Blassreiter - 7/10 (first half 8/10, second half 6/10)
Gah, it was going so well at the half-way point. Until then Blassreiter is a fairly compelling story about a contagious disease that causes humans to transform into mindless biomechanical creatures, and about the members of the organisation charged with eliminating them. Aside from some forced plot developments and an over-reliance on flashbacks, some of which recall events that happened mere minutes earlier, there's not much to complain about. As character drama goes, it's good stuff.
One other thing worth mentioning is that Blassretier is not subtle. Given the pedigree (Nitro+, Gonzo, Itano) I wasn't expecting subtlety, and I got none.
It's the second half where the lack of subtlety is most pronounced, and because of it the wheels come off a bit. First up, the motivation of the chief bad guy (the second smug, self-righteous ******** of an antagonist I've been subjected to this week) is revealed, and it's neither original nor particularly convincing. Both he and the rest of the cast love nothing more than a good speech, so much so that I started to desperately hope they'd all just shut up. And with more focus on the plot in the show's latter half, the previously neglected secondary cast are given token sob story pasts, tossed off during brief flashbacks, in order to make them more sympathetic. That didn't impress me either.
But none of that could have prepared me for the ending, and indeed the whole final battle sequence, the cheese factor of which is almost unprecedented. A theme of Blassreiter is loss of faith, and after witnessing the final episode I now truly believe that there is no God.
Despite my negativity, I did enjoy Blassreiter overall, but I did find the first half much more interesting. It's one of the most consistently well animated Gonzo shows I've seen, with no obvious dips in quality and characters remaining on-model throughout, and the CGI was impressive if not always well integrated with the 2D animation. And I have to applaud Gonzo's effort to write a dark, mature story with an almost entirely adult cast, even if it misses the mark in some areas.
