10 Second Anime - Blade and Soul - Episode 13 [END]

Blade and Soul - Episode 13 [END]

A true fan service episode. A mystery, an adventure, and a farce on a remote island. Blade and Soul ends on a fun note.

Heh.

This whole episode was heh. Our three side heroines get to shine as they search for eternal beauty from a treasure map. With elements of Indiana Jones, and the exact same feel as the Secret of Monkey Island, I was impressed with the comedic writing.

Pia: "I understand them because their language sounds like my grandparents' dialect."
Karen: "Just where are you from, anyway?"

A big dead angry fish shooting bullets was not a scene I was expecting.

The cat people sure know how to prepare soup. Only the finest and cleanest ingredients!

I have to trust these primitive people's judgment. Prostrating yourselves in the presence of godly breasts is surely the correct thing to do. Oppai is FREE! Oppai is JUSTICE!

Oh, and just what is the Secret of Fish Head Island?

How about mass producing treasure maps promising eternal beauty to lure women to their uncharted island? Ingenious!

I know the anime is based on a MMORPG, but they should totally make an adventure game based on this episode. I'd play The Secret of Fish Head Island. Instead of a three-headed monkey, the mysterious legend could be an undead monster fish who shoots bullets and keeps asking for alcohol.

The farce at the hot springs with the hallucinations was the perfect escalation to bring in our main character and calm things down.

Hah! She went there looking for eternal beauty too! That embarrassed look on her face proves that this episode took place after the true ending episode last week.

Geh.

Hey, it only took 13 episodes, but they finally made Dan Loana look good!

There were some good bits with her looking for treasure too. She came up empty while her Pleasure Gang was loaded down with riches when they were grave robbing.

And, of course, we have the goddess of Fish Head Island.

The look on Karen's face when she started suspecting Hazuki was inside the fish, heh.

Meh.

Even in an extra episode for fun we couldn't escape the terribly drawn transitional scenes. Oh well. It appeared to be a key feature of this animation group.

Final Thoughts.

I enjoyed this show, with one of its only knocks being the uneven animation quality. This was one of the few shows this season where the characters weren't a bunch of kids in school. Having adults in an anime means you can actual explore morally ambiguous plot lines, and even have morally ambiguous main characters. That's a bit refreshing.

Unfortunately, it's hard having the main character and main villain say so little. Usually a lot of talking to serve exposition purposes can be overused, but we went the other way here. Some of the episodes in the middle of the season appeared disjointed from the main arc because we had no explanation of why Aruka was in the places she was and meeting the people she met. Like the art production, the writing was a little rushed in parts.

However, when the show was good, it was excellent. The battle scenes were engaging and exciting. The musical score and sound track were also well produced. I still haven't gotten sick of the ending song. Elle Karen dancing while it plays doesn't hurt either. The flashbacks of Aruka's life were excellent as well. And we actually got character development in the softening of Aruka as she learned to "use the sword to live."

The comedy was fun too, which reminds me how other shows budget their art quality. Comedies usually have several tiers of art quality, not just to emphasize gags, but also to save time and money in animating them. For a gritty revenge story where people actually died, and stayed dead, Jin Varrel notwithstanding, having different tiers of art quality would be difficult to creatively solve. However, they did have chibi versions of Yuu and Aruka for the omake explanations and previews at the end of each episode. They could have figured something out, like the use of stills employing pan and scan, and chibi versions of the characters for side comedy gags. Ah well, this show is in the bag, so wishing for something isn't going to help now.

I will say, I still want to see CGI versions of the other girls doing the fan dance, or whatever dance they want to do with their weapons. Come on Gonzo, make it happen!