Balls are the natural born enemy of a samurai of course. (If I had had enough bytes left I may have made them into ninja stars or something)
Great job on the animation! Read your comment about ninja stars and the ctrl-f glyph to mind, so altered a couple lines of code and changed the balls to stars. Here's a link (1024 compressed bytes):
https://pico-8-edu.com/?c=AHB4YQZyBAAPcPL1229xxSUnJHcc0zSXBIkTilNeo4muuP2mE57qnE...