2009 Fall First Impressions: The Sacred Blacksmith

One of my expected B-grade shows of the season, The Sacred Blacksmith pretty much delivered what I thought I’d see: nice character art, some ok action, and a dodgy story.

Fansub group: gg

Things I liked:

• I liked most of the artwork. The background colors were a bit dull, but the scenes were well detailed. And the character designs for the main characters looked good. Cecily looks like she’d fit right into K-ON, Luke looks like the bastard lovechild between Eureka Seven’s Renton and Dominic, and Liza looks like she belongs in Umi Monogatari. Disparate looks, but they all mesh well.
• Luke seems like a pretty cool male lead.
• I thought the ED was pretty funny, and Aki Toyosaki singing is nice.

Things I didn’t like:

• The character designs for everyone besides the three main characters was pretty blah.
• Cecily’s shaped breastplate is both aesthetically and functionally idiotic. It didn’t work in the Joel Schumacher Batmans, and it doesn’t work here either.
• Also, Cecily didn’t bother me, per se. I actually think she’s likeable, but she’s about as smart as a sack of doorknobs. There’s brave, and there’s really freaking stupid. Unfortunately in every battle, Cecily falls to the latter. Her breastplate block of ice shards was facepalm worthy.
• Judging by the awkward, out-of-nowhere fanservice/fake-confession scene, I guess they’re going to shoehorn in some romance whether it fits or not.
• Like Aroduc mentions, the choreography of the battle scenes definitely could use some work. Luke spends about a minute drawing up a spell, meanwhile Cecily’s staring at him the whole time… and the monster’s doing nothing. Uh huh.

Random other thoughts:

I listed more things I didn’t like than I did like above, but actually I thought the show was ok, and worth watching for at least another couple episodes. Even though the story was weak – if there even is one at this point – I thought the character interactions were interesting enough. While it’s a pretty easy show to nitpick flaws, in the end, the episode flew by nice and quickly.

My wishlist for Cecily: forget the sword, she needs less ridiculous looking armor and a brain.

Tagged as: Seiken no Blacksmith, The Sacred Blacksmith