BLOOD-C

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MOVIE ActionBLOOD-C: The Last Dark
ONA ComedyBlood-C: None-None Gekijou
ANIME ActionBLOOD+
MOVIE HorrorBLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE
ANIME ComedyxxxHOLiC
MANGA ActionBlood-C

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  30/100
  This is one of my earliest reviews, so it's short, and it contains spoilers.

  As with the earlier installments, AMV Hell 6.66 inspired me to try out a myriad of new shows. Some of them were really good, like Arakawa Under the Bridge… some of them were really bad, like Another… There were even some guilty pleasures, like Future Diary. But the show I was the most intrigued by was Blood C. It had a few clips, but all I was paying attention to was the one of a black-clad teenage action starlet battling it out with a samurai with a giant eyeball for a head. Because that… That… Was one of the most awesome things I’d ever seen. It’s not as cool as the beat-boxing samurai from Shamploo, but damn it it’s close. So, upon watching this series, did it hold up to it’s own example?

  As it turns out, Blood C is a member of the Blood franchise, which contains one awesome movie, one crappy live-action movie, and a fifty episode series I still haven’t seen. The star of blood C is Saya Kisaragi, another incarnation of that iconic character… Don’t ask… Who’s a super popular, super pretty high school student by day, and a cold-blooded monster slayer by night. She lives with her father, and has five very loyal, very lively, very god-awful annoying friends. As the story goes on, and the monster attacks begin to strike closer and closer to home, Saya slowly begins to realize that there might be more to this situation than meets the eye.

  Blood C was animated by a company called Production IG, which has been around since 1988. Taking a look back at their filmography, a lot of their work may look dated by today’s standards, but there’s no doubt that the majority of their shows were the best looking shows of their time. Blue Seed, FLCL, Ghost in the Shell SAC, and most recently, Attack on Titan. They’re known for bringing their A game to most of their projects, and Blood C is no exception. Characters move fluidly, the fight scenes look awesome, and the artwork from Clamp looks equally inspired… But while Saya and the monsters she faces may look really good, it’s her friends that make the art design look a bit… awkward.

  At first, the story is kind of a mixed bag. You have to deal with Saya’s friends at school, as they openly parody Clamp’s notorious character design tropes… I wonder why they bothered, since they already did such a good job making fun of them in xxxHolic without even trying… But on the other side of the coin, you have Saya’s battles with the monsters, which is a plot seed that starts off with a lot of promise. You see her fighting one on one with some kind of gargoyle, which is a lot of fun to watch, but then you get to see her fight the very monster that drew me into the series… Eyeball Samurai. This is one of the best fights I’ve ever seen in an anime. It’s staged well, it’s paced well, it ends on a great note, and Saya actually manages to save some poor girl from being killed. She saves somebody’s life. Why am I drawing so much attention to this? Well…

  Let’s not dance around this. Saya Kisaragi is my least favorite character of any anime, ever. That girl she saved from Eyeball Samurai? That’s the only character she manages to save in the entire series! I love her character design, but in a show that was already occasionally painful to watch, she is so ridiculously incompetent that she made the show physically painful to watch. She can go through some kind of transformation into a vampiric bad-ass and she proves at one point that she can do it right at the beginning of a fight… Unless of course her class is being devoured, in which case she’ll wait until only three of them are left to employ it.

  I really wish I were making that last part up, because half way through the series, a giant monster attacks her full classroom. So what, does she evacuate the room, tell everyone to spread out and hide, jump out the window to fight it outside, transform, and save the day? No, she just sits there and lets everyone get slaughtered! God forbid a hero takes some initiative in saving innocent civilians! And despite the fact that her teacher is practically telegraphing the fact that she knows something about the attacks, Saya never asks. She never asks why her giant monster battles aren’t attracting more attention, either. For the love of God, I’d rather have Captain Hero try to save me then ever rely on her. If I were drowning, I’d have a better chance of being rescued by a pack of piranhas. This girl couldn’t save a sandwich with a Ziploc bag!

  I’ll admit that it’s kind of cathartic seeing monsters devour her irritating friends, but it doesn’t take very long to see the real reason why she can’t save any of them. The real reason why her power is so conveniently inconsistent. As good as this show looks, and as much promise as it shows, it’s gore porn. It’s not a horror title, it’s not an action title, oh no, it’s gore porn. The main character’s credibility isn’t important,… The dialogue isn’t important… The story isn’t important… The villain’s motivation is certainly not important… All that blood C cares about is delivering as much gore porn as possible, and if every other aspect of the show has to dumb itself down to accommodate this, then so be it.

  That’s not to say that it doesn’t TRY to be more than the sum of it’s body parts… There’s a metafictional scene near the end where the whole ‘clamp making fun of itself’ idea comes full circle, but it’s over so quickly that you can’t really enjoy it. There’s also some social commentary on mankind’s relationship to the food chain, but the way it’s delivered is just heavy-handed, tasteless, and an excuse for more gore porn. I don’t mind gore porn… I will begrudgingly admit that I’m a fan of Elfen Lied, a show riddled with problems of it’s own. But at least there was more to Elfen Lied than it’s fetishy abuse of red paint. The only elements of Blood C that had any real care or effort put into it was the art and animation, because they wanted better looking gore porn.

  All in all, Blood C doesn’t really have that much to offer. If you’re looking for a gory anime that[‘s centered around epic battles, you’d have a much better experience watching Berserk. If you wanted to see giant monsters gobble terrified people up, you could just watch Attack on Titan,. a show that does an exceptional job portraying the struggle against hopelessness. If you wanted to see an anime that pokes fun at man as a dominant predator, you could get that and so much more out of Madoka Magica, the most perfectly constructed tragedy anime in recent memory. But Blood C dumbed itself down so much to maximize the squicky blood fountains that it unintentionally created one of the least effective heroes in the history of fiction.

  It’s hard to watch, and not in a good way, which is why I have no choice but to award Blood C with the dubious honor of a 3/10.

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• 

  planetJane

  55/100
  Sound & fury, but no blood in the water.

  This review contains spoilers

  ---

  It’s never good to start this sort of thing off with a negative, so I will say, before I begin in earnest, that Blood-C is far from the worst anime I’ve ever seen (that title probably still goes to the sole episode I’ve watched of Modern Magic Made Simple), nor the worst I’ve ever completed (Occult Academy’s final act is far more insulting and the film Expelled From Paradise is much more boring). With that out of the way, I should note though, that Blood-C takes an earnest swing at being among the most pointless.

  The core concept of Blood-C isn’t hard to grasp. Our protagonist is Saya, a high schooler who is also a miko who, at night, defends her town from vicious demons called Elder Bairns with the help of a sacred katana and her own ability to heal quickly.

  

  This simple premise is an iteration of among the oldest stories in fiction--protagonist with special abilities slays wicked monsters--and it’s really, genuinely quite hard to screw this up. A better series, even if it were not exactly transcendent, would milk this setup for all the pulpy action that it’s worth. Indeed, the first few episodes are promising on that front. After sitting through about 15 minutes of the world’s dullest high school life anime, the first few episodes conclude with Saya fighting a Bairn. These scenes are, from the series’ start to its end, the major highlights. The fights are (with one exception), universally well-choreographed and animated, the earlier ones especially might remind watchers of the video game Bloodborne and if the show had stuck to this formula throughout, it might not’ve ever become great exactly, but it probably would’ve at least remained fun.

  Blood-C’s idea of raising the stakes is where the real problems start to arise. About halfway through the series, the first named character (Nene, one of Saya’s classmates along with her twin Nono) bites the bullet by having her head quite messily chomped off by a Bairn. This starts an escalation of sorts, where the series seems to confuse intensity with bodycount. What starts as initially shocking and frightening quickly becomes merely gross, then dull, then outright boring. By the time a squadron of dividing bunny demons show up in the series’ final episode, you’re more likely to sigh than be revolted when one of them grabs a gaggle of townspeople, puts them in a giant sack, and blends them with an eggbeater. It’s nauseating sure, but given enough exposure the human brain will get sick of just about anything, and that’s as true of the countless gory (and in one of the series’ more unpleasant fixations, vory) deaths here as anything else.

  If the problem was merely that the series didn’t know when the chain of messy gruesomeness became too much, it might be a glaring flaw in an otherwise good show. Unfortunately, it marries that problem to an equally large one, which is that aside from Saya herself, who is a cool protagonist if not an especially layered or thoughtfully-written one, it is difficult to impossible to care about pretty much any of the other characters. So, while it’s shocking when Nene gets her head chomped off, it’s not uspetting because it’s Nene specifically, it’s just a swerve. Similarly, in a later episode when a giant frog-crab-spider Bairn murders the vast majority of Saya’s other classmates, it’s really quite hard to care. It becomes obvious before too long that this is a show that equates bodycount with meaningful narrative development, which is a mistake that can pretty much cripple any attempt at serious storytelling.

  

  And goodness, does it make a genuine attempt at squeezing something resembling an interesting twist into its final two episodes. So it turns out that the entire town that Saya lives in--including her own father--are a manufactured “game” controlled by a vaguely-motivated villain to test her, Or Something, explanations are offered but they’re hazy, and even if they weren’t, this twist (which I am sure is intended to be super shocking) comes in as mentioned, at the tenth episode out of twelve. Even if this was an attempt to take the series in some other direction, it is by that point too late for it to matter much. Sadly though, it’s not even that, as the whole “it was all an experiment!” shtick mostly serves as an excuse to cheat all the named characters that had previously died on-screen back to life with very little attempt at justifying said happening, and then to kill all of them again. Exactly three named characters make it out of this series alive; Saya herself, the man who runs the cafe` she eats at every day before school (who turns out to be the mastermind behind it all. Of course), and one of her classmates who turns out to be a woman in her 30s playing at being a high schooler, and has possibly the least personality out of anyone in the core cast.

  To be sure there is detail that could be gone into other than what I’ve covered here but, there’s really no point. Blood-C is a thoughtlessly-written series that tries desperately to impress you with its bodycount and willingness to show blood, guts, brain matter, and in one deeply unpleasant instance, maggots, splattered all over the settings and the protagonist. Unfortunately; it’s a pointless enough exercise that the main thoughts I came away from the show with were that Saya deserves a better anime to cut up demons in, and that at least the fight sequences were pretty good. It’s ultimately a pretty iffy way to burn six hours, I cannot in good conscience recommend it to much of anyone, unless they’re a truly diehard fan of the larger Blood metaseries of which this is a part. Even then, sister series Blood+ seems to be more well-regarded. At the end of it all, the prevailing feeling one gets with Blood-C is that nothing that happened in it actually mattered at all, which is really not what you want to leave your audience walking away thinking.

  

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• 

  ThyMrMan

  60/100
  A prologue for a series I still don't know if it exists, though it is bloody and gory.

  Blood-C, I can safely say this show rates amongst the most bloody and gory shows I’ve watched. So I’ll just preface this with a warning, this is not a show to watch with young kids at all. And as the show progresses, it just keeps getting worse and worse. So this is not a show that you would watch with young kids or something who is adverse to those type of things.

  Why not start with the story and plot progression that we get over these 12 episodes. In general it leaves you with a ton of questions in every single episode. So many things are strange and odd, you just want to learn more. You keep coming back to watch the next episode in hopes that all these questions get answers that satisfy you. And as the show progresses, I started to get more and more worried about getting those answers. By the final episode, I think what I can say is this feels like a long extended prologue. It ends in a place that sets up future stories and development with many questions still left unanswered. Now what I don’t know is how many of these will be answered in the sequel movie, or the various shows that came before this that seem to follow other characters and places in the world. But I am interested enough that I will watch the movie, and potentially get around to watching the earlier stuff.

  Side characters in this show were all enjoyable, and had quirks that worked with the mystery that the story kept presenting. Odd things would happen and the characters would react in ways you would not expect. And do things that just don’t feel natural, and it works well in mixing that mystery from the plot into the day to day episodes.

  Those day to day episodes are largely of the same format, slice of life school stuff and than some gory action to finish the episode. With that format starting to change the longer the show progresses. While I will say it works well for the most part, after awhile it starts to get a bit boring to be honest. When I know how the episode will finish something ends up being a bit repetitive and I started to look for stuff to start changing.

  Some odds and ends to finish up. The visuals of the shows I don’t feel were anything special, pretty normal for that age of the show. Main thing that ends up standing out is all the blood and the gore. If anything stood out it would have been the combat, some of it does look good and smooth. The OP and ED songs I did like, and I did enjoy some of the tracks playing during the show.

  In general I think my opinion is kinda reliant on a movie I haven't seen yet. This felt so much like a prologue, that I need to see were that movie goes. But since I have to say something, i think I have to give it a below average score. i liked the show, but it just feels like part of a large story that still needs to be told.

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