Friday, September 3, 2010

Queen's Blade Utsukushiki Toushi-tachi OVA 01

Queen's Blade is back, and it appears to be far from over. Utsukushiki Toushi-tachi is a series of six OVA that will be released once per month. This first episode was released more than half a month ago, but I waited for a sub which took a while. The OVAs take place after the 2nd season of Queen's Blade and is basically season 2.5 of the show. I'm blogging this out of obligation (since I blogged the first two seasons) and for the potential lulz, so here goes.

Summary:
After winning the tournament, Reina goes off on her own doing who knows what, leaving Clodette as the de facto ruler of Gainos. Tomoe has returned to Gainos and starts a journey with Aldra.

There is still no place for men in Queen's Blade, especially grunt soldiers.

Elina is now the one getting tossed around.

At the Vance castle, various nobles living nearby are not too happy that Reina won Queen's Blade and have formed a joint army to attack the castle. Elina manages to hold off the invading forces long enough for her father to escape, but she is defeated by Echidna (who was hired by the nobles) and captured. Having collected her reward and having nothing better to do, Echidna sticks around and teases Elina, but Elina is adamant that Reina will come and rescue her. Elina remembers that she and Reina were very close after their mother had passed away, but as the sisters grew up Reina became more distant.

Wouldn't it be uncomfortable wearing the metal cat ears to sleep?

Time has passed and the nobles are ready to execute Elina. As the archer put get ready to shoot Elina full of arrows, Elina starts to doubt whether if Reina will come and rescue her. At the last possible moment, Reina shows up, blasts away all the enemy soldiers and saves Elina. While all this was going on, Echidna watches from the sidelines with amusement.

True hero(ines) always arrive in the last possible moment.

After being saved, Elina convinces Reina to share a bath and sleep together. On the next morning, Elina challenges Reina to a fight and if Reina loses then she has to stay by Elina's side forever. Reina easily disarms Elina and sets off on her trip once again. Echidna comes down to ask Elina if it's okay to let Reina go, and Elina states that it's okay because Reina promised that one day she, Elina and Clodette would live together. For now, Reina has asked Elina to go to Gainos and help Clodette, and Elina becomes a commander at Gainos and has a brand new outfit.

 New job and a new outfit.

There is no OP sequence to the episode. The ED sequence is all about boobs and I'll leave it at that.

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For a Queen's Blade episode, this was not bad. There was nothing really good or terrible in the episode. The focus of the episode was on the relationship between Reina and Elina and most of it was told in flashbacks. While Elina continued on the path of sisterly love, Reina became more of a loner and more interested in combat (although she sucked at fighting until she magically became good during the first two seasons). There was nothing profound in these flashbacks, but at least it gives background to Elina and Reina's relationships, plus little Elina was pretty cute. I'm not sure why Elina had to wait for Reina to show up and rescue her given that Clodette is queen of the land, but they probably just wrote the script so Reina can play hero. Queen's Blade was never know for making sense anyways.

The action in this episode was alright. It was fun seeing Reina and Elina try to do their impressions of Sengoku Basara characters by creating big explosions and sending grunts flying all over the place (although Sengoku Basara has noticeably better animation). I think this is the first time I saw any character tear through large crowds of enemies in Queen's Blade. We probably won't see too much of these 1 vs. hundreds fights though since the series is about battles between the featured warriors.

Next episode will be able Allean and Nowa and their run-in with Nyx. Sounds somewhat promising.

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