If you have read a certain amount of my other reviews by now, you will know that I am a huge BEE TRAIN fan, but I wasn't too excited over their acquiring of a new anime of this nature. I was expecting already from the start a bloody mesh of pointless violence and gore. Well being the fan that I am, I decided to go ahead and give it a try, and it was a pretty big mistake. I've never read BOTI so I have no idea what the story is really like but I can tell this was probably one of the worst adaptions I had ever seen.
As always I being with the writing, Hiroyuki Kawasaki the writer of such shows as Sakura Wars, Tsubasa Chronicle, and Captain Tylor was the screenwriter and he sucked. Big time. The writing in the first episode alone was all over the place and sloppily thrown together it makes even his Tsubasa fillers look like Oscar worthy screenwriting. I was lost 90% of the time, I had no idea who anyone was and ultimately why they existed. The loony sister Machi running around was a nice touch but in the context it made no sense. I had to be told as to why she acted the way she did. There was very little time spent on character development and absolutely no exposition given and no motive for any of the characters.
Equally terrible was Koichi Mashimo's direction. Mashimo who is the one to usually take his time went into high-speed on this. As a result the episode suffered greatly. I've always admired Koichi Mashimo for taking time and making all the elements come together, he is at his worst when he is in hyper-speed mode. His visuals are delpalated and dreary and his execution of the music cues is equally bad.
The visuals were very a-typical for this kind of show. Overly dark overly shadowed and dyed in black ink. It's a major departure for BEE TRAIN's usual colorful atmosphere and eye-catching style. It's like watching Boogiepop where you want to scream, turn on the lights! And of course the action was very typical with the usual blood flowing like a fountain routine. Just once I would like to see an Anime character bleed normally. The character designs are nice though, if that's any consolation.
When it comes to music Ko Otani has in the past made some pretty amazing music scores. Shadow of the Colossus being one of them, but in this case the music is terrible. The score is mediocre and the opening themes are terrible. The background and theme song vocalist sounds like a screeching cat it's like listening to Ali Project only 10 times worse.
From the first episode alone you can tell Blade of the Immortal is going to be a complete and absolute failure. And from watching various clips of different episodes, it doesn't look to get any better. Highly unsual for me to write a review on the base of one episode, but what is there to say, don't waste your time with Blade, I would even recommend Avenger over this.
