entertaining, but not stellar

Written by Harpe on July 13, 2010 at 4:59 PM

Blassreiter: In the not-so-distant future, everyone rides motorbikes and takes drugs from strangers.

I can't say that I thought this to be the best action anime I've watched lately, but it's certainly not too bad.

Plotwise, it did fairly well. Gonzo was willing to take risks with its cast, and the main character, Joseph Jobson spends the entire first half of the plot not being terribly impressive fight-wise, which I thought made better watching than the usual God-Mode protagonists which litter the action/sci-fi genre. The plot was dragged down by some incredibly uninteresting drama subplots, towards the start particularly.

The dialogue was acceptable for the most part (except for a few overwraught drama scenes and a painful succession of 'there can be only one'/psuedo-science rants from the uninspiring supremacist bad guys), and the subs are fine to boot. Don't expect sparkling wit or intellectual challenge, but then does anyone watch action/drama/sci-fi anime for the humour?

The hand-drawn art was very watchable, unfortunately the CG escapades were a little less than inspiring and only really looked good when it was being used to portray things moving a little faster than the eye could easily follow. Ie; it looked good when you couldn't really see it too well.

For the most part Blassreiter's combat, racing, etc was presentable, and you also got the impression a lot of work and enthusiasm had gone into choreographing the fighting and designing mighty-morphing-megabikes.


So reluctantly I get to the point: Blassreiter is entertaining, and it gets lots of 4/5's. Possibly that's all you want from it, and if you ran out of stuff to watch then click, click away.