Caught it by the blade: a "Bladedance of the Elementalers" review
I bet everyone has seen at least one harem fantasy/sci-fi school anime in their lives. If not, you're not missing a lot. I've heard and seen my fair share, and they all follow very similar patterns: guy enters a magical boarding school, immediately finds himself in compromising situations with women, they call him a pervert and slap/punch/any violent action him, learns about a vaguely-planned out world, and ends up being at the center of a harem while fighting villains and being all powerful and mighty. Rinse and repeat.
Not all of them are bad (Freezing, even despite its dwindling focus on its male protagonist in its second season, and The Asterisk War are two examples of this), but if you're looking for something fresh, check another genre. Better yet, dig through all the shows until you find something that tries to subvert the tropes a bit, maybe gives an effort to build on the world than have another interaction where the main guy finds a naked girl.
Still, if done right, these shows can be guilty pleasures even though I am not the intended target audience (personally, I'd take a reverse harem over a harem any day of the week). But my brother saw Bladedance of the Elementalers four years ago and considers it one of the better harem shows he's seen. So my curiosity got the best of me, we bought the show second-hand, and I watched this anime for the first time.
Unfortunately, Bladedance is not going to be one of those harems I think of fondly or revisit. Although it starts off innocently enough despite its more cliche elements, it rehashes character conflicts and never tries to establish its harem outside of their established characteristics. Additionally, the pacing never knows what to do with itself after the first arc. The second arc starts at a snail's pace before ending in a well-paced and interesting episode that turns to be the best of the show, and the third is just a mess. By the end of the series, I ended up being frustrated at what this could've been. Despite its harem trappings, there were some interesting fantasy elements and fascinating character tidbits that, if re-framed, could make this a better show. But the limitations of the genre really let this one down.
Bladedance starts with a flashback, a battle between two young girls that ends with a long brown-haired one named Ren Ashbell winning. Certain girls looking on in amazement are flashed to throughout the fight, and you just know they'll be significant later on because they are more detailed than everyone else and have colorful hair. After this segment, we immediately cut to our male protagonist, Kamito Kazehaya, accidentally stumbling on a sixteen-year-old girl bathing in a waterfall, and congratulations! You have stumbled upon the first fanservice scene of this anime! The girl understandably gets angry because why the heck is some stranger looking at her and saying her breasts should be bigger for her age (which still remains one of the grossest lines from this show)? But once she cracks her whip of fire out, she accidentally cuts a tree down and needs to be saved by Kamito before reaching certain death. Once dried off and dressed, she introduces herself as Claire Rogue, a student at the all-girl Areishia Spirit Academy who vows to enter the Bladedance festival in order to have a wish of hers granted. Traditionally, this festival is only open to female Spirit Users, as that has been what the world has known. But when Claire drags Kamito into witnessing her trying to summon a sealed spirit of millennia past, he ends up having to intervene and make a contract himself. This reveals that surprise, surprise, Kamito is a male Spirit User, an oddity that hasn't been seen since the Demon King a thousand years prior.
Claire, upset that Kamito "stole" this spirit from her, orders him to become her slave, something that Kamito does not care for in the slightest. Unfortunately, he has no choice, as he's been called to the academy by the weirdly suspicious headmistress for a specific purpose: enter the Bladedance and win. After that, Kamito learns to work with his new spirit, try to handle Claire and prevent her from turning him to ash, and handling all these girls who seem to have preconceived notions about his perverse nature and who may grow fond of him too.
Naturally, harem shows tend to scrap the elements of its world in favor of misunderstanding gags where the girls walk in on our hero in a compromising situation, he tries to dismiss it, but the girls don't listen and decide to DESTROY HIM AT ALL COSTS. While this may be funny the first time, it gets old fast, and with a world full of infinite possibilities such as Bladedance's, you'd think they'd maybe want to give more depth into its system and how it operates. But they don't even attempt to bat an eye at it, so I don't have much to say about the story other than it completely slipped my mind because it's so vague. WHY?
It also doesn't help that the show is paced as awkwardly as it is after the first third. Part of me doesn't understand why a story as thin as this would want to be pulled apart as slowly as possible (and why it would want to be ripped at the barely legible parts), but it adds to the drama, I guess, so there's that.
Maybe that's why the character writing feels as limp as it does. Kamito's writing, to its credit, is a fair lot better than protagonists usually get because much of the thin narrative is built around him. During the first arc, we learn he was the champion of the Bladedance three years ago, Ren Ashbell. Why he dressed up in drag and fought isn't clear except for what was shown in small flashbacks (he was kept in assassin training until the leader of the group introduced him to a spirit named Restia, who he would later wield as a sword; despite Restia's significance to the plot, all she really does is add mischievous and irrelevant giggles), but it allows the viewers to question what Kamito's wish was and speculate. He also has a smart mouth and doesn't put up with as much of the antics as other men in his position have done. He even outright admits to liking Claire in his head at one point! But still, he's the stereotypical protagonist and has to be heroic at all times and is even made dumber to help out contrived circumstances.
That's not even touching on most of the girls, who fall under specific harem stereotypes. Claire, for as much as I admire her strength and dedication to reach beyond her past, is nothing more than an irrational tsundere who barely listens to reason. Ellis, despite her quest to show her idea of honor, is the loyal guard who hates men until Kamito walks in and causes her heart to go aflutter. Fianna, even with her complicated feelings towards her own behavior and her past interaction with Kamito, serves as the fallen princess and really only exists to make lecherous passes at Kamito and press her breasts against his back. The only two characters I consistently liked from this show were Rinslet, the haughty daughter of the Laurenfrost dynasty who actually cares a lot more about her friends than she lets on, and Est, the spirit Kamito unseals in the first episode who turns out to be thousands of years old and appears not a day over five (ah, lolita complexes). Too bad they're barely onscreen; it's a shame. If I had to name Best Girl, I'd say Est because her insistence on never taking off her kneesocks was peculiar and she had some of the funniest lines in the show, often said with as little emotion as possible.
The animation is unfortunately in the same boat as the rest of the series. TNK has worked on a fair share of fanservice harem shows (most notably the first three seasons of High School DxD), but this is probably the tamer pick for those who don't want the full-on experience of DxD. But at least DxD has prettier animation and character designs than this show. The amount of times things go off-model is beyond belief, ad there are plenty of shortcuts taken to avoid animating things that would require just a little more money. The stuff that gets animated well is decent, but everything has this childish and sloppy veneer to it. It seems like the studio did not care about this show and wanted to put in as little effort as they could. As a result, we got this.
The score by Yasuyoshi Susuki is a little bit better. There are a few pieces I'd like to find and listen to outside of the context of the show, if that means anything. Most of it is pretty standard for shows like this: orchestration, electronic elements, and a few cutesy songs for the moments when the tsundere is screaming her head off.
Finally, the voice acting is good. I think the female voice actors worked as well as they could with the stereotypical characters they were given (and I just feel bad every time Ibuki Kido has to yelp as Claire because I think back to when she was 14 and playing a girl infatuated with her twin "brother" in a show called OniAi; ew). Makoto Furukawa's performance as Kamito proves why he's one of the best male voice actors in Japan right now (his sass is major), and Yoshitsugu Matsuoka's brief stint as a villain in the second arc is intense and reveling in its madness rather than being stuck as another male protagonist in a different harem show. But other than that, everything is fine. It leaves little to talk about, though.
So at the end of the day, Bladedance of the Elementalers is something I was hoping to like but only kind of did. With a weak story, stagnant characters, weird pacing, and lackluster animation, it doesn't redeem itself enough to warrant a Guilty Pleasure sticker. I'd only recommend watching this show if you can't find anything else or want to jam out to a great opening and ending (it's available for streaming on Crunchyroll, Hulu, and HIDIVE or DVD and Blu-Ray from Sentai Filmworks). But if something like this is absolutely what you crave, you may like this. Or you may want to see if The Asterisk War is as good as you remember it. That might be what I do after this.
