Hideyoshi (1996)

Hideyoshi could have easily be the best Taiga Drama, but it failed hard during the second half of the series in my opinion. In summary, the drama can be divided into 2 parts, the Oda-reign part and the post-Oda part.

Oda-Reign Part
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This is the best part of the whole series, even better than most of the Taiga Dramas that I have watched. One reason is the overwhelming story of Hideyoshi's rise to success. After all it's always nice to watch "from zero to hero" kind of story.

Second reason is the nice blend of drama elements into the story, with everything was told from the perspective of his mother. In early life of Hideyoshi, he was a useless guy with no money and always accused for something bad due to his not good looking physical feature...yeah "monkey-like" to be exact. The nice part is to see how the mother was keeping believing in him. A lot of motherly loves portrayed during this time and you could easily feel like want to have a mother like Hideyoshi's too...haha.

The romance between Hideyoshi and his wife O-ne was also done beautifully during this first part, and O-ne's way of supporting Hideyoshi looked much more convincing in here.

Thirdly, the writer spent a bit more effort in other characters particularly, Takenaka Hanbei, Akechi Mitsuhide, Hachisuka, Sen no Rikyu and Ishida Mitsunari. Most of the important events were also included although some were just explained through narration.

Post-Oda Part
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The drama was a bit draggy during the first few episodes after Oda's death. Just imagine an episode with mostly flashback....LoL. After that, things got back to normal but the writer made mistake with contradicting writing especially on the mother and O-ne characters.

Furthermore, Hideyoshi's character was suddenly made indecisive in this second part, with most of the actions were initiated by people surrounding him. This is in my opinion to avoid anti-climax considering many unpopular decisions made by Hideyoshi in history during this time. The writer simply put the blames on others by sacrificing consistency.

Other than that, many key events were excluded and ironically I learned better about Hideyoshi rule from other Taiga Dramas of the same era.

Overall
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Despite all that I mentioned above, Hideyoshi is still in my opinion a Japanese historical drama that you can't missed. The family interaction in the drama was very interesting to watch. The chemistry between Hideyoshi with his brother, mother and wife was spot on.... Ichihara Etsuko performance was out of this world and her role as Hideyoshi's mother deserved a "Mom of The Year" award!!

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