Otakuism

This post contains a ton of spoilers for Blassreiter up to episode 15.

The first half of Blassreiter has been fairly intriguing at best, featuring some pretty cool fights marred by a lot of melodrama and the poor video quality I am forced to watch. So as the mid-season mark approaches Blassreiter follows the iron rule for most tokusatsu (and mecha) series: time for some pruning and a complete change of pace. So the show kills off most of its cast and introduces a tragic background for the rest. And by tragic, I mean incredibly horrible deaths involving many children. I’ll explain.

First off, Wolf finally goes full Demoniac and betrays all of XAT be infecting all its members, except Hermann and Amanda who were in solitary confinement. The new Demoniacs precede to rampage across the city destroying everything. Brad, Al, and the other infected but still human members of XAT fight to get Hermann and Amanda out alive, and the two manage to escape in a helicopter. Everyone else is killed by Demoniacs or Wolf. The worst part of this is that Wolf tries to use Brad’s love interest Lene, who was just introduced a couple episodes earlier, to kill Brad by taking over her Paladin, a transforming motorcyle/robot. Instead of turning her into a Demoniac and saving her Brad instead shoots her in the head with the special bullet he received from her on their first mission. He is then gutted by Wolf. That’s just the beginning.

Elsewhere, Meifing, a minor character so far, reveals she is a double agent with the real organization Zwolf, for which XAT was just a public front (it’s basically the SEELE of Blassreiter, german and all). With her high-tech jet she decides to nuke the city to kill Wolf, not even trying to save the friends she had been working with. Hermann and Amanda’s helicopter is damaged in the explosion and Hermann forcibly ejects Amanda in her own Paladin, while he dies when the copter crashes. A now alone Amanda finds Jacob again and learns his back story.

Joseph was an orphan raised by a church that helped Outsiders, outsiders being any undesirable peoples that are treated like shit. Apparently world war 2 never happened in Blassreiter cause everyone in Germany is still racist. Not the most accurate or flattering depiction of the country. As a boy Joseph allows himself to be beaten up all the time by these really evil kids just so their families will donate money to the church orphanage. Even when a wandering pastry chef tries to help Joseph the kids push the pastry chef into the river with his cart falling on top of him, putting him in the hospital. They then push the blame onto Joseph. If ever there were people you wanted to physically reach into the screen and strangle, it’d be these kids.

Later on Joseph meets Xargin while helping an Outsider community displaced by a flood and also meets his sister he never knew about, Sasha, who originally made the blassreiter nanomachines. Everything is good until the kids in the community get scarlet fever. They have no money for antibiotics so Joseph and Xargin go to steal some and are caught by the police, but let go due to Sasha’s research. While this is going on the kids find out that they’re parents are starving themselves to feed their kids. The kids feel terrible about this and sell the antibiotics for food. Of course, the scarlet fever comes back and since the kids sold the medicine they all die. Yes, every single kid dies. They even show them all being carried away in caskets. Oh, and Sasha is beaten to death by a mob for being an Outsider.

This all drives Xargin crazy, so he takes the nanomachines, blows stuff up, infects Joseph, and then leaves to destroy the world. This leads us to the modern day. The series now takes place with both Amanda and Joseph working for Zwolf. Zwolf has three super high tech mecha, Meifing’s jet being one of them, all piloted by cyborgs. One of the cyborg’s just happens to be Joseph’s sister Sasha, who didn’t actually die. She convinces Joseph to go through excruciating torture so he can get his mid-season powerup. She also promises to kill him after Xargin is dead. And the best part is that Zwolf is actually a modern day incarnation of the Knights Templar, so now we got religious fanatics fighting against Xargin, a religious fanatic himself who is trying to bring about the apocalypse and recruit his own four horsemen.

So, I think Blassreiter succeeded in its change of pace. It will be interesting to see how Joseph evolves now since he’s basically being made to lose control of his blassreiter form. There’s also Zwolf, who definitely have an alternative motive behind everything their doing, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn out to be the big bad boss at the end, with the Director transforming into a hulking monstrosity per tokusatsu tradition. And there’s even more CG galore now, so anyone who couldn’t stand the first episode probably should still stand away. Aside from that Blassreiter is a pretty entertaining, if very pulpy, sci-fi adventure. Can’t wait to see where it goes from here. I did prefer the old OP, though.

And this is a pretty cool MAD featuring clips from the first half of the show. The song is White Night, the OP to Nitroplus’s early game Vjedogonia, which is very similar to Blassreiter:

The second episode of Blassreiter that aired today introduces the show’s OP, which I quite like. I was hoping for something a bit more like Vjedogonia’s OP White Night, but repeated listening has made me realize that Blassreiter’s OP is kickass in its own way. The OP features a couple characters we haven’t seen yet and a giant army of the dead, which is always cool. (Let the Evil Dead references ensue). The OP also shows that Gerd will be around for a while, despite his rather fiery demise in this episode. I really want to know what’s up with the mysterious guy now, since he’s seemingly everywhere. He also has one incredibly badass bike. I’m really enjoying this youtube release thing. It’s great to know I can watch a show at a specific time every week instead of having to wait for fansubs. Wish the resolution was a bit higher, but it’s still fine. I hope other companies take up this plan soon. And, yes, the CG is still fine to me.

Gonzo decided to broadcast two of its new shows, Blassreiter and Tower of Druaga, simultaneously in Japan and America, a highly unprecedented move I applaud them greatly for. Blassreiter, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of my most-anticipated shows for this season. Watching it in low quality on youtube did not hurt my enjoyment at all and the subs equal the best work of any fansub group, proving that simultaneous released are possible. On the show itself, it’s a very solid first episode, detailing the world of Blassreiter. The basic situation is that corpses have been reviving as mutated zombies capable of fusing with anything, and are kind of causing a ruckus. The XAT team, our main heroes, fight these zombies known as Demoniacs, while also having to deal with unique Demoniacs who hunt others of their own kind.

I absolutely love the designs of the Demoniacs, both mechanical and organic at the same, as to be expected of Niθ who did the designs. How they fuse with common items is pretty cool, and I liked the novelty of the motorcycle legs. The action scenes were also great; I love the camera angles and how the camera moves with the action. The CG isn’t exactly the best in the world, but I’ve seen worst. I’m hardly one to let CG stop me from enjoying a show. We don’t get much of the characters yet except Gerd, who will probably be killed shortly, though I’m surprised he transformed into one of the purple warriors from the trailer. Amanda already features some of that Niθ hotness. A lot of people will be harsh on Blassreiter for its CG, but I like it for mixing two of my favorite genres: pulp horror and henshin heroes. I look forward to fun times from it.

The other show Gonzo put online is Tower of Druaga, though it appears that the episode online is not actually the real story and just Gonzo messing with people’s heads. It kind of makes sense actually, since the beginning and ending of the episode are so different from the rest. Most of the show is spent on Hero Jil’s quest to kill the evil god Druaga and mocking RPG cliches along the way.

The constant “I’m going to be married when I return to town” line before a character died was just hilarious, especially when Jil was like “why are you telling me this?” Honestly, there are a ton of funny scenes here. The main heroine is raped by a tentacle monster and actually has to yell at the guys to stop oggling and rescue her. All the characters put down goggles before Jil’s special attack. Jil promising to marry both the Princess and Fatina. Druaga telling Jill he is Jil’s father and Fatina begging Jil to kill Druaga anyways cause she doesn’t want such an ugly father-in-law. And the greatest thing is the power up scene at the end that looks just like Gurren Lagann, the same kind of detailed animation. That was just awesomely hilarious. It’s highly doubtful the actual show will be like this. It’s probably more a generic action/adventure, which means I won’t watch it. But this episode was still fun even if it is just a one-shot thing.

There is one reason alone I can’t wait for Blassreiter: its story is being done by Nitroplus. Anyone has read the blog for a while will know that I absolutely love Nitroplus, even more than Type-Moon. They have the uncanny knack of mixing together the most diverse elements into something awesome (Lovecraft, mecha, and loli books for Demonbane; Angels and John Woo gun-fu for Angelos Armas; werewolves, androids, and maids for Gekkou no Carnevale). Blassreiter is looking to include zombies, demons, and fucking kamen riders! Admit, how can you go wrong with zombies and kamen riders?

As for the CG work, admittedly Gonzo doesn’t have the best past with CG, but I’ve seen worse CG from other studio and Blassreiter is looking to be one of Gonzo’s better CG efforts. I’ve lived through Demonbane and Dragonaut; a little CG isn’t going to hurt me. I’m hoping Blassreiter will be the dark henshin hero series I’ve been wanting since Skull Man ended. Kiva’s good and all, but I need a little more substance to my superhero fun. And, yes, this as close to a preview post as you’ll get from me. I’m too lazy to copy lists of shows made by other people when I’ll be watching the first episode of everything anyways.