After taking on last week’s entry of Arknights, I decided… why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I face what other shows Yostar Pictures has to offer?
This brings us to Blue Archive the Animation adapting, what else, the gacha game Blue Archive. And that’s already going to have some very strong opinions.
Unlike Arknights, I’m not going into Blue Archive totally blind; I was convinced to try the game out and though I eventually stopped logging in, I did at least make it through the “complete” main story (they’ve kept going after the “final” chapter, but it was there, called final, and actually was at the time). I’m not in tune with its side material as much as I was for Azur Lane or Fate: Grand Order, but I do know a thing or two that I can bring into this review.
I also have existed on the internet enough to know Blue Archive is a contentious subject. The main character is the AFGNCAAP (Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person) known only as “Sensei”, and the all-female units you recruit are students in the strange school system that is the city/world of Kivotos. This makes some folks very, very mad as these high-school aged characters are at least sometimes drawn for fanservice and at least sometimes might have less than pure intentions regarding their player-character-teacher.
First off, what age is “okay” is something that differs from culture to culture. Japan at least (as is relevant to Anime) has a much more complicated take than the US, with a lower bound that’s passed by high school students. But, sure, if you think it’s skeevy, you can go ahead and avoid it. Though it’s worth remembering that many, many characters who get a great deal of fanservice are in the same age bracket, and there doesn’t seem to be the same sustained freak-out over them. Asuka Langley, Yuno Gasai, Reisalin Stout, Yukina Himeragi, and the entire cast of every battle school harem show with very few exceptions are all under the age of eighteen. Some of them even act like it some of the time. But they’re clearly drawn to be conventionally attractive, so we sort of give them a pass.
Blue Archive students are a mixed bag from as much as I saw. Some are, like the names I just listed, drawn as conventionally attractive ladies. Aru (a minor character in the anime outing and one of the 3-star units I happened to start with) is basically the spitting image of Chainsaw Man’s Makima. Visually, one could easily serve as the other’s body double. I don’t think it’s honest, seeing as they’re both just drawings in the end, to say that it’s okay to find Makima visually appealing but not okay if it’s Aru. Saying that you personally like Makima but not Aru is fine, but I don’t think there’s a cogent argument for “it is wrong to…”
Some, such as the also-briefly-appearing-in-this-show Hina are written with clearly very adult takes on the world, even if they aren’t drawn that way. They end up giving the impression that they’re not especially young so much as just kinda small. I’ll try to limit my judgment on the visual preferences of others but I can get why she and characters like her might be resonant on a purely writing level. And a few get both adult-esque designs and personas, while others get neither. In the end, any given viewer is going to react on an individual level to any of these designs or characters
And, at the end of the day, these are drawings with associated fictional personas, not real people. I think Blue Archive gets extra hate for the perception of teacher/student relationships, but as far as I remember AFGNCAAP Sensei is about as professional and appropriate as Korosensei — which is to say, somewhat. In fact, the two have quite a lot in common, and while the player does gain affection from students, nothing inappropriate is ever really carried out or even strongly implied in-character. The fanservice for the viewer, who is not any person’s teacher, is certainly there, but probably more of it than isn’t is quite conventional and outside a few dumb jokes there’s a separation between player and character on that score.
The fan community, though, does the game’s reputation no favors. If you’re not comfortable with the kind of person who is, let’s say particularly excited by the younger set, the vocal quadrant of the Blue Archive fandom might be somewhere to stay away from. I learned to avoid it pretty quickly myself.
But, in any case, we’re not here to talk about the game so much as the show. I will, though, take a moment to make a segue.
In the game, Sensei is, as I’ve already stated, without form. You could sub in Korosensei and it would be logically satisfying and in-place except where BA Sensei isn’t capable of incredible physical feats. Sensei is also always referred to in third person as “they”; the devs quite doggedly avoided gendering them. Blue Archive, however, borrows a lot of terminology from Kabbalah and Gnostic mysticism, and the developers, speaking to Sensei’s attributes, have in the past credited Sensei as a “complete being”, in contrast to the flawed, limited, or really still-learning students with their halos. There’s an impression, vague as it may be, that Sensei’s lack of defining traits might just be more meaningful than as the blank screen for projection. It serves that purpose, make no mistake, but compared to the baseline of these protagonists where you could 100% upgrade matters for a narrative by slotting in one particular interpretation, I’m not sure that’s true for Sensei.
Managing a traitless protagonist incapable of direct action – what Sensei effectively is – did a lot of damage to Arknights, but a clever production could spin it in Blue Archive’s favor by embracing that Sensei is, or might be, something mystical; something that provides the missing piece to all their students and that exists in the same space as a lot of the other mystical mumbo jumbo. I don’t know what visual design you’d go with in that case, or how you’d work around it, but this is a world of robots, anthropomorphic cats and dogs, and even stranger that are all just treated as ordinary people in the setting. You could get away with quite a lot.
So, when we finally meet Sensei a little less than halfway in to the first episode, we find that he’s a young-enough-to-not-look-weird-next-to-the-students man with somewhat messy black hair like every other generic harem and/or isekai protagonist, the cookie cutter image of the Japanese high school boy that the producers no doubt expect to be the primary audience. But he wears a suit, so I guess that’s pretty teacher-y.
Really? This is the one where they decide to go that route? I don’t want to complain too much because, again, we just saw the result for going the ambiguous and mysterious route last week, but it feels like the properties got their approaches switched
Anyway, the plot. Briefly, we’re introduced to the world of Kivotos, the Academy City, where girls with halos all carry guns around and typically find bullets to be a mild annoyance at best, like the whole setting is in a perpetual Nerf war. Here, we’re concerned with the five students of the failing Abydos high school, as its deeply indebted campus is slowly reclaimed by the desert that surrounds them. This lot consists of Hoshino (who acts like an old man, or possibly a cat), Nozomi (a cheerful and seemingly rich girl who favors a minigun), Serika (prickly catgirl), Ayane (nerdy elf), and the face character of the game, Shiroko, a somewhat flat affected and taciturn wolf girl with a largely unsatisfied penchant for brutality and crime.
Together, the five of them are the Forclosure Task Force keeping Abydos afloat. Sensei enters the scene because they need his help. You’d think the main issue would be logistics, but apparently the aid of Schale, a central organization with sweeping powers, comes mostly in the form of combat tactics, helping the Abydos girls fight off the latest attempt by random delinquent gangster students to take over their sand-caked school.
One of the first things that’s worth noting coming off of Arknights is the animation in this. The vibe Blue Archive has, in terms of its aesthetics, is more in line with a mid 2010s slice of life. That is, we get a lot of pastel colors, not a whole lot of scenes with detailed shading, and frequent over-the-top comedic expressions. On one side, it does make sense: though the game’s main story can be fairly dramatic, it serves up a lot more low stakes comedy, and it has a very white-centric palette that’s fairly represented by the pastels. But at the same time, it goes so far as to look pretty cheap and dated. There are some of the long shots of Kivotos that look pretty good, but I can’t help but think that A Certain Other Academy City did a better job of being both bright and visually engaging.
So, other than gunfights that, when you actually put them in a narrative rather than setting them up as missions that the player could theoretically fail, are staggeringly pointless because nobody can actually get hurt, what does our cast get around to doing? Well, we have an episode to turn around Serika’s initially hostile opinion of Sensei, first by visiting her at her part-time ramen shop job and then by rescuing her from a kidnapping by the nonthreatening helmet gangsters and all their tanks and nonsense.
After that, we introduce Problem Solver 68, a gang of students from another academy (Gehenna, where the theme is “demons” so most of these girls have horns) who act as guns for hire and pretty much aspire to be Team Rocket, proudly declaring their evilness while being mostly harmless.
Meanwhile, Abydos still needs money. Shrioko, of course, suggests robbing a bank, having cased and fully prepared such a crime down to having numbered ski masks prepared for her classmates. This is, of course, illegal, and is thus tabled. Everybody goes to the ramen shop to feel a little better, which leads to bumping into Problem Solver, the members of which are down on their luck for a moment. They bond over ramen, which makes it a little tough on the dorks when their next job is taking down Abydos. Naturally, they don’t manage despite all their bombs and hired goons (who clock out at the exact minute the bell rings, leaving Aru and her gang high and dry), and really their mystery employer is more the issue.
Team Abydos decides to track some of the hardware the earlier gangsters had, an they find their way to the black market. There, they meet up with a cutie from another school, Hifumi, who wants to find rare mascot character merch but who has at least done her homework on the area. There, they discover that the corporation that manages their crippling debt, the Kaiser Group, is a gray-legal sort of outfit with deep ties to Black Market criminal interests. The only logical solution, of course, is that Shiroko gets to be quite excited to actually rob a bank
They even drag Hifumi into this madness, forming up as the “Masked Swimsuit Gang” and going on the attack, ostensibly to recover evidence of Kaiser’s wrongdoing. They happen to do this at the same time as Aru is getting denied for a loan. The rest of her gang recognizes who the new masked criminals are, but of course Aru is too dense and ends up fangirling over them since they went and robbed a bank. The end result of this is that the Masked Swimsuit Gang makes off with the incriminating paperwork they wanted, but leaves the bag full of money behind to be picked up by Problem Solver 68.
Problem Solver ends up blowing up the ramen shop due to internal miscommunications, though the members talk Aru into kind of owning it. This is when the Prefect Team, the enforcers of the rules for Aru’s school, show up to pretty much fight everybody. This results in a Problem Solver/Abydos Teamup until rank is pulled among the Gehenna forces the second time – the first time out, a seeming boss named Ako makes more of a mess, but after her first wave (named characters included) is beaten it’s her boss, Hina, who shows up, acts reasonable, and tips off Sensei about Kaiser doing something evil out in the desert before withdrawing.
In any case, the bag of money gets to the ramen shop owner to rebuild, while we learn that Kaiser’s manipulation of the situation runs deeper still and Hoshino… has some things wearing on her, including an encounter with an extremely obvious antagonist who looks like he’s made of smoldering ash.
This is Black Suit. I’ll be honest, this guy might by my favorite character from the game, but some of that’s for later and more’s not for the scope of this show.
After an overly long sequence of largely puttering about, where the only real movement is that Shiroko starts to catch on to Hoshino’s troubles, the girls actually follow that desert plot hook and find a Kaiser military base. Rather than storming it, they’re greeted by Kaiser’s director – more or less the biggest villain of the arc – who taunts them about having bought out pretty much the whole district legally so there’s nothing they can do about it. As an encore, he has the school’s loan interest jacked up 3000% on a whim. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be a legal move like he seems to take pride in if the setting were sane, but this is Kivotos. In any case, this forces Hoshino’s plan and she takes the offer she couldn’t refuse from Black Suit to transfer out of Abydos.
Turns out this was a pretty bad idea as once Hoshino, the last formal member of anything resembling a student council, is gone it lets Kaiser just attack outright with all their soldiers since nothing more can prove the Foreclosure Task Force ever was. They confront the troops, but let the Kaiser director talk them into despair until Problem Solver 68 shows back up to blow up enemies and save the day. They team up with the Abydos girls and fight off the director when said robot man gets in his big battle robot, taking up most of an episode. He manages to get off lightly singed from exploding dramatically and nobody finishes him off.
Meanwhile, Black Suit takes charge of Hoshino, putting her in some magitech device after explaining that he’s his own faction and not with Kaiser as anything other than allies of convenience. Black Suit then summons Sensei to have a little chat, explaining that his faction, Gematria, consists of individuals from beyond Kivotos, much like Sensei is, but they’re explorers and scientists rather than teachers.
We then get an alright rendition of their great and surprisingly affable battle of ethics, at the end of which Black Suit… accepts that Sensei won’t budge where his student is involved, tells Sensei exactly where Hoshino is being held by the Kaiser forces who were helping him, and wishes Sensei luck retrieving her from that base in the desert before making a perfectly calm exit.
They play up the hostility for some of the conversation in show form but really I get the sense that those two, while technically of opposed alignments so to speak, are the kind of enemies who can go out for a drink once the problem is resolved. Realizing they need allies they go to the other schools, the girls and Sensei try to get ins with both Trinity (through Hifumi) and Gehenna (through the Prefect Team), but get blown off, with no help from some extremely out of place sensei foot fetish comedy. Even Problem Solver doesn’t seem to be up to go for the end run.
Thus, we move into the final episode with the Abydos girls preparing to rescue Hoshino on their own. They start fighting their way in, and then the cavalry shows up – Hifumi with artillery from her school, the Gehenna Prefect Team, and even Problem Solver all show up to take on everything in the way and let the Abydos girls hurry on to Hoshino. From there, we get a long scene of Hoshino’s angst as the rescue goes off despite the director setting off bombs in the building she’s in (while being kicked in the head. Somehow he still books it in the end). She’s retrieved, returns to Abydos, and presumably the acute nature of their crisis goes away as we end with a smiling montage. Thus ends Blue Archive, Anime Version.
So, issues.
The action is a curious one. Technically, it’s actually pretty well executed. It’s lighter and more fun, with lots of fireball explosions and fancy flips and jumps, but the choreography is nice and the beats are all in the right places. But, again, nerf war. This hits the hardest early on, when the show is desperately trying to establish that these girls are immune to bullets. Later on, fighting the Kaiser mechs and soldiers (who are also mechs), it feels a little better and you can kind of let the animation lull you into forgetting that these girls shouldn’t be under much threat.
The animation is bright and extremely standard. It looks fine… but nothing really looks great. As the show wears on it’s something you get used to, but watching it next to something that puts more effort into the details is going to be pretty rough. I’m not sure this is a competence issue, though, as much as one of style. The show wants to have this look and feel, and I can’t say it doesn’t serve the overall mood.
The pacing is a real problem. The arc has a fairly draggy middle, and a few fights that come off as a little repetitive. Nothing is 100% just filler, not even the episode-burning Aquarium visit, but despite the in-game story being pretty long it feels like twelve episodes may have been just a tad too much, at least for the cutting of it that was actually prepared.
The characters are… average. Hoshino rallies right at the end, but she spends something like ten episodes being basically enigmatic before she leaves. Serika is extremely basic, but watchable. Shiroko… I have no affection for flat affect characters but at least she gets a couple neat scenes like figuring out Hoshino or being an ardent bank robber. Aru and the rest of Problem Solver 68 are enjoyable goobers, but none of the other minor characters make much of an impression if you don’t already know them, not even Black Suit.
And then there’s Sensei. He may not be without form or definition, but he’s still fairly useless. Sensei does give a couple words of encouragement here or there, but in the grand scheme of how this plays out I think the only thing he does that the girls couldn’t have done on their own is convincing Black Suit to basically pull out of the game. And since Black Suit gets all of five minutes of screen time, he didn’t feel like that much of a big deal; surely the girls could have figured out Hoshino had been taken by Kaiser.
Even though they gave Sensei a face, a gender, and seemingly a foot fetish, the studio clearly didn’t want to give him too much of a personality: when his lines are more or less copied from the game he always takes the safe answer, and while he’ll sometimes say “I have a plan” before the girls do something cool in battle, we never really get a feeling for his personality through his command. That’s something you can do, but they don’t do it.
You might think that this is an artifact of the player self-insert role, but oddly enough they actually take a badass moment away from Sensei. In the game, at the end of the act, there comes a moment where all hope seems lost. In that moment, Sensei needs to use their “Adult Card” in order to miracle in the cavalry – in character a mysterious power that could consume their life, but a tongue-in-cheek reference to the gacha mechanic as for that boss battle you get to use your own units rather than canonical ones given to you by the campaign. It’s both built up as kind of awesome and a funny bit of leaning on the fourth wall for folks who decided to pay to win since its literally the player’s credit card.
I understand why that bit might have been cut (since it doesn’t make sense in a show context with a different fourth wall) even if that would start to cause plot holes if the full story were to be adapted, but you couldn’t give your Sensei something to really feel like saving the day? Just because a character doesn’t necessarily fight directly doesn’t mean they can’t do cool things.
Further, in keeping Sensei milquetoast in general, it becomes difficult to feel like he’s really got a meaningful relationship with his students. In the game (last time, I promise), you get goofy dialogue options plenty, so it’s clear that Sensei is – and this is why I compared them to Korosensei at the start – a funny, creative, characterful individual who you’re supposed to see really bonding with these students. This Sensei? He existed.
All in all, Blue Archive is not a bad show. It will probably leave you basically entertained, and it tells a story that’s coherent and mostly solid story. But unless you have affection for the game and its characters – like, more by far than I do – I don’t think it’s going to escape the mediocre bracket. Not much is really incompetent, but in anime form, what’s here that’s worth remembering? Not Sensei, that’s for sure. Not the Abydos girls. Not the extremely basic plot. Not the barely hinted-at esoteric depths. Problem Solver? Even their bit, which is fun, might get a little old and there are better and more creative versions of their archetype elsewhere.
To me, this is all worth a flat C. There’s no real reason to hate or avoid Blue Archive, with its inoffensive plot and one extremely brief even remotely awkward scene, but there’s also nothing to recommend it.
