Review of Blue Archive the Animation

For a show based on a Gacha game, and assumedly only made as an advertisement, the show is overall “good.” As someone who played through the game’s story until about halfway through the shows story, it would be fair to say they made it a lot more engaging than the original. However, the somewhat Janky fight & action scenes, as well as horrible default subtitles, take away from what is a very pretty anime with an interesting world and fun & cute characters. If you’re going to watch it, use fan subtitles. For viewers who haven’t played the game, there will be a lack ofcontext for certain organizations and world building that would help explain character motivations and relationships. This is primarily due to the production decision to skip animating the game’s prologue. Though the missing context is slowly drip-fed through out the season, the show as a whole suffers from seemingly random encounters and events that would confuse and seem nonsensical to anime-only watchers. For example, the character halos, why the Sensei is there, and what S.C.H.A.L.E. is.

Ultimately from watching the episodes you will get the “gist” of these topics covered, but for the first few episodes, it may feel like you are missing information. This won’t stop you from enjoying the show, but you will definitely have a more complete experience if you have played the game even for a little bit.

I sincerely hope they make a season two and onwards as there is so much more to the world and story than the Foreclosure Task Force and the Abydos girls. You get a taste of this in episode 11. If you decide to watch the show, I STRONGLY suggest you watch with fan subtitling. I used Kaleido-sub’s translations, and the dialogue impact is night and day, and is the reason I raised my score from an initial 6 to a final 7.