Many 24- or 26-episode anime series tend to bog down in the middle.
I stopped watching Guilty Crown and recently Sword Art Online midway through because either the first half ended without a cliffhanger and I just didn’t feel like continuing with it (Guilty Crown), or I heard that the second half of the series wasn’t as good as the first half (SAO).
I have to say I’m not having that problem at all with Blast of Tempest.
If you’re not watching Blast of Tempest (Zetsuen no Tempest), you are missing a really good series. :)
Two teenagers, a bad boy and his best friend, get caught up in an end-of-the-world scenario in which—unsettlingly enough—it appears they were fated to play a part.
Mahiro Fuwa, the one with the bad attitude, is from a rich family. He had a possessive attitude—laced with subconscious sexual attraction—toward his adopted sister Aika. When Aika was murdered, Mahiro swore revenge on the killer, who remains unidentified.
Yoshino Takigawa, the “good” kid, has been looking out for Mahiro since they were little. But Yoshino has his secrets that he keeps from Mahiro and everybody else.
Hakaze Kusaribe is a mage, a powerful princess who uses magic. Unfortunately her magic doesn’t protect her from her traitorous lieutenant Samon who strands her on a desert island where her magic is nullified.
When Hakaze sends a wooden doll in a bottle and it reaches Japan’s shores, Mahiro picks it up. The doll is a communication device and he and Hakaze start talking. Hakaze says she will use her magic to find Aika’s killer if Mahiro will help her get off the island.
At the same time, huge rotund eyes appear in the sky over small coastal towns in Japan and start turning people into iron. The magical eyes are connected to the coming rebirth of the Tree of Exodus, to which effort Samon has lent his strength.
However, Hakaze’s Kusaribe clan—Samon’s original clan—is supported by the Tree of Genesis, which opposes the Tree of Exodus’s awakening. As Mahiro and Yoshino get swept up in the conflict, they must decide which side is the right side for the fate of the world.
A solid supernatural shonen story—but Blast of Tempest’s good points don’t end there.
Mahiro and Yoshino are very smart and capable but still believable as vulnerable teenagers. Mahiro, still enraged over Aika’s murder two years after the fact, demonstrates he will do anything to find her killer and avenge her. At one point he abandons Hakaze when it seems she can’t help him any further and Yoshino has to convince him that Hakaze can still be of use.
While Mahiro is the quick-thinking one, able to assess changes in circumstances and instantly adjust to them, Yoshino is the long-range strategist who thinks six and seven steps ahead of everyone else. His main secret that he keeps from Mahiro is that he and Aika were dating behind his back.
Mahiro is ruthless but Yoshino is made of similar stuff. As Evangeline Yamamoto, a government agent, notes—after a fight in which Yoshino piledrives her head-first into the ground without a second’s hesitation—despite his innocent face, this young man is something different.
The series takes risks that pay off. One example is in the pacing. At one point, for nearly three whole episodes Mahiro holds a weapon on Samon while both Samon and Hakaze (through the wooden doll) as well as Yoshino attempt to sway Mahiro to their way of seeing things.
There are flashbacks, and we hear the internal thinking of all four characters, but otherwise the scene is virtually static: Mahiro with the rifle, Samon pleading his case, Yoshino on the ledge above Mahiro holding Hakaze’s doll and Hakaze on the faraway island giving Yoshino information that he eventually uses to turn Mahiro back to Hakaze’s side.
It could have easily derailed the story as it built to its mid-series climax, but instead—it was riveting. You couldn’t take your eyes off of the four characters until the very end, when Hakaze’s situation takes a dramatic turn and Mahiro finally lowers the gun.
The use of the word tempest in the series name doesn’t refer to stormy conflicts or fight scenes—it actually refers to Shakespeare’s Tempest. The characters frequently quote from The Tempest, as well as from Hamlet, and the series echoes many elements from the play such as the use of magic, magicians and Hakaze being stranded on a desert isle.
The mysterious Aika, though already dead when the story opens, is still a major force in the story. Old beyond her years and with issues of her own (at one point she offers to have sex with Mahiro, who turns her down), I can’t quite let go of the idea that she’s not really dead—though disturbingly, Mahiro and the others come to suspect that the Tree of Genesis may have engineered Aika’s death in order to bring Mahiro into the conflict years later.
One of my resolutions for 2013 as an anime fan is to pay more attention to the industry side of it. I typically don’t notice who directs a series or what production company made it, but starting with Blast of Tempest, I am taking notice. The series director is Masahiro Ando, who directed the magnificent anime feature film Sword of the Stranger, one of my top ten favorites. And the studio responsible for Blast of Tempest is Bones, the producer of Sword of the Stranger as well as both Fullmetal Alchemist series and numerous other anime series.
All this is to say that Blast of Tempest has beautiful animation: it’s fluid and there are no choppy parts or moments where the characters suddenly look weird, where you know they farmed the scene out to their overseas contractors to finish—everything looks great.
One final note: the music production is also excellent. Even in talking-head scenes it sounds like a full orchestra is playing in the background, and in battle scenes it’s like a symphony reaching its climax.
Blast of Tempest is set for 24 episodes. If you have any room in your anime viewing schedule at all, you really might want to give this series a try.
