Review of Black Clover
Black Clover is a 12 episode anime stretched out into 170 episodes. It is a whole lot of nothing, you’re gonna finish this and question your life choices that led you to do absolutely nothing but watch this brainless dribble of a show. Firstly, the characters are extremely one-dimensional and surface level. I don’t know the best way to explain this without spoiling, but they get NO character development throughout the entirety of the 50 hour snooze fest. In fact, I think that nearing the end they were starting to regress and their ENTIRE personality began to get centred over one trope. Let me put thisinto an analogy - let’s say that you have a friend who likes football, but his obsession over football is so severe that his house is a ball and every time he sees you he starts yapping about wanting to kick a football 24/7. That is exactly what every character consists of in this series, one likes footballs, but the other likes basketballs and the other likes golf balls (etc etc). So every time these characters are introduced in unison, the animators like to individually present each character and make them monologue about how much they love balls rather than 1) have them all express their obsessions in tandem or 2) STOP WITH THE GENERIC AND BLAND tropes.
An average episode of black clover will literally consist of 1) recap 2) intro 3) 5 minutes of talking about what was mentioned or 4) a backstory that lasts three more episodes, and this is without a joke nearly how every episode goes and develops itself without fail. Near the end, I started skipping full chunks and/or whole episodes if it was based on a backstory which we as the viewers hold full knowledge of.
The main character, above all else, is the most insufferable. I’d like to think that the main character represents the whole cast of this show because whenever he thinks too much his head starts to steam and explode. He has no personality whatsoever and unfortunately suffers from the same problems that the side cast do too.
The animation fluctuates episode-by-episode. Some episodes had world-class animation, while the others probably were made by just one person and this is very noticeable, but generally the animation and art style are good
This show is definitely not for everyone and has worse pacing than something like one piece, but the concept and general gist are good if you suffer from a shortage of braincells.