BlazBlue: Alter Memory Blu-ray Review
What in blazes. . .?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, June 27, 2015
On one hand, it's perfectly understandable why so many anime are culled from the ranks of pre-existing videogames. After all, there's going to
(hopefully) be a built in audience, one that is already well ensconced on couches in front of televisions, just waiting for something "entertaining"
to come along and delight their eyes and ears, if not their minds. These folks
will already be primed for whatever is in store, having already become familiar with whatever "plot" and "characters" any given videogame has
been proffering. And the multimedia cross pollination these efforts tend to foster typically resound with the redolent
ka-CHING of
increased sales across various platforms, whether that be for the games themselves or indeed for the anime versions. On the
other
hand, however, the transition from videogame to anime is often a rocky one, one that is fraught with a number of inherent dangers and risks.
First of all, will the anime be so "specific" that it will
only appeal to gamers already familiar with the franchise? And perhaps even more
importantly, how is it possible to translate gameplay into a coherent, cohesive narrative structure that will support an episodic television
format?
BlazBlue Alter Memory ups its chances of succeeding and/or failing by being based on not one but
two videogames in
the expanding
BlazBlue universe,
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger and
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, two fairly rote if dense
fighter entries that boil down (after all the mythological hoo-hah has come and gone) to good, old fashioned brawling. If
that's your
videogame and/or anime cup o' tea, there's probably enough to engage you in
BlazBlue Alter Memory, but the anime is something of a
slog quite a bit of the time, despite an appealing design aesthetic and some bombastic action sequences.
Now it must be mentioned that I am (seriously) outside of the demographic for typical gamers who are well versed with various
BlazBlue
releases, and so I can only comment on how the anime presented aspects of backstory, character and forward moving plot mechanics,
though
some cursory research tends to support the idea that the anime is at least relatively faithful, if incredibly redacted at times, to the
videogames'
pre-existing content. Unfortunately, the anime plops the viewer down
in media res with little to no information imparted, and then
only
exacerbates matters further by cartwheeling through ensuing events without much in the way of explanation. Add in the typical anime (and
videogame) bugaboo of an unwieldy franchise specific vocabulary, and
BlazBlue Alter Memory can be downright confusing for
neophytes
not already well versed with the franchise's somewhat convoluted mythology.
The main character in
BlazBlue Alter Memory seems to be (with an emphasis on
seems — more about that in a moment)
Ragna the Bloodedge, a wanted criminal who is a bit of a bounty hunter himself, equipped with a prosthetic combo cannon arm that is
referred to as the Azure Grimoire or BlazBlue. Ragna evidently has a history with a kind of angelic automaton named Noel Vermillion, a
character whose transformation serves as one of the series' overall story arcs. The main villain is a kind of Joker knockoff (replete with
scraggly green hair) named Hazama, who is supposed to be a kind of omnipotent nemesis. All of this plays out within the confines of a kind
of post-Apocalyptic scenario where the world has recovered from so-called "magic wars" but is perhaps on the precipice of a more daunting
conflict.
Now about that "seems" alluded to earlier—while Ragna the Bloodedge could arguably be called the main character, one of
BlazBlue Alter Memory's most confounding elements is its outsized cast, a huge gaggle of which is thrown at the viewer from the very
first episode, with very little in the way of introduction or context being offered. Later, the series tends to skip from character to character
almost willy-nilly, in an approximation of a gamer simply moving on to a new "level" or battle once one has concluded. But a gambit like this
seriously undercuts any pretense at a through line or dramatic momentum being built up. It is by nature episodic, and that feeling of ping
ponging from vignette to vignette (and character to character) is probably going to confuse a lot of viewers.
Because things are thrown so haphazardly into the mix, what could potentially set
BlazBlue Alter Memory apart from its battle based
kin—namely, its mythology and the backstories of various characters—is instead frequently either just plopped down into the proceedings or
(more frequently) shunted to the sidelines. That leaves the battle sequences themselves as the main structural support for the series. The
ironic thing is, my hunch is most gamers are going to want to confine their skirmishes to gameplay, where after all
they can
participate, rather than simply watching a conflict unfold as part of a cartoon.
Use the thumbs up and thumbs down icons to agree or disagree that the title is similar to BlazBlue: Alter Memory. You can also suggest completely new similar titles to BlazBlue: Alter Memory in the search box below.
