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Blade and Soul Review:

I did my first impressions (when I was about mid-way through this series) awhile ago. I don’t really want to change any of my opinions having finished it, so I’m going to keep this prettty short.

Alka is an incredibly dull protagonist. She does not improve as the series goes on, though she does at least emote a bit in the second half.

The other characters are all one note personalities and a lot of the characters exist only to get cut down and give their tearful and blood-choked last words. Too bad we aren’t given any reason to care about any of these characters and so their deaths just become another speed-bump on the road as we drive… well that’s an interesting question. Where does this anime try to take us?

Originally we had Alka hunting down the one who killed her master for revenge. Then just after the midway point that character is killed in a fairly unspectacular fight sequence (lightning does not make your lame fight look any cooler). Right. Central villain dead, many episodes left… What now?

Clearly we now have the betrayal of the character who has been oh-so-helpful up to now (only we all kind of knew she was shady from the start) and her motives are ridiculous. Okay, Alka did kill the supposed love of her life when Alka was an assassin. But, she doesn’t go after Alka. No she, helps Alka, get’s her to make friends with someone else and then said friend bites it. And you justify this how?

Also, the underlings of the first villain escape that mid-point fight and you just know they are going to be a pain later on.

Basically, it’s a mess. When it isn’t being obvious it is only because it dove off the cliff that was sign-posted turn back in some failed attempt to add tension through surprise (and it fails miserably at every turn and then has to claw itself back out of the ravine it just flung itself into).

About the best I could say for this show is it is watchable. It isn’t interesting or exciting and it doesn’t ever really improve, plus any interest I had in it kind of failed after that mid-point battle anyway, but it also doesn’t do anything so horrific you would contemplate throwing the disc (or at least I didn’t). Not much of a recommendation but that’s the best I’ve got after finishing Blade and Soul.

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Karandi James

Overview:

Alka, a member of the sword clan, is on the run and trying to find the woman who killed her master so she can follow some code that may or may not involve killing the person responsible (they are maddeningly non-specific on that aspect).

First Impressions:

Okay, so I’ve kind of watched about half of this series before I’ve bothered to do first impressions but that’s okay. I still have about 7 episodes to go so plenty of things can change before I do my final review.

Firstly, I received this as part of my last Hanabee Mystery Box so I’m actually enjoying it enough for the price I actually paid for it.

Secondly, apparently I’d started this anime before (possibly on Crunchyroll but maybe somewhere else), though it took until the third episode before anything happened that jogged my memory that I’d seen it before (and amazingly enough it was the stupid armour the ‘Pleasure Gang’ were wearing that tipped my memory.

That said, given I didn’t finish the series the first time I watched it, and given even as I remembered that I’d started it before and dropped it I started thinking about all the things wrong with the series, my first impressions aren’t great.

Certainly, this show is watchable (provided the outfits on some of those girls don’t make you flee but you can figure that out from the art work). The biggest complaint I would have is actually Alka. She’s an incredibly boring protagonist and no one else has really stuck around long enough to leave much of an impression. Plus the show has this nasty tendency to introduce characters only to kill one of them off in a totally preventable manner but have Alka and other strong fighters just stand around and let it happen. That’s when the highly overpowered villain isn’t just turning people into red mist.

I am going to finish this because despite that complaint I’ve actually found a lot to enjoy. It’s ridiculous and the story is moving incredibly slowly (which is probably a good thing given there doesn’t seem to be much story) and the characters are all kind of caricatures rather than people but it’s the kind of ridiculous that is mostly relaxing to watch and if Alka develops some sort of personality it would almost be recommendable as a binge watch on a rainy weekend.

So that’s my first impression of this series and as I said it still has time to actually go somewhere or do something amazing.

Before I finish I’m going to add in one more major complaint. The guy who follows around the girl who either serves or is manipulating the villain (yeah, I’ve paid a lot of attention to names here). He only talks in grunts and seems less articulate than Chewbacca from Star Wars and yet the girl responds to his various noises as if he’s an ace conversationalist.