Blade & Soul

The anime has a good story "but I think if they used it better, the rating would have been higher."

The anime has great side characters, such as the guitar playing, the nomadic kid "or as I like to call him the detective".

It would have been better if many things had been clarified, including the past of both "jin, varel" and "ran,yu." I also wish the anime had been enhanced with a bit of a darker atmosphere "knowing that the general atmosphere of the anime and comedy is great."

"el,karen" is a calm character, and this is a distinctive trait and character. I wish we had seen ... her more emotionally.

*only really minor spoilers here
Watching the first 8 episodes of Blade and Soul feels like you're just watching another fantasy medival anime, albeit a very bad one. The story feels rather rushed and is vaguely explained, the characters are flat, and lack any meaningful depth or connection to them.
What got me through this anime for those episodes was the somewhat decent animation, and a little hope that the anime would improve itself. It eventually did, with the second half delivering more emotion, character development, and brings and interesting twist to the story. It eventually reverted back to being your typical hero vs Big bad ... guy towards the end, but the main character motives are better understood and the ending was conclusive. It still left a lot of questions unanswered and quite a bit of flat characters though.


One thing I didn't particularly like was the way the anime tries to develop their characters and progress the story by introducing new characters every episode, only to kill them later on in the SAME EPISODE. This is somewhat similar to what Akame ga Kill did, showing the side characters backstory in one episode and killing them in that same episode. This may work with a lot of people (and in AGK it did), but for me it just won't do.

Talking about things that are mixed, there is also the animation. Sometimes the fight scene can make you go wow with some stunning shots and cheography, but most of the time it is just average. Animation consistency is decent with the some strange inconsistencies (mainly one of the final episodes, they were just probably saving budget to animate the following episode, which has a big fight scene). Women character designs are good though, if a not on a little bit of the fanservices side. They look good and stand out, but you kinda feel a little bit jarring when almost any woman in the anime has big breasts and huge asses.

Have you guessed why I wrote "women character designs" instead of "Character designs" yet? Because the character designs for the male characters in this anime are nonexistent. They either be extremely ugly, or extremely generic if you are being generous. This probably won't pose a problem to the viewers, because 95% of the main chracters are females anyways.

The BGM used in the anime is rather standard, but I was pleasantly surprised by the ending, "RAINBOW" by LEGO BIG MORL. Not only the ending music is good, but the animation accompanied by it was simply amazing, even if it is CGI. The opening is trash though.

Overall, Blade and Soul is not good, nor bad. It didn't do anything well, but that doesn't mean it did a bad job either. Other than the twist after the first 8 episodes, and the simply top notch ending, There is nothing that is particularly good or new that can be had in this anime.
I definitely had some fun while watching this anime, but would I recommend it to anyone though? Probably not. There are animes that are more worthy of your time than Blade and Soul.

So, as a summary,
Watch if you want:
- fanservice, characters with big boobs
- somewhat intersting fight scenes, battles
Don't watch it if you want:
- a decent story
- memorable characters
- beautiful animations (art is rather debatable though)

Scores:
Story: 5/10
Art, animation: 6/10
music: 7/10 (just for that godly ED)
characters: 5/10
enjoyment: 7/10

Overall score: 6/10

I was excited when I found out that there is an anime adaptation of my most anticipated
MMORPG, Blade and Soul. Upon watching the anime for the first time, the episode kind of clicked with me but the later episode just feels like chewing a flavorless piece of gum for hours but I was interested of what will happen next to the emotionless character. Speaking of emotionless character, I don't particularly hate the anime for having an emotionless main character because she's a heartless assassin with a tragic past (how many times have we heard of this trope before?). What I hate about this anime ... is that it was unnecessary to be made because the story in the game was more well elaborated rather than a rushed 10+ episode story. I also find it funny that the main character speaks LESS than the side character, seriously! I think if you were to add ALL of the dialogue choices in the game (because you are mainly a silent protagonist), you'll have a longer script than the main character in the anime. As for animation goes, it was meh. In some scenes, the fire were so bland and texture-less that ANYONE can tell the problem with the fire right away even if they have watched one or two anime in their life. The opening theme song was pretty catchy and it fits the whole atmosphere and setting with the anime. What I found distasteful of the anime is that through out the story, the main character goes through her journey and learning how to become a better person and speaking more as a result but later was ruined by a distasteful generic anime beach episode solely for fan service. The animation team COULD HAVE removed the last episode budget to give their fire a little more texture (if you know what I mean). Do I recommend the anime? No, absolutely not.