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
