Review for Sacred Blacksmith: Complete Series

Introduction

Boobs! We all know that sex sells, and that's even truer for anime, the majority of which is targeted at the young male demographic. That isn't to say that there are not a grand variety of shows out there, a wide selection of genres and styles, stories and ideas. It's just that the money comes from those series that appeal to the core demographic, and as the industry has contracted in recent years (as has everything else with the global downturn), these are the shows that keep getting made, while the imaginative and creative ones fail to find funding. What that doesn't necessarily explain is why the same core demographic that exists in Japan, is also assumed to exist outside of Japan. After all, the US, and UK anime distributors have their choice of shows to licence, and if they so wish, they can go for the non-fan-service-y shows. But apparently sex sells to UK audiences as well, hence Manga releasing Master of Martial Hearts, Sekirei, and Shikabane Hime so far this year. They also have Strike Witches and Samurai Girls lined up for later. Of course the fact that I loved High School of the Dead no doubt tars me an utter hypocrite. But you know, when for the twentieth time I see a female character somehow lose her top, realise after a while, then turn bright red with embarrassment, while the usually uptight, or wimpy male watching said wardrobe malfunction suffers a gushing haemorrhage from the nostrils, before the female half beats him to death… I react with a rather disinterested, 'Meh'. Guess what happens in The Sacred Blacksmith. There had better be something other to this series than just the boobs!


Cecily Cambell is a young knight, carrying on the tradition of a long line of Cambell defenders in the free trading town of Housman. The trouble is that she's not very good at it, still a rookie, and has thus far got by on bluster and borrowed reputation. In her first real fight, her ancestral sword is broken, and she's almost skewered, before a passing blacksmith rescues her. Luke Ainsworth isn't exactly the hero type though. He's arrogant, mercenary, and antisocial, although he makes up for a lack of appealing character traits with a wizard skill at forging weapons, with the aid of the elfin Lisa. Try as she might, Cecily can't get him to forge a worthy sword for her though, and she certainly can't pay the price he charges. But there is trouble looming in the land. A mysterious cloaked figure is unleashing demons, using magic banned after the end of the Devil's Contract War, and Cecily's going to need more than just your usual sword if she is to stand a chance. Luckily her first real mission is to guard a demon sword named Aria. Aria can cut with the power of the wind, and has the added benefit of existing most of the time as a young, pretty girl. In the inexperienced and reluctant warrior Cecily, she may have just found her ideal partner. Meanwhile, Luke is looking for a special sword too, a sword that can kill God!


Manga Entertainment presents all 12 episodes of The Sacred Blacksmith across two discs.

Disc 1

01. Knight
02. Devil's Contract
03. Demon Sword
04. Pledge
05. Ties
06. Princess

Disc 2

07. Family
08. Departure
09. Remnants
10. Victim of Love
11. Truth
12. Blacksmith

Picture

The Sacred Blacksmith gets a very pleasant 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, which courtesy of Australia's Madman Entertainment, is a native PAL transfer with the requisite 4% speed-up. The image is clear and sharp throughout, with fairly generic character designs enlivened by a bright and vivid colour palette. At the same time, Manglobe's animation is of high quality, energetic and lively, with a fair attention to detail and a lot of effort put into the action set pieces. It's a top quality transfer for a very well accomplished animation.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 5.1 English and DD 2.0 Japanese, along with translated subtitles and a signs only track. I gave the dub a spin and it was acceptable enough, with solid, if somewhat predictable English voice actor performances. The 5.1 surround was a little more open than the Japanese stereo, but still pretty front-focused. It did do the action sequences more justice though. I still prefer the original language track as always, but again, the voice actor choices and performances were pretty run of the mill for a show of this genre.

Extras

Minimal extra features this time, with the show getting the usual static menu presentation. For some reason, only disc 2 had a jacket picture, although that may not be so for the retail release. It's hardly a hanging offence.

The only extras are the episode previews, which have been stripped from the episodes, and stuck into a little 6-minute reel of their own. You'll also find the textless end credits, presented here in NTSC-PAL format, so you can hear the music in the correct pitch and tempo, minus the 4% speedup that you get with PAL conversion. Unfortunately, there aren't any textless credits for the episode 12 ending, which continues the story behind the end credits.

Conclusion

Somewhere early on in this collection of anime episodes, I lost my will to live, as I contemplated the banality of my existence, and the depths of sheer mediocrity to which a medium that I purport to cherish has sunk. This is mediaeval fantasy, swords and sorcery, admittedly not my favourite of genres in any medium, but one that has given us anime like Berserk, Claymore, Slayers, fantastic and varied examples of what imagination and creativity can accomplish. Then along comes Sacred Blacksmith and reduces it to boob gags and moe tropes, the same clichés that so permeate anime today, the clichés that sell to the core audience, but stifle any originality and creativity in the industry.


Cecily Cambell is the main character, an inexperienced knight with a fairly ample cleavage. That is the character description, and we are reminded of that again and again. When we first meet her, we get a pointless, meaningless x-ray upscrolling shot, to show us what she looks like in the nude. What this has to do with the story is anyone's guess. Not long after, her breastplate shatters, revealing her boobs, and causing nosebleeds to the poor blacksmith witnessing the wardrobe malfunction. Incidentally, at all other times, Cecily wears clothing under her armour. It's just for that one shot that her top vanishes, leaving just the disintegrating breastplate. Thereafter, random acts of boobage occur throughout the series, peaking with the obligatory bathhouse scene in episode 7.


People will also randomly comment on Cecily's boobs, complete non-sequitors of breast observation. They may be talking about military strategy, crop rotation, or the best way to catch fish, and all of a sudden, 'My, my Cecily, your boobs are big today, what are you feeding them?' At which point Cecily gets all shy and bashful, and everyone laughs. I'm no longer worried about what the anime creators are smoking; I'm more concerned with what they think their core audience is like. Not even the most perverted, hormonal teen male, gender perception warped by terabytes of Internet porn, getting through a forest of Kleenex each week, spending each insomniac night glued to late night sex-chat TV trying to lip read, will be able to take something like Sacred Blacksmith at all seriously.


Behind all this, there is a lot of exposition being dropped, about the Devil's Contract War, Luke Ainsworth's past, his relationship with the elfin Lisa, and there is a fair bit of action as well, as random demons pop up, terrorising the town, and providing something for Luke and Cecily to fight together against, to give them a reason to relate to one another. I hardly noticed it, because of the aforementioned banality, and it's all pretty redundant, as it gets repeated for the show's climax regardless. The first five episodes are pretty much disposable, booby moments obscuring the character set-ups for Luke, Cecily, Aria, and Lisa. Incidentally, it's Lisa that supplies the moe in this show, an excess of loli cuteness that just about avoids the sugar overdose until the 'Lisa goes clothes shopping' episode.


Then comes episode 6, and it's as if Sacred Blacksmith gets completely rewritten. It's the introduction of Charlotte E. Firobisher and her three guards that suddenly gives the show a dimension beyond the mundane. Charlotte is a girl looking to claim her Imperial heritage, the illegitimate daughter of a neighbouring state's Emperor, and her first plan is to steal the demon sword Aria, and kidnap the Sacred Blacksmith. She'll present them to her father as a sign of her loyalty and her royal credentials. It's an interesting enough story to get me paying attention to what was happening on screen. When Charlotte's first plan doesn't work, Cecily takes her in as part of her family, and even though episode 7 is the acme of the show's obsession with boobs and moe, it still manages to be more interesting and entertaining than anything that has come before, mostly because Charlotte is the most interesting character in the show, and her story at least manages to engage the emotions. Unfortunately, it's something of a false dawn, as Charlotte's character leaves the story at this point, but it does bring into focus the political knife-edge upon which the situation in the region teeters. It does reveal in greater clarity just who the players in the grand conspiracy are, the ones raising the demons and pushing the world into chaos.


Episodes 9 and 10 start filling in the blanks in Luke's back story, and by doing so reveal the grand enemy that the world faces, and why everyone is looking to him as the one person who can forge a Sacred Sword to defeat the menace. It also reveals the nature of the Devil's Contracts, the truth about the Demon Swords, and revealing just who Lisa is, before taking us to the conclusion of the story in the final two episodes. It's when the conspiracy is revealed in its entirety, and Luke must stand up against the mastermind, overcoming his doubts, and Cecily must show her mettle as a qualified knight, with no mention of her breast size at all.


The Sacred Blacksmith is a show of two halves, utter, predictable, and low-rent banality in the first half, followed by some decent storytelling and character development in the second half. If you have to have two-sided anime like this, it's far better to start off rubbish and come good than the reverse. But even when Sacred Blacksmith improves and settles down, it doesn't do enough to stand out. The story is stop-start piecemeal, and there's never really a consistent flow and tempo to the thing. The real story begins to spin in the final four episodes, and it's then that my attention became glued to the screen. It would have been far better to have the story and character development in these episodes properly paced over all twelve, but instead we get random acts of boobage.


The Sacred Blacksmith is forgettable nonsense. It's stupid and crass in the first half, but enjoyable if run of the mill in the second. That averages out to the kind of show that you only buy if you really do have money burning a hole in your pocket.