When the very first girl is a fire-breathing tsundere redhead, this harem just might have girls with strong personalities…
Anime
Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance was a Summer 2014 anime TV series. That makes it almost six years old.
Episode 01 was reviewed by wizardofecchi after it aired and he found it lacking and generic. Will the BDs fare any better?…
Plot summary from MAL:
Seireitsukai no Blade Dance takes place at a very prestigious school for holy shrine princesses called Areishia Spirit Academy. At this school, the girls train to be elementalists and try to form slave contracts with spirits so that they can compete in battles against one another. Only females have this privilege… at least until now.
Kamito Kazehaya is a normal guy in pretty much all respects except for the fact that he’s the first man in 1,000 years to be able to form a contract with a spirit (which he “stole” from a shrine princess named Claire Rouge). Additionally, the headmaster of the school, Greyworth, has summoned him to enroll and is forcing him to participate in a special tournament that will take place two months down the road. With Claire demanding that he become her contracted spirit, will Kamito even manage to survive the entire two months until the tournament takes place?
action, comedy, ecchi, fantasy, harem, magic, novel, romance, school, supernatural
Staff
Director: Yanagisawa Tetsuya (aka Souma Oogami) is an animator, character designer and anime director. He began his career at Nakamura Production, where he studied and graduated as animator.
Yanagisawa made his debut as director on the Kannazuki no Miko. His more notable ecchi works include Daimidaler, Demon King Daimao, High School DxD, Ikkitousen and Sekirei.
Series Composition: Yoshioka Takao is a screenwriter for anime. Currently freelance he resides in Tokyo. Yoshioka is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Japan and the Television and Radio Writers’ Association of Japan.
His more notable ecchi works include Daimidaler, Demon King Daimao, Elfen Leid, High School DxD, Ikkitousen, Queen’s Blade, Sekirei and Shinmai Maou no Testament.
A veteran staff when it comes to ecchi anime…
Episode 01
Title and summary from Wikipedia:
“The Sword, the School, and the Fire Cat-Girl”
Areishia Spirit Academy: a place where young girls train to become elementalers, where no men are allowed. Kazehaya Kamito gets lost trying to head to the school, and runs into Claire Rouge, a girl purifying herself for a spirit contracting ceremony. She tries to contract with the Demon Slayer, a sword that no one had succeeded in contacting with before, but it goes out of control…
Media
Thoughts
Episode 01 doesn’t take long to get to a bath scene. With lots of steam (from a fiery, feisty, fire girl nonetheless). But no nipples, alas. Even on BDs. Which is a bit disappointing from such a veteran staff with previous experience working on significant ecchi anime shows such as Daimidaler, Demon King Daimao, High School DxD, Ikkitousen and Sekirei.
Then episode 01 introduces three of the main girls, each with rather strong personalities, and quickly dives into harem hijinks. Along with some nice and natural fanservice. Which surprisingly compares relatively well to recent anime shows which it comes to quality and quantity.
The behind-the-scenes story is that I was making media from Strike the Blood BDs and it was slow going on my old laptop which struggles with making 1080p media so I took a break after S1 and looked for another BD anime that wouldn’t be as time consuming so I could look for ways to make improvements and speedups and along came Bladedance.
The good news was that it was a good fit for my needs at the time and it was fun to make media for.
The bad news is that the video is not nearly as good as it should be for a BD. Too blurry and too low of a bit rate for a BD. It’s almost like a DVD upscale but shouldn’t be since it aired on HDTV and was released only on BD not DVD. Might be a low budget transfer since sales were probably pretty low. Such a shame…
But overall for a could-have, should-have been better anime and BD release, it’s amusing to watch for a harem with strong personalities and accompanying hijinks…
Notes
Check out the links to AniDB, MAL and Wikipedia if you want to learn more about the characters and story.
This review uses a combination of jpgs for display images and pngs for link-to images in order to be more mobile friendly and speed up page load times.
For details on how to access and/or download the original media, or something close to it, see the Notes section of Kanata no Astra TV Episode 05 Special Edition Fanservice Review.
For details on how to access and/or download a GIF instead of a WebM, see the Notes section of Cosplay Complex OVA Episode 1 Fanservice Review.
