Also, I apologize for every single spelling mistake I make in this post. I’m not really good at English.
So. I think an ideal word to describe this series is ‘simple’. But not in a negative way. If something is simple, yet catches your attention, it means there must be something good about it. I have a hard time paying attention to video’s that exceed 20 minutes, so I decided I would watch a part of this movie, to see if it was interesting or not. Before I knew it, it was over. It didn’t felt as if I watched such a long episode. The story was very interesting, imo. Yet, there are several reasons why I use the word ‘simple’.
First of all, let’s talk about Rygart Arrow, the main character. He’s 25 years old (god bless every 18+ mc in anime) and is one of the only people that can’t use magic. Yes. It’s an averted trope. Whereas most anime throw mc’s at your face that happened to be able to unlock some kind of badass power, Rygart is the only one who can’t. Indeed, the story is about a ‘normal’ main. It’s something refreshing to see. I won’t say I never bumped into this trope before, but it is definitely nicer than the most special of special snowflake mc, that happened to be the chosen one and saves the world even though they’re less than 18 years old and have no experience in life or whatsoever. Yet, you could argue about how ‘unique’ the plot actually is.
But oh well, since I’m only at the first part, I can’t tell how the story will develop, but making the main this ‘normal’ compared to the other characters, could eventually push the story towards the ‘special snowflake’ trope. If he’s the only normal character, he’s still the ‘only’ one, making him more special than the others. But I guess we’ll see once I continue watching.
So. Simple series. What do I mean by that except for the fact that Rygart is ‘normal’. Well. The story isn’t all too complex. In my opinion, it was ideal. I don’t really like to watch anime movies, as the pacing is often odd. It’s either as fast as a mad bull running through an arena or as slow as Windows 8 doing a ‘minor update’. The pacing in Broken Blade, was great though. The conversations don’t feel too long and stretched, yet it’s not all too hard to understand what’s going on and everything is clear and well-explained. It’s an interesting storyline, yet, it’s not too confusing. And this is something that counts for pretty much everything in the series. The character designs aren’t all too complex or outstanding, but they aren’t boring either. And in fact, I didn’t mind the lack of music. Sometimes, the silence created a special, idk how to say it, ‘aura’. And the songs that played were nice. Some of them felt like ‘typical’ background songs, others were just very beautiful.
Honestly I loved how ‘classical’ orientated the music was. You could easily play some of these songs at a classical concert and nobody would note it was supposed to be music for a movie.
What I found rather disturbing in the beginning, was how Rygart happened to be best friends with the king and queen themselves. I thought he was supposed to be as simple as possible, making him childhood friends with them, didn’t seem right. But after thinking this through, I realized the purpose of this relationship actually is supporting the series it ‘simple’ vibe. It’d be really hard and unrealistic to come up with some kind of story to how King Hodr found out about Rygart, how they need to gain each other’s trust, Zess’ part of the story and the relationship between Sigyn and Rygart (I cover that one later on). Making the four of them friends, made the story better, in my opinion and I’m curious to see how things will develop in the sequel.
Okay. So about Sigyn. Honestly, I’m not all too keen on the RygartxSigyn hints the first movie gave us. She’s married to Rygart’s best friend. It’d be highly disturbing to see her cheating on him for no good reason. And no ‘Rygart is my true love’, isn’t a good reason to me. As I enjoyed the plot for so far, I really hope they won’t ruin the series for me with some half-assed love triangle.
As last but not least. The art. The freaking art. It’s beautiful. The animation is really well done, even the mecha fights were great. The bots had interesting designs as well. Not too weird, yet not too similar to the other ones I already saw.
Overall I think this was a really enjoyable movie and I’m really looking forward to the next part!
