Blade Dance of the Elementalers Review (Anime)
Blade Dance of the Elementalers is brimming with fan-service and whilst it certainly has a story to tell, it doesn’t take long to realise that it’s only there to keep giving the girls a reason to not wear clothes.
To put this into perspective, the first scene begins with a 16 year old girl washing herself and the main character comes in, makes a comment about how small her breasts are, then she attacks him (this same thing happens in the following episode, too). This is something I’ve never found funny in anime and here it’s pretty cringeworthy too – I like fan-service but this just makes me reach for the remote to turn to TV on and, well, put something good on. It’s all fun and games doing something I love, which is reviewing games and anime, etc, but then something like Blade Dance of the Elementalers comes along that changes all that by making my job a complete slog – seriously, this show is bad. Simply bad.
Kamito Kazehaya, the protagonist of the story, is the only male elementalist in the world with only one other being before him – the Demon King who ravaged the world with his power. Taken to the Areishia Spirit Academy after completing a mission for the headmaster to bring Claire Rouge back to the school, Kamito’s presence of quickly frowned upon as the only male in the academy. A boy attending a school that only girls previously attended – you can already imagine how this show will pan out. What’s worse is that the majority of the characters aren’t likeable and aren’t only rude to Kamito, but are rude to each other too. I don’t think the concept of the show is inherently awful, but it’s clearly a vehicle to throw in fan-service everywhere. You know when people get huffy that anime is frowned upon by those who don’t watch it because of nudity and what not? Blade Dance of the Elementalers is probably what they imagine or maybe have seen, because I don’t think I’d continue watching anime if this was my first exposure to it – this is poor in almost every aspect, and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.
Visually it’s fine although does nothing to blow me away, and certainly does nothing to make up for the show existing, but it’s far from a bad looking show. Studio TNK were on animation duty, who might be best known for Highschool DxD and School Days, but otherwise I’ve personally never watched any of their other shows but it seems that they tend to animate fan-service heavy shows – they did an Ikki Tousen show! There are some explosive and dynamic action scenes and the show is bursting with colour, but I’m not enamoured by the character design and if you’ve watched anime as long as I have, then you’ve probably seen an anime with a similar premise and even a similar art style countless times. Admittedly, the fire cat is adorable and the spirits that the girls use in battle are the stand out characters of the show.
There’s no English Dub which might be for the best here, but the Japanese voice-over is well casted and lively even with the material they’re given to work with. The music is decent too although, again, it isn’t making up for the rest of the show and isn’t something which really grabbed me – I’m not a big fan of the OP’s and ED’s but the audio is the least offensive (offensive in a ‘I can’t believe this is this bad’ way) aspect of the show, and the only aspect that isn’t mostly insufferable.
Don’t watch Blade Dance of the Elementalers. Animatsu have had some fantastic releases and licenses which I could praise and write about all day, but this show is evidently a license solely to pad out their release schedule and because I imagine it was cheap to license (I highly doubt that there was strong competition to license this for release in the UK) and, of course, they are a business so sometimes they have to license things like this to make money. Regardless, Blade Dance of the Elementalers is one of the worst anime I’ve ever seen and seeing a copy of it in-store at HMV has the ability to ruin my entire day when memories of it come rushing back to me. Animatsu, and other publishers, have far better titles that released alongside Blade Dance of the Elementalers and you’d be better off picking up one of those instead of this abysmal anime.
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