different...but perhaps not in a good way

Taken on its own, this was a good story story with decent animation. It does stick more to the original series than the previous volumes, which can be very jarring, especially for people unfamiliar with the original series and characters. I myself only know a little bit about the original series so I couldn't comment on how closely this followed that series' story. While the story was good, it did feel like an extension of the original series and that there was a huge chunk of plot that I'd missed beforehand. There seemed to be an attempt to link the Kenshin in this series to the Kenshin in the previous episodes, which felt very awkward. For fans of the original series, I'm sure this is pretty nice. As for other viewers, the change of plot, character and design would probably be too jarring to get around.

On it's own, this isn't a bad film. Taken as part of the Samurai X series, it was far too much change to really pull it off successfully. Not the best in the series by a long way