Preview Gif Anime - Blade and Soul - Episode 2

Blade and Soul - Episode 2

More world building as the main story hasn't started yet. A mix of animation styles leads to mixed results. We meet more interesting characters.

Heh.

Can you tell this anime is based on a video game? Our hero Aruka barely says anything at all, as we come to our first small town on the frontier, with bounty hunters, thieves, and assorted sundry NPC's. The bounty board looks exactly like something you'd use to pick out your side quests to get experience and money. And our Aruka has no money. With how little she says, I think her name is perfect in Japanese, 「あるか？」, "Are you still there?"

We get a nice Mexican standoff between three would be bounty collectors, and some shadowy censorship on how Aruka uses her blades along with hiding bullet wounds.

Elle Karen, the Tomon Inn Propietress, really knows how to handle her fan. From putting on a little show at the inn, to saving the drunk bounty hunter Hazuki from Aruka's blade.

But she really knows how to use it to dance, as the end credits showcase.

The use of CGI here works much better than trying to mix it in with the other animation styles during the course of the show.

Meh.

Which leads us to the mix of animation styles. It's actually quite jarring. When you can go to some terrible in-betweener grade stuff, to high quality action scenes, and throw in the CGI stuff as well, it becomes distracting. Look at how nice everyone looks in the big battle scene at the end of the episode.

Super Sonico last season used CGI to animate the the music band scenes, which worked out pretty well, but they also didn't have 3rd tier quality mixed in, which is the case with Blade and Soul. Well, I can't complain about the jiggle mechanics, though. Go, go, Elle Karen!

Hmm.

The main story starts next time, where we see the real villains and what they want with Aruka. This is coming right up against my 3 episode rule too, so I don't know yet if I'll keep blogging the show. The end credit song grabbed me, and this is also a different animated sequence from last week, so we'll have a meta feature for the show. I'll probably end up watching the whole season at the very least.