Review of Strike the Blood

Sometimes you just want to turn off your mind and watch a typical ecchi harem anime. You don’t expect too much of it and just want enough fanservice to get you through your rough day. So when you start watching and see the number of episodes you think “Hmm 24 episodes, isn’t it usually 12? Well then this must have some kind of good plot to be this long.” Then you start it, finish it and wonder why the fuck this was made?! Story 2/10 I want to say this is just a typical ecchi harem show with some action, but it isn’t. Aside from the largecast of girls to fit different fetishes and the plain main character that everyone falls for along with the occasional panty shot and the mc getting hit for walking in on them or doing something indecent which isn’t even their fault, it isn’t really like your typical ecchi harem show.
The plot of the show is well… there is no plot. It starts off with our bland OP protagonist who is one of the strongest beings in the world, so they have a little girl oversee him to see if he should be disposed of or not. Initially I thought the organization sending her had some underlying goal in mind, since there is no way they would send a 14(?) year old to handle one of the 4 strongest beings in the world with one of their strongest weapons, but yeah no they actually did that…
3 months prior to the show MC was just a normal guy, but got vampiric powers from the previous strongest vampire. They add a little mystery to that, by not telling us exactly what happened. But they never tell us anything about it because fuck you go read the light novel. In 24 episodes they tell you nothing about the only plot line in this show. The whole show is basically just some episodic arcs with one arc having an event from another arc that the show doesn’t cover so it ends with having some loose ends.
The story has a lot of supernatural beings in it, since the location of where the story takes place is a city full of supernatural creatures that have been “tamed” as in they have a collar, look like humans and the collar goes off when they transform and use magic, but the show never does anything with this.
Since it’s an ecchi, school harem show, you expect it to have that as the main vocal point. But while watching it, I didn’t really feel like that was the main focus of the story. I didn’t really feel like it was just trying to be an ecchi show with a stupid plot put into it. It had quite a few moments where it felt like it wanted to be taken seriously which made me question what they wanted to convey in this story. Did it try to convey that humans are the actual monsters instead of the supernatural creatures? Nope that was never mentioned like I said they didn’t really do anything with it. Well then does it try to show how monsters and humans can live together? Well they do live side by side, but the show doesn’t really make it 100% clear if everyone is aware of that. Even if they are tamed there are so many explosions in the city and shit happening that I wouldn’t know why anyone would want to live here. Well maybe it was about the mc’s friends accepting him as a supernatural creature. Although he mentions telling his friends and it’s frequently asked what is really happening there is always something happening just so he won’t have to tell them for the convenience of the plot. Actually not even convenience, since the story would probably work better if he just tells them. There really is no need to hide this especially for 24 episodes. Same thing for the romance in his harem. Every time there was some progression it’s immediately stopped by having something random happening. For example one of the characters say “I’ll explain what this kiss means on Saturday”. Saturday comes, now I’m stuck on this inhabited island and we’ll never talk about this plot line again. Aside from the fact that it’s stupid that this needs to be explained, it has some real flip the table moments for this. If it wasn’t already obvious for everyone in the beginning, the last episode already tells you who the mc will end up with.
Speaking of the last episode, well it just kind of ended. It was not a bad ending or anything it was just, well, there is more, but you need to read the source material.
The only thing I really enjoyed about the show were the ecchi moments and the occasional good comedy that made me chuckle.

Characters 3/10
Oh boy, well if you thought the story was bad, the characters are also quite bad. Not as bad as the story, but still pretty bad.
Kojou (mc): He is your typical nice guy, he says the typical nice things which instantly makes the girls uncontrollably wet, shaking their legs and drooling with lust because which girl wouldn’t if you tell her she looks good in that piece of clothing. Though seriously they all just fall for him for reasons I’ll list in a few moment. Like I previously mentioned he’s an op vampire, although he’s only op at the very last moment of every fight. It basically goes like this they fight the villain, Kojou is useless, Himeragi (the other mc) is holding her own, but they can’t defeat the villain so Kojou needs to get a power up, but he can’t get the power up because his familiars don’t see him as their master yet, because he hasn’t drank any blood. So obviously instead of just cutting the hand of the girl and drinking the blood, he needs to get excited, so the girls OBVIOUSLY need to undress, make out and then he can drink their blood (note that although I’m saying this very sarcastically these were the only real moments I enjoyed). He then gets his power up and defeats the villain. Now note that his power up becomes completely useless against the next villain because every fucking familiar only works on the specific villain that he needs to face at that time, because you know plot convenience.
On to the other characters we have:
Himeragi: The girl who will beat up Kojou for perverted things that weren’t even his fault. She’s also a good fighter who can hold her own. Initially she seemed to be one of the only 2 characters who weren’t bland, but her personality basically stays the same throughout the show just like all the other characters and besides holding her own in a fight, I don’t really see any real personality traits.
Asagi: The blond (Best) girl who’s the only one with a sort of personality and actually tries to further her romance, which makes you root for her, but because of plot convenience that progression comes to a halt and we all know that the best girl never ends up with MC (so fuck!!!!!).
Little sister: She is in there because we need a cute sister. She has a “tragic” backstory for one scene, but this is never really expanded upon, so you can forget about it since her being in the show wouldn’t have made any difference. Also one of the very few girls that don’t want to fuck Kojou. (No incestual she’s actually not blood related moments here. Surprising honestly).
Loli teacher: Because we need a loli teacher. She’s competent in fighting whenever the plot needs her to be and is very serious. She is also not interested in Kojou (as far as I can tell).
Tsundere girl: The ponytail girl who likes Kojou, but can’t admit it. She has some cute moments and surprisingly doesn’t come in between the relationship of the other (on purpose).
Nice princess(?) girl: Who just wants to make advances on Kojou because???
Childhood friend: because we need a childhood friend and she likes Kojou because he’s her childhood friend. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but just go with it.
There are 4 other sort of important side characters, but we don’t care about them. To sum it up, there is a maid girl with no personality, the sort of oni-chan girl, the gay OP guy who only fights when it’s convenient for the plot and that other male character that seemed important, but wasn’t really.
The villains were your typical villain of the week spread out over 3-4 episodes. They weren’t memorable in the least. Sure they had some motives, but they were all really forgettable, hell they weren’t even threatening. There was not one time I felt like any of the characters where in any real danger, I don’t mean in a plot armor kind of way, but there was just no tension in the fights. Sure there were some close calls, but you always knew it wasn’t the end for them.
Overall none of the characters where really interesting or had any real development except for the best girl, Asagi. But at least all the girls were really cute and none of them were annoying well except for Himeragi when she hits Kojou for no reason. Especially when it’s not even a misunderstanding…

Animation 6/10
The animation was pretty solid overall, especially the fight scenes even though the fight’s became pretty repetitive over time, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the animation which they did a pretty good job on. Like I mentioned before the girls were also really cute so ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I mean uhm the art style is really nice, though girls tend to look a bit similar apart from hair style.

Sound 6/10
I honestly don’t recall any ost aside from the song at the end of a fight and I can’t be bothered to listen to the ost, so I’ll just judge it mostly on the opening and ending which were both pretty good. The 2nd opening actually made the series seem better than it was.

Enjoyment 4/10
As you could probably tell, I did not enjoy this anime very much. I went into this expecting this to be just a popcorn ecchi flick that would be 12 episodes, but instead I got THIS thing that for some reason exists and recently even got 2 ova’s. That actually had the ecchiness I was searching for.

Overall 4/10
I feel like this series just lacks a plot, it could have been something more if it actually used its plot elements, expanded on the world and actually tried to do something original with it. The best thing about this show is the stereotypes and ecchi scenes which is obviously not a good thing. It’s definatly not the worst thing I’ve seen, but it could’ve been a lot better. I wouldn’t really recommend this show to anyone you’re better of watching dxd or testament.