This sounds awesome, right? I mean, it's all there: badass chicks, a cool and interesting world to explore, a studio that knows how to handle crazy, over-the-top fights between ridiculously busty ladies just fine (see Vandread and Witchblade). And y'know what? It is! It absolutely is...
... for three episodes, before this series turns into one of the most depressing and disappointing trainwrecks I've ever seen.
Y'know, off the top of my head I can only think of exactly THREE anime that made me legitimately angry...:
... Burn Up! Scramble, which was a fucking chore to sit through after I had a lot of fun with Warrior and Excess, despite their respective flaws.
... Master of Martial Hearts, and the less said about this piece of shit the better.
[btw.: Honorable mention goes out to Wizard Barristers, for ARMS pooping their pants in the last two episodes - but I wasn't really angry at the show, I was angry at ARMS. And I still am. 'cause fuck ARMS.]
... and this one.
I started watching B&S (appropriate abbreviation) because of one thing only: GONZO was involved. And I used to love GONZO, no matter how much my friends hated them. Some of my favorite anime were made by them (Blue Sub No. 6, Welcome to the NHK, Pumpkin Scissors), I defended a lot of their output because I genuinely liked their ruthless approach at animating stuff - shit, I even dug the ending of the Gantz-series.
But B&S broke me. B&S not only broke my spirit in terms of defending GONZO, it almost made me quit watching anime alltogether. I wanted to like it, I really did. I accepted a lot of its drawbacks (increasingly bad animation with each new episode, horrid CGI - even by GONZO's standards -, the severe lack of clever dialogue and interesting characters by the time the series lost its way like the damn song in Kill la Kill...) with a handwave, just hoping it would get its shit together, bounce back and be as awesome as its first three episodes. But it didn't, until the very last episode - and by then it was way too late for me to give a crap about anything, really. I was done by that point.
It starts out like a really cool, oldschool revenge-tale in a fantasy world and comes right out of the gate with decapitations, a village burning the fuck down, guns blazing, people dying by the dozens, a The Good, The Bad and the Ugly'esque standoff-sequence and an amazingly well-choreographed fight scene between a ninja and a gunslinger that reminded me of 90's-hongkong-wuxia flicks á la Butterfly and Sword or Hero (the 1997 Corey Yuen-film, not the other one).
But then, someone in the writing department had the bright idea to introduce a plot that went beyond "Find bitch -> fight bitch's lackeys -> fight bitch -> kill bitch -> roll credits". And I was fine with the series taking a more serious approach at first - but little by little, B&S stopped being fun. And then it became annoying, boring, dull, stupid and anger-inducing at the same time. Especially the latter took over at some point (around episode 9, I think), and I sat there in front of my TV, shouting numerous swear words at the screen with every new stupid, mind-numbingly boring sequence the anime threw at me.
The problem is not the fact that anime wanted to tell a serious story. Again, as with Martial Hearts, B&S took the completely ass-backwards approach of introducing the serious shit at the most inappropriate time and in the most jarring way possible. One does not simply introduce a pulpy fantasy world with pulpy fantasy characters who fight each other in pulpy ways for about two hours worth of television time, only to swerve into a weirdly composed episodic format with a "moral lesson of the day"-plotline, disregarding the main plot ("Find bitch -> kill bitch") entirely for hamfisted drama surrounding our protagonist's lack of ambition and emotion. You can TRY to give your main protagonist emotional depth by, oh I don't know, maybe not having her be a lifeless vessel of a human being whose only characteristics are her appearance and the fact that she's really really good at killing shit.
Most of the time the melodramatic bullshit, that starts around episode 4, doesn't even fucking involve her at all! She's just a bystander looking at people debating over whether or not they should plant fantasy-opium (yes, fantasy-opium) to gain money, looking at people who become obsessed with being the good guys, looking at people obsessing over a family member she might've killed - she just looks at shit as if she was Kim Jong-Il looking at things, she does jack shit most of the time to prevent bad things from happening, she doesn't learn shit every time she messes up, and she sure as shit doesn't evolve as a character until the FINAL GODVERDOMME EPISODE when she has her freaking Shinji-moment and goes "Hey, guys, guess what - I AM ME! I'M HUMAN! YAY! OMEDETO, ALKA-KUN!".
The writing and pacing in this show are fucking bad, 's all I'm sayin'. It breaks the show's neck four episodes in, and then GONZO tries to kinda fix it by the time B&S ends with an admittedly well-choreographed wuxia-fight scene. But was that scene worth waiting for, like, ten freaking episodes? Hell naw, by the time you get to it you're already desinterested in ANYTHING the show had going for itself when it started. You just want it to end. And when it ends, it's as disappointing an ending as you might expect.
Too bad it turned out this way, because up until B&S lost it I was really surprised at how good everything looked (except the horrible CGI). The fight scenes are engaging and fun to watch, the setting makes for a cool atmosphere and some really nice background art, the character designs are average but still acceptable, the soundtrack is pretty cool and Yuki Takao's performance as the heroine Alka - despite her being a useless twat most of the time - is one of my personal highlights in this show (the rest of the cast is alright, I just wish they would've taken the entire thing a little less serious and went a little bit more ham). There is merit to be found here, it's just burried under the writing staff's complete lack of talent.
It's really too bad, there was a ton of potential to just give us a kickass dark fantasy-action romp with cool characters, badass fight scenes and an overall schlocky low budget-wuxia-atmosphere. Instead, B&S went for the angsty route - and failed miserably. And it was the fact that all this talent (the director of this also helmed the direction duties for Steins;Gate, Texhnolyze and Vampire Hunter D - Bloodlust) and all this potential was flushed down the toilet that made me so angry and bitter and made me turn my back on anime for a month or so. Well, maybe the fact that I had completed two anime prior to that that I really didn't like at all had something to do with it. I think the first one was Burn-Up! Scramble, and the other one was Master of Martial Hearts, if I remember correctly.
...
Huh. I had a really bad run back then, didn't I?
Luckily though, I got what I wanted out of this piece of crap a year later with Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis. Thanks, MAPPA.
tl;dr:
To quote a very famous critic: I hated this show. Hated, hated, hated, hated this show. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it after episode 4. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
Goddammit, GONZO!
