Anime Reviews: "Blood Blockade Battlefront"
"Blood Blockade Battlefront" features bombastic and lively visuals.
Blood Blockade Battlefront Plot Summary
Hellsalem's Lot, known around the world as New York City before the Great Collapse three years ago, is a chaotic melting pot where a portal between the human world and the Alterworld was opened. It allowed all sorts of monsters and madness into the city. As time goes by, an equilibrium is reached.
Soon, Hellsalem's Lot becomes just like any other city, albeit one where businessmen wait at crosswalks alongside wasp-men while skeleton trucks drive down the road. Amid this bizarre setting, a young man named Leonardo Watch seeks to join Libra, a secretive organization that keeps Hellsalem's Lot's streets safe from hostile forces. He hopes that he'll find a way to help his sister.
Six months prior, a demonic beast appeared before Leo and his sister, taking her eyesight and giving Leo the All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods. Though this new power is a great boon, Leo will stop at nothing to arrive at a future where his sister can see once more.
The Good: Bombastic and lively visuals, the humongous cast is a riot, and the series as a whole feels like an awesome party ...
The Bad: ... in which you get wasted immediately and wake up half a week later, inside a dumpster, wearing nothing but a feather boa.
The Ugly: Hoping and praying that no one gets any funny ideas about making Prosfair into a real thing.
Series Stats
Title: Blood Blockade Battlefront a.k.a. Kekkai Sensen
Genre: Action/Comedy
Production: Studio Bones
Series Length: 12 episodes
Air Dates: 4/4/2015 to 10/4/2015
Age Rating: 13+ (Mild violence, mild language, and some suggestive content.)
How are the visuals this time around? Well, considering Studio Bones is responsible, the answer is frickin' great.
Blood Blockade Battlefront Review
Yasuhiro Nightow's got a hot project going on. It's ... not exactly what I was hoping for. I was hyped to see this series because of his past works like the introspective and dynamic space Western Trigun, and the cool and tragic mafia/monster tale, Gungrave.
It turns out Blood Blockade Battlefront would be something entirely different. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it did make my expectations sky-high; disappointment sadly reared its ugly head. This is partially my fault for hyping myself up so much, but it is also true that BBB is probably Nightow's weakest work to date. Does that mean we've finally fallen below the arbitrary good line? Nope. It's still pretty darn good. Let's stop wasting time and dig in, shall we?
Visuals
How are the visuals this time around? Well, considering Studio Bones is responsible, the answer is frickin' great. The colors are bright without being obnoxious, and the character designs have translated well to animation. This gives the series a varied and unique look with both its human and monster characters.
The setting does look pretty much like New York City would after an event like the Collapse with its grim steel skyscrapers and more colorful streetside shops. The action scenes are huge and high-flying with lots of debris shooting around and characters performing crazy attacks in gloriously high-quality animation.
I also love the little touches you'll see in the background, like English signs being mixed with alien letters. You'll see giant centipede-dragons flying around town, but nobody cares because it's just a monster bus. There are giant skeleton trains being conducted by their own eyes and brains traveling alongside normal trains. It's just all so cool. I can guarantee that every episode will have at least one thing you've never seen before or never thought you'd see.
Musical Themes
Special mention also needs to go to the opening and ending themes. Opener "Hello, world!" by Bump of Chicken is a rousing pop-rock track that gives insight into Leo's perspective of the setting. We see him becoming accustomed to the daily madness. It also manages to be a catchy tune.
The ending theme, "Sugar Song & Bitter Step" by Unison Square Garden, perfectly captures the party feel of the show. It's much lighter and has an upbeat melody set to animations of the cast dancing the night away. They're both fun songs, fit the show like a glove, and the animation is great as well. For an opening and ending theme, you couldn't ask for more.
"Blood Blockade Battlefront"
Characters
Of course, if BBB is a party, what would it be without its resident partygoers? Our protagonist, Leo, is the dedicated normal main character who has to brave the madness of Hellsalem's Lot. There's a lot of fun to be had in watching said madness unfold all around him. Of course, his noble goal of finding a way to help his sister brings his story down to earth, and it's only natural to want to see him succeed.
The first Libra member we meet is Zapp, a dark-skinned, white-haired womanizer with the badass power of creating swords from his own blood (and setting them on fire with a butane lighter). Zapp constantly finds amusement in Leo's naïveté about this strange city, and he's more than willing to throw his weight around ordering Leo to grab lunch and whatnot.
Another major member of Libra is its leader, Klaus. He is a gorilla-man who is usually calm and sophisticated. However, he possesses incredible fighting skills and the ability to manifest all kinds of weapons and spells from his blood. Klaus is also proficient as Prosfair, a mind-bogglingly complex variation of chess which utilizes multiple boards and upgrading pieces. This proves that Klaus is a genius as well as a beast in combat.
"Blood Blockade Battlefront"
Another important character is a capricious girl who hangs around a hospital cemetery and takes an interest in Leo. She calls herself White. Referring to herself as a ghost, she enjoys hanging out with Leo and giving him moments of normalcy in their mad, mad world.
White's brother, Black, also plays a big role. He is a humble boy who possesses psychic powers. He befriends Leo because of their mutual goal of looking after their sisters, but he seems to hold some dark secret. Both Black and White are surrounded by mystery, adding more questions to this already-puzzling world.
There are just too many great characters to go over in detail within a mere review. I haven't even touched on Stephen and K.K. (a pair of vampire hunters who bicker like an old married couple), Femt (the King of Depravity himself, who seems content with causing chaos in this already chaotic city), Chain (an invisible werewolf who excels at reconnaissance and making Zapp's life miserable), Dog and Deldro (two men forced to share the same body, with comedic results), Aligula (the Queen of Monomania, who kidnapped Dog and Deldro and fused them together to make her ideal boyfriend), and so many others.
My absolute favorite is Lucky Abrams. He is a dogged detective cursed with bad luck by a vampire, but because of his innate good luck, only those around him experience the misfortune intended for him. The cast is huge, and while you'll never be able to remember all their names, their appearances, and personalities will certainly stick with you.
The Story
As for the show itself, BBB is relentless with its fast-paced comedy and over-the-top action, making every episode an absolute blast to behold. However, this begins to encroach into the biggest flaw; what the hell is even happening right now? The action is stylish and bold, but we're never given any indication of what each character's limits are or how their powers even work.
The story, when it emerges, seems to revolve around Femt and the mysterious King of Despair orchestrating a major disaster of some kind. But the moving parts in their plan are largely unexplained or vaguely defined, so these more climactic moments don't hit home as they should.
Mysterious elements are pointed out and questioned but then never addressed again. Ominous concepts are introduced but never elaborated on. I guess you could say the story's incoherence and leaps in logic are part of the point; this is a world that isn't supposed to make sense. But it would've been nice for them to throw us a few bones here and there just for the sake of narrative satisfaction.
Fun Things Are Fun
So that's the sticky position BBB finds itself in. It's a whole lot of fun until you begin to ask questions about what's going on. Like you had a great time at a party, only to wake up later and realize nothing you said or did at the party made any sense. But if you can get past that, you're in for a wild ride.
In the end, this is the kind of series where the plot is secondary. The true purpose of a title like this is to just throw a bunch of entertaining characters and situations at the screen and let the fun unfold. That's exactly what we got. Yeah, I do kinda wish the plot was more solid, like in Trigun or Gungrave, but for me to complain about having this much fun feels a bit disingenuous. As the philosopher of our age Yui Hirasawa once posited, "Fun things are fun."
Final Score: 7.5 out of 10. Blood Blockade Battlefront holds absolutely nothing back with its visual vibrancy and wildly-entertaining cast. But I can't help but feel like its undercooked and underexplained plot could have been hammered out into something amazing instead of weighing the series down.
