Blood Lad

(10 episodes)

What’s it about ?

Comedy about vampires that don’t bite anyone.

Characters

Staz, the vampire ruler of a section of Hell. Except he has no interest in sucking the blood of humans, as he’s very grateful for them creating all this delightful pop-culture. Basically a gaijin otaku stereotype.

Deku, his beleaguered second-in-command, who’s baffled by this boss who barely ever gets out of his room and shows no interest in vampiring or conquering more territory. But still beats any other boss wannabe, especially this asshole who’s just showed up with his stupid people-eating plants.

Yanagi, an ordinary Japanese high school girl who’s stumbled into Hell (without any clue how) and should consider herself very lucky to be in Staz’s territory, all things considered. Well, except she gets eaten by one of those darn plants halfway through the episode, so she’s a ghost now. But Staz is totally going to restore her to life ! (Given how he takes his inspiration in Dra-Gunbol manga, I wouldn’t keep my hopes up…)

Other members of the supporting cast include a mysterious traveller whose dimensional door is probably responsible for this mess ; a three-eyed bar owner (and her humanoid symbiote or whatever) who’s not much help with figuring what can be done ; and a meek shapeshifter who joins Staz just at the time he needs a decoy while going off in the human world to buy more popculture stuff escort Yanagi back.

Production Values

This looks quite cheap indeed ; there’s some nice effects where the camera shakes around a bit to make the storytelling feel more hip, but that’s not enough to hide the lackluster budget.

Also, the camera never lets you forget that Yanagi has big boobs.

Overall Impression

It’s decent, I guess ? There are some good jokes (and a good deal that fall flat), I like some of the deadpan snark being thrown around, and the various hell creatures are fun.

But let’s be honest : the only reason I haven’t dropped it yet is that it’s only 10 episodes, and thus there’s a reduced risk of it running out of ideas and stopping being mildly funny in such a short runtime. I don’t trust it to go anywhere anyway (especially with a still-ongoing manga), but hopefully the joke won’t get stale too quickly.

via [In which I review] New anime, Summer 2013 – Page 5.

Published by

Jhiday

I've been kinda blogging about anime for years... but mostly on forums (such as RPG.net's Tangency) and other sites. This site is an archive for all that stuff, just in case.

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