Maybe about a year ago, I heard about this MMORPG called Blade and Soul. Fast-forward to the present, and we’ve got an anime based on it. How related is it to the game’s story? I have no idea, so let’s just take a look at the anime by itself.
The story is about an assassin named Alka, who’s kind of on the run with a whole empire after her. Supposedly she’s wanted for the crime of killing her master, but she claims that it’s actually the empire who killed her master, and she wants revenge. So yeah, story about revenge.
To support the premise that the empire is evil, the pilot episode has Alka getting hired by some small village as a bodyguard to the acting chief during their negotiations with the said empire, because the empire wants to do a land grab. End result? Village gets massacred.
Oh, also, the empire employs druggie combatants, who may or may not fully transform into monsters.
The ending of the pilot episode has Alka telling the survivor of the village massacre to seek revenge. That’s some fine moral lesson at the end of the day… We sure hope she’s got room for character growth in the future (personality wise, cup size is fine already).
With that in mind, Alka is not a very likeable character in my opinion. She has the Cloud-esque blank personality in full: No expression, not much dialogue, no distinctive charm (ok, maybe those boobs, but that’s not important). Add to that her earlier preaching of the doctrine of vengeance…
The action is decent. There’s quick and crisp movements, along with ridiculous Lito-Lapid-esque slicing of a bullet that splits into two and kills 2 enemy goons. Yes, that happened in the episode. At the moment though the action is more flashy than anything. There’s not much fighting dynamics yet as Alka has yet to face someone of equal skill. Maybe we’ll get there in the future.
As for the art and fanservice? Well…
Yeah, plenty of stuff to ogle, possible enough to consider it counterproductive.
So as it stands, at worse this show will be just fanservice. At best, there might be some serious plot. I’m not gonna get my hopes up for the latter though.
Rating: 4/10
P.S.: Remember that thing Alka was wearing? She actually just borrowed that set of clothes from this relatively flat-chested girl here. It boggles my mind why the fit is exact.
