Blood +

Length: 50 Episodes
Episode Length: 22 Minutes
Genre: Action/Horror


The Series starts with flashes of the Vietnam War with a young girl with long flowing black hair, glowing red eyes, and a samurai sword attacking anyone or anything she sees. This girl shows a lot of hatred and anger in her eyes and face and keeps attacking people whether they attack her or not. Also, however, you see her attacking what seems to be very strange monsters. At the end of this scene you see her just standing there with an army of these monsters walking behind her.

This series is based around a girl who looks to be around the age of 16 years old named Saya (Sigh-ah), who lives with her foster father George, and her foster brothers, Kai(older) and Rikku(younger). Saya is spending time with her friend after school practicing the high jump. Afterward you find that she is at a hospital getting a blood transfusion and you learn that she seems to need this to stay alive. As she heads home she hears a Cello player in the streets with a crowd around him. This man looks to be around the age of early to mid twenties, the one distinguishing fact is that he has a bandage over one of his hands. As Saya stands there listening to him play she starts having visions of someone walking down a corridor. Quickly she starts to panic and freaks out and begs for the music to stop, you also notice that this man seems to take interest in her when she yells. Later on, once Saya makes it back to Omoro's, the bar that George Owns, she notices that she seems to have left her gym shoes at school, and so she decides to head back to grab them alone. Once she is there she is unable to find her shoes, but does hear strange noises, when she is talking to her gym teacher she sees him attacked by a horrid looking creature. Saya's friend from school arrives at Omoro's to give Saya her shoes, and when George sees he sends Kai after Saya to bring her home. By the time that Kai gets there, Saya has run into the School and is doing all she can to avoid being killed by the monster. As Kai arrives at the school, Saya is trapped in a lab room with this monster and the Cello player. This man uses a small Metalic Coffin to attack this monster and when he puts it down for a short period of time, he opens up the coffin, and then opens a secret compartment inside. You see a long Samurai sword, that seems to be the same from the first scenes of Vietnam, inside. He pulls the sword out, and cuts his hand that the bandage had been around. You see that this hand is very similar to that of the monsters he is attacking, then he tries to feed Saya his blood. After but a few attempts and dodging ensuing attacks from the Monster, the man puts the blood in his own mouth and kisses Saya to put the blood in her mouth. He speaks the words "Saya, it is time for you to wake up." and then something happens to Saya. Her eyes start to glow bright red, she picks up the sword as if it were natural instinct, puts her blood into the sword and starts obliterating the monster that had recently been attacking them. Kai arrives just in time to see the end of the fight, and Saya standing there covered in blood. Shortly afterward, Saya falls unconscious and the strange man leaves with the Sword. Thus continues the story of Saya's life destroying more and more of these horrific monsters.

Grading Scale from 1 to 10.

Visual Effects: 8
Plot: 7
Sounds: 10
Follow Through: 6

Visually, Blood + could have been better, It was still one of the best aspects of this anime, however, the way they had this shown was not the greatest of ways I have seen. It was obvious that the people were very focused on Faces and surprisingly Blood. Not one person seemed to have a similar type of face, everyone was very unique above the neck. Also, they were very accurate with the amounts of blood you would expect to see from things of a certain size, also they showed blood running down arms of from wounds as you would expect them in real life. They focuses on these things very well. However, when it came to figures of people and buildings. Most buildings looked very similar to others, in fact many towns looked the exact same but with buildings rearranged. People were also a problem, they focused a lot on the faces, but the bodies were a completely different story. They basically designed 4 different shapes and then added color and re-sized them, so that everyone seemed to have essentially the same type of body.

Plot was one of the things that they needed to spend more time on, This series was unbelievably repetitive. While most anime along the lines of action are, this anime took the same plot line, and ran it 5 times through with approximately a 1 or 2 episode break for following along with random things which you would prefer to learn progressively, rather than skip a lot and learn it all at once. Blood + was still a great story, however, they seemed to just use the same short story board too many times.

Sound is probably the only thing that makes this series go from Good to Great. I couldn't find a problem with it. Every Character had a different voice, and the voice acting seemed to fit in the the characters and their situations. Also, the sounds made by the monsters and people were well done, however much time they may have put into this anime sound wise was well worth it. I have to say that this was the best aspect of this show.

Follow Through is someone difficult to focus on for this anime, as it is both Horror and Action. While the action aspect was consistent throughout most of the series, the Horror part did seem to turn a lot into mystery instead. It seemed more that the Horror was based on that there were monsters, but it was more focused on showing the action and trying to make you guess at things or show what sort of information the main characters were missing. This anime does a good job at supplying action to its viewers and dispersing it jst long enough for you to want more. The big problem was the avoiding by the creators to really get into the horror aspect of this show.

Overall Blood + is a great anime series, and is well worth watching. However, some aspects to this show were a little repetitive, and could have been fixed if the creators had perhaps just spent another short while on it.

Blood + gets a B+