tl;dr: A mecha anime with great action and characters with a lot of depth but very slow development.
Break Blade is a mecha anime, though unlike most it’s fantasy rather than sci-fi. It’s set in a world where most everyone has the ability to magically manipulate quartz and bend it to their will using what is dubbed sorcery. This allows especially skilled sorcerers to pilot enormous mechs known as Golems. However, the protagonist Rygart is one of the exceptionally rare few who can’t use sorcery at all. This would normally mean that he has no place on the battlefield at all, but fate has different plans for him when, right in the middle of his home country Krisna being invaded, he discovers that he’s the only one that can pilot an ancient and especially powerful Golem dubbed the Delphine.
Character wise it’s somewhat hard to grasp what this anime is trying to do and where it’s trying to go. Rygart is the epitome of this. He very much embodies the mecha trope of a character who isn’t special at all but has a special role simply because they’re able to pilot a mech. It differs from how the trope is normally used in that this is portrayed as a burden he’s suffering rather than an advantage. He starts off as the type of pacifist that naively tries to save the enemy in the middle of a war, though when that backfires he seems to drop his ideals entirely. However, this isn’t really what I would dub character growth. It’s more like it breaks him, and as the anime progresses further events continue to break him further. And at the end of the anime, despite him now being a capable fighter, he seems to be completely broken mentally. To be honest, I have no clue what’s going on in his head or where his character arc could go.
The rest of the cast also has a lot of complications that are pretty unique and thus it’s hard to predict where the story will take them. For example, the main heroine, Sigyn, seems to be in love with Rygart and Rygart seems to be in love with her. However Sigyn is already married to Hodr, who is not only one of Sigyn’s best friends, but also his king. Then there’s Zess, who despite being really close friends of Rygart, Sigyn, and Hodr, is a key figure in the invading Athenian army. He seemed to be fighting for the sake of as peaceful a resolution to things as possible, but as things progress it isn’t clear at all how he fits into things. There’s also an Athenian character that was fed a lot of propaganda about how all Krisnan’s are evil but after getting captured seems to have discovered this isn’t the case, though what they’ll do with that information remains to be seen. There are also characters that don’t really seem to make much sense, neither their personalities nor their backgrounds, so it feels like the writing is building up to doing something that will better flesh them out. But then they die off before that and you’re left to wonder what was going on with them.
Now to be clear, that characters and their arcs being difficult to understand isn’t a demerit. If the lack of clarity was simply due to bad writing then that would be an issue but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Rather, it seems to be trying to portray characters with depth, but in a story that isn’t very character oriented. The overarching plot is much more centered around the world building surrounding the conflict between Krisnan and Athena and the realities of the gap in military might between them. It doesn’t try to continually push fleshing out it’s characters or advancing their character arcs in meaningful ways. The writing seems to try to avoid explicitly conveying characters motivations or thoughts through directly showing what they’re thinking, but rather tries to convey who they are through their actions and interactions. This results in characters feeling much more nebulous and mysterious, but also feels more natural. This makes the pacing a bit strange, because despite so much happening most things don’t really seem to be progressing as much as they should, but all in all it seems to work well enough. The anime ends after a major battle at a point where absolutely nothing is resolved, but all in all it feels like a solid place to end on considering it ends on one of the rare in your face character beats.
The art and animation were very good. The mecha action and designs especially were pretty impressive. The character designs were decent outside of a couple that especially stood out as especially good. The OP and ED were both pretty different from the typical anime OP/ED and though I can’t say I like the music in and of itself, it fit very well. The soundtrack was also quite epic and worked great, especially during the major battles.
