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Meanderings
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Saturday, 08 January 2011 19:29 |
Sendo Aichi is a timid boy in his third year of middle school - the sort of kid who does his best not to stand out in a crowd. His most treasured possession is a card he was given as a kid - the "Blaster Blade", a power card from the card game Vanguard. In a world where card games are ingrained in everyday life - even being used in schools as teaching tools - that maybe wouldn't be such a big deal, but Vanguard is the hottest game around at the moment, and once it becomes known that he owns one of the rarest, most powerful cards in the game, getting drawn into a match is only a matter of time. And the price of losing will be giving up possession of Blaster Blade...
Right of the bat, there are two things that make Cardfight!! Vanguard very much something that normally wouldn't even appear on my radar: first, it's a promotional video, not a 'real' anime series; and second, the target audience is barely a quarter of my age (i'm 38 - you can work the rest out). So I was watching this episode more out of an attempt to make sure I was getting full use of my Crunchyroll subscription than from any hope that it would turn out to actually be good - and at that level, at least, it lived up (or maybe down) to expectations.
The episode sets up a few of the show's main characters and, more importantly, the card game they're going to be playing, Vanguard. Now, I spent many years and a bloody silly amount of money being a Magic: the Gathering player - I fully understand the appeal of CCGs, and how addictive they can be. But they're fun to play, not necessarily fun to watch, especially when you don't have any vested interest in the game. Vanguard is real, it exists, but it's not on sale yet - the Japanese release is still a few weeks away - so we get to watch people explain and play a game that no-one watching has any knowledge of. And, frankly, it's just dull. The playing itself is livened up by having the anime 'visualise' the battle scenes - instead of just watching people place cards on a play mat, you also get to "see" the battle as though they were taking place in a real world. But that's just visual gloss onto something that's not very exciting to start with.
Most of the characters we seen in this ep could also use a charisma transplant, as they're a completely unlikeable bunch ("dickheads" was the word I used when I was tapping down review notes while watching - although in hindsight that's probably a bit harsh). Even if the playing of Vanguard was enough to catch my attention (and it wasn't), watching this lot of personality-less characters playing it would've knocked the appeal right on the head anyway.
The Good: Decent production values - it doesn't look like it's been produced on the cheap.
The Bad: It's unashamedly a promotional tool, a 25-minute advert for an upcoming game. A game that I have no interest in.
No prizes for guessing, then, that I won't even be giving this one the benefit of the three-episode rule. Dropped.
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Backbites 
