Ranked #5063

Blade

Marvels try to get a chip in the anime genre is entertaining and amusing at best.
Preset old characters, giving nothing new to the serie, and only thing new in the serie is introduction of different world type vampires. Gargoyles, lamieres, gorgons... All the same, Vampires. As with this "upgrade" Eric is not fighting "humanid" creatures anylonger, ofc there are those pureblood classic vampires, but on the same time blade is fighting with demons and mutants.

Sure, as a blade believer, this series is definetly worth watching, but it brings nothing new to the genre, instead it is using every single mannover there is on the genre. But with anime clash, they added more of the bushido and samurai style to the blades fighting.

And if were mentioning mutants in this, were not again talking about those regular ones, were talking about the marvels supermutant ones. There is serious, unshamefull attempt to bring more mutants to the anime genre so they too could be made for anime series.

If you like monstertype vampire, blade and longed out conversations and dwelling to the characters past lifes made onto continous series, you will probably like the new serie. read more

Blade is the fourth Marvel attempt to get a piece of the pie out of the anime fans and once again it’s just wasting its precious money on lame adaptations. I have watched all three previous shows and I could already see from the pilot episode it is following the exact same pattern as those. It is quite safe to say that I knew in just a few minutes that it is mediocre at best since the makers repeat the same crap as before. To be honest, up to now Marvel derived anime were slowly getting more interesting, meaning the makers were slowly learning how to make a good action show and we had the more than obvious analogy of Iron Man < Wolverine < X-Men. You see, the action was getting better and the amount of heroes was increasing which was making each attempt a bit more enjoyable than the previous one. So I expected for Blade to be even more enjoyable for improving the formula further but to my disappointment it is the worst of them all. And don’t tell me I reached to conclusions too early; it is more than obvious if you see the storyboard and the execution in comparison to the other three.

First of all the music part is by far the best thing in this show as those rock pieces are nice to listen to lots of times. All the rest are terrible. Just 3 minutes in the show and you see that the bad guys are nothing but dumb vampires attacking innocent civilians and being vaporized by the hero. There is nothing interesting about them, they are just cannon fodder. Hell, they don’t even fight in an interesting way; they are just brainlessly attacking with claws and get owned in less than a second because Blade moves faster than light or something (lol at the after image he leaves as bait; what is this, early Dragonball episodes?). Great strategy there guys; too bad Solid Snake is better.

What is even worse is how these mooks are killed. It is true that in some stories with vampires they are instantly combusting when they die but this is plain laughable. They don’t burn and turn to ash with a few bones remaining to fizzle away in the wind. I mean it was so cool in the live action trilogy or even in From Dusk Till Dawn. So what crappy way to combust is this here? They just go poof and disappear like it’s a Digimon being defeated. Plain horrible; they look like kagebushin rather than monsters with personality.

What is even worse than even that is how they look like. In an attempt to flavor their appearances, they are all sorts of combinations. Just imagine a vampire catfishman who uses vampire cats and water as hindrance. Weird? How about vampire chicken? Vampire imps? Vampire ninjas? This is plain ridiculous, especially when it is pointless. No matter how they look, they are equally weak and use the exact same dumb technique of “running towards the opponent with no plan at all”.

There are also human collaborators to the vampires, called familiars. Not only they are even easier to beat than vampires yet they have the nerve to attack Blade in hopes of defeating him with simple clubs. They are also idiots enough to have tattoos on their wrists showing the vampire insignia of the guy they are working for. Amazing secrecy people, do you have the map to his lair drawn on your ass too?

And then there is the Big Bad of the show, whose actions make no sense. He clearly is ten times stronger than Blade, continually defeats him easily and continually lets him escape despite the more than obvious fact that he needs his blood to complete an experiment. Instead of capturing him single-handily, he keeps sending his troops to be massacred by Blade and he just walks away when he has him cornered. Yeah, that makes sense. It’s called the “We can’t have a showdown before the last episode” strategy.

There is zero interest in the action and it is supposed to be an action show. Since the first episode, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to already figure out the animators are using the exact same choreography as before. Random slashes and gunshots, most of which are done with still frames and a cheap fire effect covering the monsters. And all vampires are defeated in less than a second with a simple punch or kick before they are set on fire; as if they are made of paper. They are not even shown suffering before they die. Hell, they are not even shown being damaged much before dying. Hell, there isn’t even a body remaining as proof a battle took place there.

Furthermore only vampires are killed in this show, as normal people always survive or just fall unconscious. This is of course done because the show is supposed to be for teenagers and thus it couldn’t be too brutal. And for some reason vampires don’t count as people but as Digimon, so it’s ok to kill them. Anyways, my point is that normal people are always spared but vampires are killed. And since both are defeated equally easy, that ends up making the vampires to look far weaker than normal people! Shouldn’t a story full of dark areas and vampires be scary or unsettling? Well this one here isn’t in the slightest. How can you be afraid with such piss poor weak adversaries? They look stupid too.

This is a retelling of the action live movies and it is nothing we haven’t already seen. They aren’t even trying to make a twist with an already simplistic plot (and don’t tell me there is complexity in the Blade movies). I practically felt like I watched the first movie repeating in the exact same way, with far less interesting action and atmosphere. So ok, Blade is after the guy who bit his mother. Doesn’t that make him his creator? Why is he after the guy who thanks to him he is now so cool and saves people from vampires? He should be in-dept to him. Yet all he does is killing random vampires, as if he has nothing else to do. That gets tiresome fast.

As for the story? Aside from Blade chasing after Big Bad it is practically random traveling around the world and fighting mooks, while listening to the overblown dramatic tales of unimportant people you will never see again past the episode they appear in. So practically there is NO PLOT AND STORY THAT FITS IN TWO LINES OF TEXT. Heck, even the major secondary characters that aid Blade are a weak girl, a grandpa, and a dog. Does that sound interesting? Nope.

As you can tell early on, my impressions of Blade are veeeery negative. It is a mediocre work like all the other Marvel derived works, and thank goodness it is the last. Now Madhouse can you please try harder? read more