What’s it about ?
High school girl fights monsters in bloody sword-battles. And there end any similarities with the rest of the Blood franchise.
Characters
Saya, our protagonist. Randomly clumsy (she trips over her feet twice in a few minutes, but that doesn’t prevent her from having an impressive fight scene), can’t cook, loving her father, late in class… the clichés pile on.
Speaking of clichés, we get a quick glimpse of her classmates : the serious girl, the insufferable whimsical twins, the nice-guy class representative, the brooding loner dude in the corner, the wacky teacher… You couldn’t make them any more generic (and when their “witty” banter is already making boke-tsukkomi references, it just becomes pathetic).
Saya’s father, a stoic who trained her to fight supernatural beasties, would have been dead by the end of the episode in any other series (hello, Blade !), but it looks like he may survive for a while.
Our Monster Of The Week is a bizarre walking statue that still manages to bleed profusely.
Production Values
I got the eye-cancer-inducing “preview airing” (the series is supposed to start airing for real on Thursday), so it’s a bit hard to judge. The fight scene in the second half of the episode is pretty good, at least.
Overall Impression
Oh, dear. When I watched the short Blood – The Last Vampire movie a couple of weeks ago, I got the impression that the franchise was about a stoic vampire-hunter fighting an endless battle who scared the heck out of any hapless bystander. This show couldn’t be any less like that, though, as this Saya has the completely opposite personality and the swordfight has the good grace of happening in a remote field, far from any witnesses. Now, this could just be lulling us into a false sense of security, as Saya’s two worlds are bound to eventually collide with each other… but that doesn’t make the high school scenes any less irritating, unfortunately.
Damn, I really wanted to like this. I’ll give it another episode or two to see whether it improves, but it looks like a miss.
