Yasuhiro Nightow is a creator with style by the truckload. Trigun and Gungrave both are works with a tremendous sense of flair, with Trigun also having a strong heart as well. So, when I learned about Blood Blockade Battlefront, I went “I should watch that” — and then never got around to it. When this year’s Anime Secret Santa came around, the show was among my options, and I decided now it’s time had come. I chose wisely.

Blood Blockade Battlefront manages to achieve, narratively, what the anime adaptation of Demon City Shinjuku failed to do. The premise of the story is that a magical catastrophe in New York City opened a demonic rift merging the demon world and the human world at a chunk of the southern end of Manhattan. That area has been contained in a magical barrier to keep the worst of the stuff in, and is now known as “Hellsalem’s Lot”. However, what this place isn’t is it isn’t full Escape from New York. Loads of people still – voluntarily – live there, work there, and dream there. It’s dangerous, it’s weird, but it’s home.

Into this mess comes our audience perspective character – in multiple senses of the term – Leonardo Watch. Due to a magical accident a few years prior, he ended up with the Mystic Eyes of the Gods – a power that grants him tremendous magical sight including the ability to see the true nature of things. He’s come to Hellsalem’s Lot, where he ends up joining (somewhat by accident) Libra, an organization that helps protect the more normal people of Hellsalem’s Lot from supernatural happenings – which means they’re very busy.

How this pans out is in the form of a bunch of Monster of the Week stories that slowly build up throughout the season to a larger threat. Over the course of these episodes, we get to learn more about Hellsalem’s Lot, some of the other members of Libra, and in particular Leo’s romantic interest, a frequently hospital-bound girl named White, and her brother Black, who both have a connection to the event that lead to the creation of Hellsalem’s Lot.

Blood Blockade Battlefront has a very dry sense of humor. The show uses a lot of quick jump cuts as a sort of mini-Gilligan cut for jokes, sort of like in FLCL. A character will say something, and we’ll get a cut to a couple of seconds later for the reaction, or something happening that would contradict that. It gives the dialog a rapid-fire sense of timing to the jokes. The show also uses arrows in scenes to comedically point out a sense of scale to emphasize how weird Hellsalem’s Lot is, or how out of his depth Leo is – showcasing how he’s just a dot against the side of a building he’s falling from/been thrown out of/combination of both, or just how big that absurdly big monster is.

Also, Nightow drops a lot of pop culture references in here – outside of stuff like a visual reference to Pacific Rim, or the premise remixing the concept of Demon City Shinjuku, there’s a character who is just ninja Abe Sapien, or sequences where characters literally go see Scanners or Twins, rather than serial-numbers-filed-off versions. It’s fun – I like when creators wear their influences on their sleeves, rather than trying to cover them up or file them off for fear of litigation.

Probably where I think the show stumbles is that while 12 episodes is just the right length for me to get through it this month (combined with some technical difficulties I had with Crunchyroll), I think this season could have fared better with 24 episodes, and had been able to use that space to work up to the season’s antagonist a little better. While the big bad doesn’t come completely out of nowhere, the amount of notice is just low enough that I can see another viewer being blindsided by them.

I feel like I need to add the manga to my long and ever-growing list of other manga series to read, because I really liked what I saw here, and I’d love to see what form the story takes in print.

Blood Blockade Battlefront is available for streaming on Crunchyroll, and has gotten a physical media release as well (Amazon Affiliate Link).

Please support my Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/countzeroor
Buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/countzero
Watch my Live-Streams on http://twitch.tv/countzeroor
Check out my Let’s Plays at https://www.youtube.com/@CountZeroOrPlays