Break Blade Movie 1: Kakusei no Toki (Broken Blade)

Rygart Arrow is different compared to the other people in the continent of Cruzon: he is unable to control quartz, branded an "un-sorcerer." Despite this, he still befriends the future king and queen of Krisna—Hodr and Sigyn—as well as Zess, the younger brother of the Athens Commonwealth's Secretary of War.

Several years later, Rygart discovers that there is a war brewing between Krisna and Athens. While visiting Binonten, the capital city of Krisna, he learns that his misfortune as an un-sorcerer enables him to pilot an ancient Golem, a unique ability that quartz-wielding users lack.

As Zess leads one of the Athenian strikes upon the capital, Rygart joins the battle with his newfound power in hopes of mending the schism between the two nations.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Adaptation:	Break Blade
Sequel:	Break Blade Movie 2: Ketsubetsu no Michi
Side story:	Break Blade Movie Picture Drama
Alternative version:	Break Blade

Katsuragi, Nanaho
Japanese

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Hirasawa, Nao

Producer

Amino, Tetsurou

Director

Habara, Nobuyoshi

Director, Storyboard

Tsuruoka, Youta

Sound Director

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Opening Theme

"Fate" by KOKIA

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Ending Theme

"SERIOUS-AGE" by Faylan

Reviews

Jan 25, 2024

hexashadow13

Recommended

*Note: This is a review of all six films.*

tl;dr: A mecha anime with great action and characters with a lot of depth but very slow development.

Break Blade is a mecha anime, though unlike most it’s fantasy rather than sci-fi. It’s set in a world where most everyone has the ability to magically manipulate quartz and bend it to their will using what is dubbed sorcery. This allows especially skilled sorcerers to pilot enormous mechs known as Golems. However, the protagonist Rygart is one of the exceptionally rare few who can’t use sorcery at all. This would normally mean that he has no place on the ... battlefield at all, but fate has different plans for him when, right in the middle of his home country Krisna being invaded, he discovers that he’s the only one that can pilot an ancient and especially powerful Golem dubbed the Delphine.

Character wise it’s somewhat hard to grasp what this anime is trying to do and where it’s trying to go. Rygart is the epitome of this. He very much embodies the mecha trope of a character who isn’t special at all but has a special role simply because they’re able to pilot a mech. It differs from how the trope is normally used in that this is portrayed as a burden he’s suffering rather than an advantage. He starts off as the type of pacifist that naively tries to save the enemy in the middle of a war, though when that backfires he seems to drop his ideals entirely. However, this isn’t really what I would dub character growth. It’s more like it breaks him, and as the anime progresses further events continue to break him further. And at the end of the anime, despite him now being a capable fighter, he seems to be completely broken mentally. To be honest, I have no clue what’s going on in his head or where his character arc could go.

The rest of the cast also has a lot of complications that are pretty unique and thus it’s hard to predict where the story will take them. For example, the main heroine, Sigyn, seems to be in love with Rygart and Rygart seems to be in love with her. However Sigyn is already married to Hodr, who is not only one of Sigyn’s best friends, but also his king. Then there’s Zess, who despite being really close friends of Rygart, Sigyn, and Hodr, is a key figure in the invading Athenian army. He seemed to be fighting for the sake of as peaceful a resolution to things as possible, but as things progress it isn’t clear at all how he fits into things. There’s also an Athenian character that was fed a lot of propaganda about how all Krisnan’s are evil but after getting captured seems to have discovered this isn’t the case, though what they’ll do with that information remains to be seen. There are also characters that don’t really seem to make much sense, neither their personalities nor their backgrounds, so it feels like the writing is building up to doing something that will better flesh them out. But then they die off before that and you’re left to wonder what was going on with them.

Now to be clear, that characters and their arcs being difficult to understand isn’t a demerit. If the lack of clarity was simply due to bad writing then that would be an issue but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Rather, it seems to be trying to portray characters with depth, but in a story that isn’t very character oriented. The overarching plot is much more centered around the world building surrounding the conflict between Krisnan and Athena and the realities of the gap in military might between them. It doesn’t try to continually push fleshing out it’s characters or advancing their character arcs in meaningful ways. The writing seems to try to avoid explicitly conveying characters motivations or thoughts through directly showing what they’re thinking, but rather tries to convey who they are through their actions and interactions. This results in characters feeling much more nebulous and mysterious, but also feels more natural. This makes the pacing a bit strange, because despite so much happening most things don’t really seem to be progressing as much as they should, but all in all it seems to work well enough. The anime ends after a major battle at a point where absolutely nothing is resolved, but all in all it feels like a solid place to end on considering it ends on one of the rare in your face character beats.

The art and animation were very good. The mecha action and designs especially were pretty impressive. The character designs were decent outside of a couple that especially stood out as especially good. The OP and ED were both pretty different from the typical anime OP/ED and though I can’t say I like the music in and of itself, it fit very well. The soundtrack was also quite epic and worked great, especially during the major battles.

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Sep 28, 2012

Bishounen_Hunter

Mixed Feelings

INTRO: Broken Blade was a bit of a let down for me. I broke one of my own cardinal rules for watching anime; I had expectations. I saw the nice art, I saw that it was from I.G., and that it was an OAV, saw some good-looking characters and therefore launched right into the assumption that it HAD to be great! And maybe it is, but it certainly wasn't my cuppa! I was kinda bored throughout this series....and I'm not sure why Broken Blade isn't classed as a series because you can't watch any of them independently or out of sequence, that's enough for it ... to be classed as a singular series. And that's how I've written this review...for the WHOLE series, So yes, bored and disappointed I was, as Broken Blade broke no moulds, the: same old mecha-driven plot complete with "unique" pilot, yet no true human story or character development and even though the art was lovely...it wasn't ground-breaking.

VISUALS: I.G. Definitely did not disappoint on the art and animation. They rarely do. Very good battle scenes, complex movements, dramatic slow-motion scenes all packaged nice and neat. The desert looks beautiful with it's infinite sand dunes, fine grains of sands slipping through fingers, lightly dusting everything it touches: clothes, boots, war-mecha...and it certainly seemed hot there. The castle interiors looked large and spacious, definitely Anglo inspired...once again [gag, eye-rolls!!! Would be nice for an anime to TRY and BE inspired by other cultures for once, how about Turkish, Moroccan, Greek?? Anything from Africa??] Sighs, geez, either way, the art was nice for what it was.

AUDIO: The OP theme was pretty grand and majestic sounding. It's the type of music you hear for films and anime that have a great story to tell, mostly the types that have been adapted from novels. It kind of reminded me of the theme from Lodoss War, that same kind of majestic “once upon a time” feeling. It definitely, encouraged me to think "yeah this story is gonna be great!" Big letdown. The ED theme was forgettable. I watched it in Japanese dub, typical shounen acting and screaming....bored, now. NEXT!

STORY: I'll tell you what's wrong with the story, it's unoriginal and completely uninspiring. The story is centred around several battles within a war for natural resources, namely quartz. Fine, I'm OK with that, I love politics, military and tactics, but this series had little of that. It was about the mecha and the battles, making the true characters of this series are the mecha....and that's why I got bored and lost interest. I'm not opposed to mecha-themed anime, per se, [loved GUNDAM, loved MACROSS] however those stories contained a solid foundation of human interaction and drama. With Broken Blade, human interaction is purely incidental, merely used only to fill the spaces between the combat scenes--where the true dramatic elements reside.
You can't create REAL drama from combat scenes only the illusion of drama with screaming, rage faces and blood drippings but you don't get the great drama that hits you in the gut because there is no character development. All the great war films and anime were splendid because time was spent fleshing out credible characters we can become attached to...no one beyond the 3 or 4 central figures has a solid back story. We only get to know who is related to whom then maybe there is some minimal interest by proxy: maybe they have a kid, maybe they were war-orphans, maybe they were slightly insane but there is no why or how they got that way. How did Sasuke [yes I know his name isn't Sasuke but these characters were so generic it's irrelevant] wind up on the opposing team? Why did Psycho-man turn against his comrades? What did he say to Naruto [yes I know it's not his name too] before going down in a blaze of glory? And there are many more questions that could have been answered were time spent more on that than the battle scenes.

CHARACTERS: OMG! If I see another blonde haired, blue-eyed lead character....I'm gonna hurl! Whatever happened to the old days when anime characters looked purely fictional with pink and green hair and all different color eyes? When did they start this raging trend to look like Hitler's army? If we're gonna stick to realistic human colour schemes, how about some black/blue, black/brown, brown/brown, red/brown...I'd even settle for blond/brown. But please, please, PLEEEEAAAASE! Stop with the blondes especially blonde/blue combos! I honestly couldn't even get into the characters because as soon as I saw blonde, I tuned out. I saw the glaring lack of originality and just tuned out. I saw Naruto, jumping into a mecha that of course ONLY HE can magically operate and I saw Sasuke on the opposing team, genius though he is, he's still misguided and he's still brooding as usual. And then some other equally boring archetypes thrown in the mix: Big boobs, gentle giant, midget loli-warrior, the over-plotter who doubles as the narrator to help the viewer follow along, crazies who get boners from warfare and killing. Now bake at 380 for six hours for the typical anime recipe, Ting! Boring! NEEEEEXT!

VERDICT: It's was a mediocre unoriginal story with nice art. It's pretty obvious this anime has only mecha-fanservice and battles scenes in mind and if that your cuppa tea, then have at it you'll be thrilled. But for those of us who've seen all that and are now looking for a bit more substance, forget it....you'll go hungry! You're better off with Escaflowne, they did already and MUCH better.

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Dec 22, 2016

Harizak

Not Recommended

This is a review over the first 6 movies though I assume all the movies they will release.

To keep this short 100 people dead in a different country will have less of an impact on you than the death of one close person. Sadly no one told the writer of this. So many people die which is fine, but it is all like omg they are dying and the bad people are laughing manically. Sadly because at best I know one thing about them they are basically strangers and when they die as soldier I could not care less. We have all ... had those moments in something we watched where we were like fuck now, they better live. Sometimes they do not and when the good guys get revenge yous like yes tear them apart now we get to laugh like a maniac. Which this show tries to go after time after time but not once was I moved. More or less I was just like ow wow the bad guy got killed ow wow that was as thrilling a death as the good people they killed... someone kill me next please because I do not want me gravestone to say lamed to death by an anime.

I am not one of those noise in the air anime watchers who are like OMG I have seen this already be origional ect ect ect. This one just did not do anything form me, which I saw it really go after. It does not make you care about all the no name people who died, it does not make me like the main guy who does not want to kill, but after one thing gets over that shit fast but still complains like the whole series. Last of all it wasted so much time to resolve nothing. So much time was wasted on increasing the pointless backstory of people I cared nothing about when the people on the battle field they wanted me to care about when they died got nothing... and most of the people a backstory was built up on, the very few of those few even did anything.

I am very nice as a reviewer some things get me going and I am always happy as a person it does not take much to amuse me. So just note that means I did not like this at all and a 4 from me is probably a 2 from harsher people.

Also I will say there was one funny part where 2 guns are pulled out and shoved into the main character for something he said. Out of the evening we watched this anime while messing around for the 4 hours of content it provided I can say this one moment was the only moment I was like holy shit that was funny and good why can the rest not be more like this? Sadly that one minute worth of content was surrounded in an ocean of ow cool there killing people.. why the hell is random grunt number 12 getting screen time. This all being said I have a thing for Mech anime lately where I would rate Aldnoah.Zero and Heavy Object very highly. I love the music, the growth, how smart the main guys are. I love everything about those anime's so maybe I am judging this one in bias, but I felt like everything I loved about them was done way worse or not even attempted here. Like if anyone has ever watched Aldnoah.Zero.. you know when some shit is about to go down when that music start I was just like omg yes yes yes tear them apart, I was like a pavlov dog but instead of a bell, it was just that sweet sweet music that would make me drool, as I knew some cool shit was going down. In Heavy Object had more of this slice of life where you got to really know the people and you cared about them. It has good humor that makes you laugh and even though they are being shot at half the time with their quick quips. I will just say that I do not think I will ever watch this serious again. Where I do plan on watching many other ones for multiple times with larger breaks in the middle, but not ever for this one with its lack of arch completion and character development. Plus with all that combat it never had me like OMG YES fuck them up, end there lives, kill them all!... I get a bit into it okay. I guess while writing this review I realized it just did not bring any emotions out of me hardly for the amount of time I spent watching it. Felt like they just used a bunch of filler techniques not that I think about it. I personally cannot recommend it. Maybe a different more detailed media would be better suited for this like a Light novel. The whole idea of how the mechs work is very cool. Along with more backstory maybe peoples deaths would mean something. I will say we watched the whole thing, while means it was not the worst thing just we did not focus on it and instead watched other things. Though few things like Blood Vore make us turn it off but also few things make us all watch. So I would say a lower middle score like 4 is good.

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Break Blade Movie 1: Kakusei no Toki

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