its OVAs, and everything else sits outside it; the live action order is written out in full in the guide above so nothing is lost by that choice. The manga itself is listed twice: the original twenty-eight volumes from 1994 to 1999, and the Hokkaido arc, which began in 2017 and is still being published on an irregular schedule, so its volume count is flagged rather than stated.

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