Blue Drop: Tenshi-tachi no Gikyoku

After hearing that Blue Drop is a slice-of-life/ sci-fi action with some yuri, it is understandable to assume that it would be a big floundering mess. The whole idea of school life, spaceship battles, and girl-on-girl romance being mashed together in one show sounds ridiculous (yet we still see this kind of thing far too often as anime-fans)... and yes, Blue Drop flirts with disaster on a regular basis. However, it manages to juggle these elements surprisingly well to deliver a decent story with emotional punch.

Mari Wakatake is a young amnesiac and sole survivor of a tragedy that left hundreds dead. She remembers nothing before ... waking up in the hospital and has lived with her wealthy grandmother ever since... that is until her grandmother sends her off to an all girls boarding school. Here Mari meets Hagino Senkouji, a girl highly admired by her fellow students, but also quite mysterious. As it turns out Hagino has some big secrets, as she has ties to Mari's past; plus, she may not even be of this world.

Blue Drop attempts to combine school-life drama with sci-fi action, and for the most part it does a decent job of this. Those looking for heavy action might be disappointed, as the primary focus is on is on the school-life aspect; but really, that is where the heart of the story lies. The drama works very well here, in no small part to the show's colorful and sympathetic cast; most important of which are Mari, Hagino, and their classmate, Michiko. On face value Mari is kind of a jerk, pushing away her classmates, but as the show continues and she begins to build relationships, it becomes clear she's actually a very caring person who acts abrasively because of the traumas in her life. Hagino's perfect girl exterior is actually a facade hiding a deep remorse over her past; Michiko is friendly and has a love for stories, but is very unsure of herself. It is very compelling and rewarding to watch these three distinct personalities grow; Mari and Hagino's friendship (later on romantic relationship), and Michiko's struggle to write the school play (which in of itself is an interesting story) are definitely the highlights of the show. Other notable characters are tough girl and wannabe cook Akane, dorm-manager Hiroko, and chemistry teacher Yuuko Sagawara; all of whom have there issues and turns in the spotlight.

With the school-life aspect being dominant, you would expect the sci-fi portion to be a huge mess that doesn't work. Surprisingly, it actually works quite well. Hagino's dual life, and her species purpose on Earth (the presence of heavily armed spaceships should be a dead giveaway...), fit nicely into the frame of the story. There is even a good amount of compelling drama regarding the show's sci-fi segment; the spaceship battles are exciting satisfying. There is a lot left for speculation and some gaping holes in logic, so the sci-fi aspects are far from perfect, but admirable considering its considerably limited time.

On the technical-side, Blue Drop works, but doesn't excel. The character designs are, for lack of a better word, 'normal'. They certainly are not hard on the eyes, but they aren't particularly striking, and honestly, the outfits for the (all women) alien race are pretty silly. The backgrounds are decent enough, but again mostly the interior of a school, the grounds around the school, occasionally a city or small town, without any particularly distinctive characteristics; so nothing eye-popping. More interesting are the interiors of the spaceships, which are quite striking and practical in design, which is nice and shows effort was put into their look. As would be expected from an anime from Gonzo, there is CG art used present, it is primarily used for the spaceships and done well there. However, it is also used for birds, or cars, for which the rendering could have been done better. The music is pretty standard, it can be effective and is used well, but ultimately not a memorable soundtrack.

The problem here is, because of uneven amount of time spent on each part, Blue Drop ends up falling short of being rewarding as a whole. Sure, the school-life drama is done very well, and the sci-fi is competent... but they just don't mesh well enough together to work cohesively as a whole. The fact of the matter is that the trials of school life are trivial when faced with an alien invasion, and the possible enslavement/genocide of the human race, and that is what takes up majority of the shows running time. It is hard to care about a school play, no matter how well written, when there is world-wide destruction taking place. On top of that, there is no clear resolution to the monumental events that take place late in the series; with only a very vague idea of what happened that just screams "Haha... read the manga", which makes sense because this is a precursor to the manga, but it ultimately feels like a slap to the face to the viewer.

Blue Drop is a show that ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts. All the aspects of the show are good enough on their own, but fail to come together in a completely satisfying way. Perhaps if the show was given more than 12 episodes, they could have. That aside, it is recommendable for how well each individual part works. The drama is compelling, the characters are sympathetic, and the action is exciting. For those reasons, Blue Drop is certainly worth a watch.

Hmmmm...
To simply put it, they fail to end the series properly.
The plot is basically like alien scout for invasion make contact with esper girl and become human's ally. The story goes on and end with a cliche plot where the scout alien ended up protecting the human and died on the final suicide attack. Since the main plot is broad where the alien invade earth so the scale of the story are huge so it's unable to fit within 13 episode so you can only see like the prologue for the series.

Frankly the reason why I start to watch this series is for the Girls ... Love tag, but ended up with disappointment. There is not that much of flirting going on, it feels like more than a friend less than a lover kind of thing. Also it end with the tragic love, where the other partner died while the other one continue living while remembering her dead partner. It's not a complete ship.

Blue Drop is another in the Girls Love genre that I was really rooting for, despite the low MAL score, in the same way that I was cheering for Destiny of the Shrine Maiden, for very similar reasons. I was coming into this with such an open mind, but man, I really wasn't into this one.

Story & Characters: Blue Drop starts out with us seeing our main character, Mari Wakatake, who has been enrolled in Kaihou Academy by her grandmother. Why her grandmother? Because Mari lost her parents, along with everyone else who lived on the island she was from, five years ... prior to this series starting. The kicker is that this caused amnesia in Mari, so she can't remember any of it. Skip forward to the present where she meets multiple students in the dorm, including Hagino Senkouji. Due to Hagino's popularity and standing in the academy, it's suggested to Mari that she get to know her. This, before Hagino decides to try and... choke Mari? To make matters weirder, when Mari steps outside, she sees a rising spaceship in front of Hagino.

The story, unfortunately, takes a long time to get going and that's really the ultimate downfall of Blue Drop. It doesn't ever feel like we have any amount of foreshadowing into what the end goal of this series is, and that makes this series' direction completely absent. I'd argue that while you're in a school setting, you don't "really" need that end goal in mind, but with this series quickly introducing sci-fi aspects into the story, you kind of wonder what the point of it all is. There are a fair amount of conversations taking place both back on this ship, or with its crew, but it almost feels like there's no way for us to know what the point of it all is. There's nothing to really get excited about, outside of the fact that romantic aspects are getting introduced once the plot moves along.

It's pretty evident early on that Hagino isn't particularly normal. She's very clearly related to this ship in some fashion, and unfortunately, the dialogue that surrounds her makes very little sense until they feed you the information later on. That makes her very hard to like as a character... because you just don't know what's there. There's no ramp up for us to see this character shine. Mari makes almost less sense to me as a character than Hagino. She has some pretty stark attitude issues, some of which are understandable, that make it seem like she's pretty hard to get along with. That's fine for a character, but after a certain point, she's completely warmed up to her colleagues. The journey to see her character from the beginning to end doesn't feel smooth, and her character just changes, seemingly overnight. That being said, the moments between our two characters near the end were really sweet, and if only the character development made sense and was allowed to blossom, I feel like you'd fix a lot of the issues that I have with this story's main cast.

Tsubael is one that Hagino knows very early on, and she's sweet for the most part, but doesn't really add much to the story itself. Azanael is from the same place that Hagino comes from, but I actually didn't mind her as a character. She has some pretty hard resentment for Harino, which gets explained later in great detail, and that easily makes me feel for her. Even when she acts rashly, you can kind of see why, and her character develops even further in the last half of the series. She was an excellent side character. Yuuko is one of the teachers at the academy, and she clearly has a purpose to the story, but like Tsubael, I just found her to be kind of useless. Hiroko, Akane and Michiko make up the biggest names in the dorm that we see in our story, and they're fine for being general schoolgirls that our main cast hangs around. Michiko was probably the best of the bunch, trying hard to get some form of reputation while working her absolute hardest.

Most of the series took place in and around the school or dorm, and that's probably where this series most comfortable. What little drama occurs during the series was decently placed, even if the storyline itself didn't seem like much. I wasn't terribly pulled into all of it because the series basically only focused on one class, but it was all believable enough to call this series a school-based series anyway. The back and forth between the students does tend to get old pretty quick because there's so much bickering. Even if you consider this typical for an all-girls school, it hardly makes for an enjoyable viewing experience.

The sci-fi aspects drag this series down quite a bit because it feels like it was almost added as an afterthought. It doesn't feel like a well thought out story because it's not fleshed out and there's nothing terribly interesting happening with it until the last couple of episodes. This is something that Destiny of the Shrine Maiden also struggled with, and is why that series resembled Blue Drop the most - outside of the fact that they were both Girls Love series with Sci-Fi aspects. When you finally have a realization of the purpose that these Sci-Fi aspects have, the series just kind of ends. Sure, the last two episodes were probably the best in the series, but there's no real resolution. Not only that, but after a key event happens, the series basically rolls to the credits with a 30-year time skip clip that lasts a depressing minute or so. It all leaves for a pretty disappointing end to a series that had some potential. (Story: 4/10, Characters: 5/10)

Art: This series is very old, so you have to keep your expectations a little reasonable. However, the series generally looked fine. One thing that current series struggles at time is keeping characters looking of decent proportions, even in the distance shots, and I wouldn't say this series struggled with that much. That being said, there was some pretty heavy and misplaced-looking CG used for the ships and some of the associated textures, and it just didn't look good at all. (6/10)

Sound: The OST was pretty lacking in most parts of the series, but I'm not really a hard stickler for anime OSTs anyway. Same goes for the OP and ED, which were just kind of there. VO work was really rough here, even for the time in which it was recorded. Look, Hilary Haag (Mari) is a very big name, still thriving to this day, but I wouldn't say this was her best work. It feels like she overshoots Mari's "rough" attitude some times and it doesn't feel like the greatest fit. But what makes this series somewhat annoying to listen to is the choice to employ random country accents to our characters. All of Brittney Karbowski (Tsubael), Monica Rial (Hagino) and Shannon Emerick (Hiroko) had them here. This was very likely a choice by either the script writer (Clint Bickham) or ADR Director (Matt Greenfield) and I'm not entirely sure of the inspiration for that. Rial's in particular kept coming and going, for whatever reason. Shannon Emerick was actually really solid in this series, as was Luci Christian (Yuuko) and John Swasey (Fukamachi). (6/10)

Overall: Blue Drop is a really difficult title to recommend because it really doesn't have many places that it shines. The story doesn't have enough of a direction, our main couple are okay at best and the random accents popping in and out are fairly annoying. I gave a pass to Destiny of the Shrine Maiden because all of the non Sci-Fi aspects were really well done, but I unfortunately can't say the same thing for Blue Drop. (5/10)