There are some shows that I find somewhat difficult to talk about, and oddly enough it tends to be the ones that I would generally regard as more standard that are difficult to review. This is because there are only so many times you can trot out the same formula and show how it is applied before it gets repetitive. Strike the Blood is all about that.
It’s not as though this is a carbon copy of another show. It does have its own characters (stock though many of them may be) and its own plots (predictable though they may be) and its own world (thinly sketched though it may be). But it sticks very close to the formula for arc-driven Urban Fantasy with Harem elements. It’s the same formula that underlines shows like A Certain Magical Index or to a lesser extent Trinity Seven, but Strike the Blood wears it more openly. I’ll try to give it a fair shake anyway, but there’s only so far generosity can be allowed.
So, let’s start with the conceit of our show: what is the world like and why is our main character special?
Well, we start out set in the nebulous “magic is real” future, not in any familiar part of Japan but rather on an artificial floating city called Itogami Island. Though canonically consisting of several interlinked “gigafloats”, you could be forgiven more often than not for mistaking it for just an island city. Its look and feel is basically similar to Academy City; Bright, clean, and pleasantly futuristic with an undercurrent of darker dealings. In the case of Itogami island the native stuff is more skewed to the mystical because there’s not the magic/science divide, and also technically more under cover than Esper powers in the Toaru series, but one could be forgiven for mistaking the general look and feel of a lot of shots as belonging to the other setting.
Our main character is Kojou Akatsuki. He’s an ordinary high school student, except for the part where he’s actually the “Fourth Primogenitor”, a vampire with world-shaking mystical might. He can be forgiven a little, though, as he only gained that role recently, having all the Primogenitor’s powers transferred to him, which remain sealed until plot demands that he get an upgrade.
Kojou lives with his little sister, Nagisa, and has a kind of obvious tsundere friend called Asagi Aiba, but the show’s blatant first plot-magnetic girl is Yukina Himeragi. Himeragi is a sheltered ditz, but that’s mostly because her life has been devoted to training in a shadowy group called the Lion King Organization to be a professional magic warrior. Her mission, on paper at least, is to observe the Fourth Primogenitor and, if he seems like a threat to the world, eliminate him. Sadly, this isn’t really milked for tension, and she very quickly ends up a friend and ally, providing reliable combat support and even more reliable social awkwardness.
I’ll be honest, when it comes to personal takeaway and not any attempt to get an objective bead on quality, I largely find Strike the Blood to be pretty harmless. Most of what it does is bog standard and now and then it will do something that is, fair enough, pretty cool. But in a similarly subjective sense, I really came to despise Himeragi.
What this is a useful jumping off point for is talking about, and I know I normally save this sort of thing for the end, what makes a good love interest.
So, what’s the most important trait in a love interest? Assuming the plot engages with the character, what makes a girl in that kind of role good rather than lame? It would apparently surprise some people, but I don’t think the answer is that she’s cute or hot. Appearance helps (it would be a little rough to watch an otherwise by-the-numbers romance where the lead is deliberately drawn as grotesque), but it’s far from the most important element. Being in love or lovey-dovey isn’t the important element either; how the girl relates to the male lead can be relevant, but there are a lot of ways to do it. No, what’s most important is that the love interest character should be fun and/or interesting in her own right.
Because, when you get down to it, a major love interest character has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Whether she’s the sole love interest or a competitor in a traditional love triangle or a member of a broader harem, if she’s really going to qualify as more than an also-ran she has to be in at least a fair number of episodes and make herself known and distinctive in that time. Some will do it with a “day in the limelight” episode or arc, others have a more constant presence, but either way the character has to be something more than a sexy piece of set dressing.
At the risk of invoking the show too much, perhaps because it is far and away the most comparable in themes and story structure to Strike the Blood, A Certain Magical Index got this right. Now, I had a lot of harsh words for Index herself when I reviewed that series, and I stand by them in the context of the Toaru series, but in the grand scheme of things she has a well-defined personality, an interesting background, and while her “brat who likes biting” act got real old real fast, it did at least give her something that went against the grain and that makes her memorable. And, of course, that show was full of better potential love interests than Index. Itsuwa played the meek and more traditional girl role for her time in the sun, which you could say was true of Himeragi, but Itsuwa related to our lead in an interesting and different way. And Misaka Mikoto, of course, was awesome enough to get a starring role in her own show.
It’s not just Index, though. Unbreakable Machine Doll, like Strike the Blood, very much has a structure where we get a new girl each arc and she’s more in-focus. Every girl in that show who was at the arc-competitor level was unique and interesting. Yaya, Charl, Frey… I was able to say things about these girls, they didn’t seem like the next model just rolling off the Henry Ford Waifu Assembly Line (“Your leading lady can have any personality you want, as long as it is bland.”).
It is perhaps best shown in Konosuba that a leading lady type needs to be interesting even ahead of being likable. The entire show only works because the girls that would be harem members in a traditional Isekai show (and, lets face it, kind of are in some senses even there) are all insane. Creatively, entertainingly, uniquely insane. Megumin is not a traditionally attractive character. At least, not the way Himeragi is; I’m sure there is a subset out there that prefers Megumin on looks but I’m even more sure it’s not the majority. But Megumin is an interesting and entertaining character. She’s fun to watch and has a very clear theme and personality. Darkness and Aqua are much more the expected knockouts, but they also work as characters because they’re deliberately written to be eccentric loons. It is legitimately a big part of their charm.
And some might be inclined to point out, at least Himeragi fights. She can get herself involved in the plot and provide relevant support to our lead when he’s in trouble. And that is good, and part of where I have to admit that I probably dislike her disproportionate to her failures. Not that she doesn’t have problems as a character, but my personal reaction is farther in the negative than, perhaps, she deserves. But combat capabilities aren’t really a substitute for chemistry or personality. Plenty of great love interest characters have been completely incapable of actually doing the things that the leading characters do (like Winry Rockbell), and plenty of action girl leading ladies, who can do the fighting and heavy lifting of action (whether or not the male lead in the story can) are interesting and/or fun in their own right, like Shana or Mikoto Misaka.
Yukina Himeragi – winner in the appearance department though she is – is the most mass-produced, milquetoast love interest this side of Yoshida or Wako. She still has an edge on Wako at least, and probably on Yoshida, but they really are something of the unholy trinity of lame girlfriend characters.
So, rant finished and dislike established, how does the first arc go? The main thrust of the arc involves the arrival of a magic-wielding European church type dude who wants to obtain a magical relic (the right arm of a saint, currently in use to magically stabilize the city foundation) but in the process threatens the safety of the city. Along the way it seems that Kojou’s power, aside from a stock set of vampire abilities, mostly comes from magical familiars bound to the Fourth Primogenitor… and he doesn’t know how to really awaken and use them, having little control over what he can call up. This means that when it comes to the final battle against the priest and his servant Homunculus (also a cute girl so you know she’s going to be pardoned to become a set dressing side character), he’s in bad need of a power up.
At that point, Himeragi, having worked with him for the majority of the arc, offers the way, allowing Kojou to drink her blood (something he hasn’t done in his time as a vampire) in order to unlock more of his super powers, which win the day in fairly short order.
I’m shortcutting a good deal of the arc, but it really is enough to know that the idea of Himeragi being at all hostile to her senpai Kojou is rather quickly dispensed with, and the overall structure of the arc, like most of the arcs in the show, is an action-mystery sort of vibe that, once again, is very familiar to other outings like Unbreakable Machine Doll or a certain other series I’ve already mentioned too many times in this review.
And, as an action-mystery-shonen-harem affair, it’s somewhere between perfectly serviceable and entirely standard. Honestly, there’s a degree to which I feel like I don’t need to do as close a plot summary of this one as I normally do, because it feels fairly perfunctory. Somebody starts stirrung supernatural trouble, Kojou and friends intervene, his current powers aren’t up to it so he drinks the arc girl’s blood to get more, the stupid catchphrase happens, rinse and repeat. In terms of the overall structure rather than the details and set dressing, the script is very much on autopilot.
So, before I go ahead and try to highlight the interesting points out of that whole situation, another digression is in order: vampires.
Vampires have a lot of different portrayals in media. So, even though Kojou mostly uses elemental powers gained from summoned familiars rather than the Dracula power set, that’s not really a problem. Especially since one thing he does really well is the core of the vampire’s identity, sucking blood. Granted, he doesn’t need to do it to exist and thus there are only a few blood-drinking scenes that coincide with arc ends for the most part, but this particular element is rather well done.
When thinking of a vampire feeding, it’s always going to be somewhere on a spectrum between predatory and sexual. For most modern vampires (that is, ones after Carmilla and Dracula), this conflated element is a core part of the identity. Some entries skew more gruesome and some more purely erotic, but you’re fairly obliged to strike some sort of balance.
Strike the blood goes more for the erotic end – the blood drinking scenes have fairly heavy sexual overtones. They are, however, woven with the idea of blood and pain. It’s not just like a heavy kissing scene (which some vampire bite scenes in media can be like), there’s absolutely an element of injury there, even if the girls are all fine shortly after.
I guess you could say that, even though this is really just a basic competence for vampire fiction, managing the bite scenes is one thing that Strike the Blood does at least somewhat remarkably, which given how much of this show is anything but interesting, remarkable, or fresh, is worth giving credit where it’s due.
So, how about that plot? The second arc deals with the arrival of an envoy from the domain of the First Primogenitor and the plans of a terrorist organization of… not technically werewolves, but they’re animal shapeshifting people in vampire media so pretty much werewolves… who want to kill him and take over the island with an ancient magic giant death robot. The new girl of the arc is Sayaka Kirasaka, an old friend of Himeragi from the Lion King Organization who takes a fairly reasonable instant dislike to Kojou before falling for the fact that this is a harem show and he’s basically not a terrible person, becoming our second flavor of Tsundere in the process. She’s fairly forgettable but not quite as bland as Himeragi while still being very pretty, so I usually appreciated any screen time she got over Himeragi in later arcs where neither of them was technically the girl of the week.
The third arc deals with evil mad scientists trying to produce and control an artificial angel (sounds eerily familiar), which ties in to a pair of new characters: La Folia Rihavein (the princess of a foreign nation) and her identical aunt Kanon Kanase (a classmate of Himeragi and the little sister here on the island). The latter is turned into a berserk artificial angel, but thanks to Kojou taking the former’s blood (and some from Himeragi for good measure) the day is saved and she’s brought back around to sanity and relative humanity while the malefactors are largely defeated.
The fourth arc introduces its obvious girl right off the bat: Kojou’s childhood friend, Yuuma Tokoyogi. She’s both the girl of the arc and its most active villain, though, as she’s secretly a witch. She swaps bodies with Kojou in order to use his powers to free her mother from a magical prison.. The plan to spring mom from Violet Hold involves attacking Kojou’s teacher, who is also a witch who maintains the prison. However, evil mom isn’t grateful enough at being sprung from this setting’s Azkaban, and tries to dispose of Yuuma. This comes around to bite her in the rear when Yuuma and Kojou (returned to their original bodies and with additional help from Sayaka in particular) are able to bring her down and stuff her back in the box. Yuuma is largely forgiven for reason of being a brainwashed magic clone, and all’s well that ends well.
This was probably my favorite arc of the show. It was, as is typical of this show, rather overcomplicated in order to present as a mystery, but it features the two of the three best girls in the lot (Sayaka and Yuuma) heavily, number three (Asagi) also gets some good scenes, and it has a fair amount of action. And I have to admit, there’s some entertainment in all the batty twists. This starts with body swapping and ultimately gets us a kid version of Kojou’s teacher, a swarm of eccentric mini-bosses, a better artificial human plot than Kanon, and so on.
After that, we get an arc with a lot of Asagi time, centered around the resurrection of an alchemist who, ages ago, attained the Philosopher’s Stone to become a perfect being, went crazy, and tried to purge everything else. Once he’s back among the living, he goes on a crazy rampage and tries to wipe out “imperfect” beings. I’ll freely admit that I probably know more about Alchemy and its goals and philosophies than is entirely healthy, and I was fairly amused by the take on the Great Work represented by this villain. It’s probably my second favorite arc of the lot because it has a creative and threatening baddie like that and also features more of existing girls (especially Asagi) rather than throwing another lady into the mix, which gives it a little more time to work with its plot.
Finally, the show ends with a short arc where Kojou and Himeragi’s daughter from the future comes back in time to help defeat the monster of the arc. Not that either of them catch on, despite her having Kojou-reminiscent powers and being the spitting image of Himeragi while wielding an upgraded version of Himeragi’s unique spear… but I will grant them that time travelers don’t seem to be a normal thing in the setting.
The arc is half the size of a normal one (less than that compared to the Yuuma arc), and is mostly build up to the punch line of said daughter returning to the future and talking with her half-sister (strongly implied to be Asagi’s, indicating a harem ending) about how she actually met dad, only to get told off because they just had breakfast with him the day before. I will give the show credit that it’s an actual joke, but I don’t think it needed a two-episode setup.
We also learn that this is sort of Just As Planned by the Lion King Organization, who intended Himeragi to become something of a leash on Kojou by way of being his lover, more than an actual observer/killer. Again, kind of funny but also a little wasted.
And that is the end of the first (twenty-four episode) season of Strike the Blood. There’s more, including OVAs and later seasons, which is really easy for me to believe because of just how reprocessed this story is.
It’s not as though Strike the Blood is phoned in. One of the reasons it works at all is that the animation is really good and even if the mysteries aren’t exactly compelling, they keep moving forward with plenty of explosions and exposition. Actual effort was clearly put into Strike the Blood but… it feels hollow.
I don’t think this is just because I am and was already familiar with the much-superior Toaru series. There’s a good deal of technical competence, but a lack of passion and investment that nags at you while you’re watching.
One of the ways I would illustrate this is with the arguably most annoying part of the show, the catch phrase sequence. At the climax of each arc, when it’s really time to kick the villain’s ass, Kojou will say something ending in “Now this is my fight” to which Himeragi will speak up to say “No, senpai, this is our fight!”. After this, enemy defeat is almost instantaneous in most cases, with one of the two (usually Kojou) giving the assist and the other (usually Himeragi) the finishing blow.
Now, I’m not anti-catch-phrase. Some moments work when repeated, but a key to that is variation. Unless you’re working on the level of episodic opera that is Sailor Moon, you can’t really get away with doing the exact same moment more than once or twice. Heck, even Sailor Moon usually includes some variation in when and how her latest super move actually works. For that matter, Team Rocket shook up their motto recitation now and again, usually to humorous results. The catch phrase exchange here, even though it’s being done at the capstone of some very different fights, is always the same. It has the same intonations, the same emotions, the same build up, and the same results… even when those don’t even make all that much sense. It also shoe-horns Himeragi, who I’ve already made my opinion on clear, into the end of each and every arc.
If there had been some variance to it, it could have been pretty cool (hell, it kind of was the first time) or even cute (if the couple aspect had been more leaned into rather than Himeragi being so depressingly generic). Let it happen earlier, so they go a few rounds with Kojou properly riled up. Let the reply one time come as a chorus from all the girls involved in the arc; Himeragi may be the strongest warrior of the lot, but it’s not like she’s the only one who can at least have the spirit to step up. With a few little touches, I would be smiling rather than groaning remembering this.
But that’s not what Strike the Blood is like. Strike the Blood has a catchphrase for the sake of having a catchphrase, and because it’s “the catchphrase” it has to be the same as far as Strike the Blood’s creators are concerned. This show is afraid to show you anything really new or different because it knows what’s safe and marketable and desperately wants to color inside the lines, so to speak.
And, in some senses and to some degree, there’s nothing wrong with that. For that matter, while Strike the Blood isn’t really old enough to be credited with this, there are some works that come off as formulaic or cliché because the formula was literally based on that work.
But, when the soulless nature starts shining through, we start having problems. I could enjoy a show that was basically all “by the book” in terms of what happens as long as it was able to display, or even fake a reasonable passion to tell its own stories, rather than an empty pursuit of what’s popular.
It’s a shame, because some of the magic stuff in Strike the Blood is pretty fun and interesting. The villains I hesitate to say are memorable, because I struggled to recall them, but with the exception of the bland church guy from the first arc they at least have power sets you probably haven’t seen too many times over and thus that should be interesting, and would be if you were invested enough in the show to care.
Strike the Blood is, therefore, a bit of an odd failure. It’s certainly a weaker show, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but it’s on enough of a technical level that I feel comfortable offering it a C all the same. In some senses, I guess this might very well be a good benchmark for a C grade – it does what it needs to do, but never excels or interests, lacking any sort of spark to push it higher. If you want to watch Strike the Blood it’s totally harmless (barring the fanservice getting on the heavier end at times), but I wouldn’t recommend wasting your time.