Back from the dead

Again I must apologize for my week-long absence, dear readers. I'll skip the very exciting and totally true tale about how Bon Jovi showed up in a Tardis with the Doctor (who is totally real, btw) and took me on awesome adventures in space with kick-ass theme music and instead cite family and a sudden ability to play my xbox again as the reason for my lack of posting. Unfortunately, I still lack funds to actually GET any of the flippin' sweet new games that have just been released (coughspacemarinecough) and instead have been getting my noob-pwning legs back on Halo: Reach, which, despite it's troubles I still prefer to the braying hordes of exploiters, twelve year-olds and bros that populate the CoD fanbase.

Anyway, I think it may be time for something new. I've taken to digging around in netflix streaming in my non-gaming hours looking for interesting things to watch. Some things are awesome, some make me want to reach for the nearest hot poker and gouge my eyes out. It's kind of like playing Russian roulette with your spare time and brain cells. So I've decided why not share my findings with you, my loyal audience.

Like just about any nerd worth his computer and childhood fixation with Lara Croft's low-polygonal breasts I happen to watch the odd anime now and again. With the passing of years I've had to suspend my skepticism sometimes in order to gain the same enjoyment from some of the plots as I used to, but such things come with being an older, more jaded individual. Anyway, the last couple of nights before I started watching Firefly and lost all interest in everything else I'd been watching a half-decent anime called Blassreiter.

Boobs, blood, demons and emo dudes with red eyes and glowing hands, your four basic anime food groups.

Without spoiling too much, Blassreiter takes place in the Germany of the future. A plague is infecting the population, reanimating corpses occasionally into creatures called Demoniacs that can fuse their bodies with technology and have a very ornery disposition. To combat the Demoniacs, a police force is formed called the Xenogenesis Assault Team, or XAT for people who don't feel like saying cool words like "xenogenesis." Their role is to deploy into the area where the Demoniac is running amok and take them down before they do too much damage, as well as do their best to make sure that whatever turns the corpses into Demoniacs doesn't spread. The series starts when the game changes and a human/Demoniac hybrid they start to call "Blue" shows up and from there more and more living people are turned into hybrids called Amalgams.

The series centers around Blue, the XAT and the other humans that turn into Amalgams. Most of the time the Amalgams go ballistic and need to be destroyed, but every so often an Amalgam will appear that's not only sane (sorta), but able to transform at will between human and Demoniac forms. Now I haven't gotten far into the series, but the creators seem to be fond of killing off main characters, or at least making a character very central in the story before killing them. This has already happened twice and I didn't get through the first series yet. Hell, one of them is still in the intro sequence.

All in all, the series is interesting enough. The plot has some decent twists and turns but it's already starting to fall into old anime fallbacks, like the villain with the soft voice who's only motivation is to change the whole world to his liking by wrecking everything in it. All too often it seems villains in anime are all godlike beings who's only motivation is "to change the world in his vision." While it all seems very grandoise and evil, nine times out of ten even after the exposition of the villain's grand scheme it still seems needlessly convoluted and the world he wants to make usually seems like some sort of desperate wasteland that nobody would want to live in anyway. I get he's evil and that's the whole point and all but if I'm going to remake the world in my own image I'd at least leave a little spot with some grass or a park with a pool or something for myself and just fence everyone else out. THAT would be properly evil.

What's that? Can you come into my evil dome and see the trees? No, fuck you. My trees.

So, to recap, Blassreiter has multiple girls with overlarge bosoms, demon monsters, explosions, dudes transforming into things with superpowers, action, plot twists and motorcycles. Didn't I mention the motorcycles? Yeah, it has motorcycles.

Cheers, kids. I'll be back with another post in a day or two. Pinkie swear.