Black Bullet - Anime - AniDB (2024)

Black Bullet is a harem and SF anime about a cyborg high school student and his red-eyed mutant loli partner with super-human strength fighting against a virus that turns people into CGI monsters. You think it sounds bad? Don’t worry, it gets worse!

Production-wise, it’s good

Animation and sound is what saves this anime from being complete trash. The voice acting is pretty alright if you can tolerate the protagonist’s constant yelling (it’s the same voice actor as Eren from Attack on Titan, by the way) and the lolis’ high-pitched voices. Music-wise the background music was good and there are even some tracks that are worth re-listening, such as Crisis Point and Hiruko Kagetane’s theme. The opening and the ending were nice, too. The fight scenes are done pretty well and the 2D animation is smooth and clean. The CGI doesn’t look very good, particularly the huge CGI monsters, but to be fair I’ve seen way worse. The backgrounds and props look good and are very detailed. However, the character designs aren’t great and look either very generic or very incoherent – they don’t really fit the story and the general mood of the series. There are also many times where the characters faces look inconsistent and ugly. But for the most part, it looks very good.

An Attack on Titan rip-off?

In their reviews and comments about this anime, a lot of people have said that it was a rip-off of Attack on Titan, but in my opinion, that is an exaggeration. Granted, there are some significant similarities in the setting: humanity is threatened by horrible creatures and people are living in “safe-zones” protected by a structure (monolith) that keep the creatures away, but that’s about it. Apart from that, they have nothing in common. In fact, this series has more in common with the average zombie apocalypse setting than with the masterpiece that is Attack on Titan.

A harem show with tons of lolis

The worst aspects of this show are the harem elements and the loli bullshit. Most of the female characters, lolis included, are madly in love with the protagonist and will fight to decide who gets to have sexual intercourse with him. As a result, the “comedy” in this anime is about sex, girls talking about their boobs’ size, but especially pedophilia – because pedophilia is cute and funny, apparently!

Yep, most of the supposedly comical and cute elements are borderline pedophilia: Enju, the protagonist’s loli partner, can only talk about how much she loves the main character and how she wants to marry him and “make babies” with him (so wholesome!), she calls him her “fiancé”, the protagonist says dumb stuff about her boobs size, Enju and the protagonist live together and sleep in the same bed, there are moments where Enju is half-naked and other moments where the protagonist looks below her skirt (so cute!) and then there’s also the fact that in the first episode, the anime jokes about Enju being covered in “white sticky stuff” (so funny!).

If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s also another loli that wants to marry the protagonist and calls him “big brother” (how unexpected!), and they go on a date together because… I don’t know… it’s not like your very survival is being threatened by a monster virus and you probably have something better to do than going to the mall and buying fancy clothes.

The story is complete nonsense

The job of the protagonist partner is to fight the monsters called Gastreas, but they aren’t soldiers, policemen or even employed by the state. They are “civil officers” who operate in pairs with a loli and work for a private agency and are sometimes called by the police or the government to eliminate Gastreas. Do you realize how stupid that is? They partner with red-eyed lolis with supernatural strength who are the only people capable of fighting the Gastreas. They are supposed to be humanity’s last hope, yet they are private contractors. Shouldn’t these people be under government control? Some of them even do this as a part-time job: the protagonist and his “boss” (a tsundere with big boobs, how original) are high school students, and it is shown that they aren’t remunerated very well, as they are struggling to get enough food. That’s right, the saviors of humanity are poor. How uncharacteristic and funny.

The Gastreas can’t be killed by regular weapons, only Varanium rounds can kill them. Varanium rounds are supposed to be expensive, but the protagonist gets them for free from his other female friend with big boobs who works in the weapon industry – how convenient! Why would she give them for free, you might ask? For advertisement, apparently… what a dumb excuse!

The character designs seem completely random. Seitenshi, the ruler of the Tokyo area, is clothed like a princess or a British woman from the Victorian era. She also lives in some sort of palace and has an advisor that looks like the stereotype of a Chinese kung fu master. One of the red-eyed lolis wears a huge and impractical dress, when she is supposed to be a sniper and a professional killer. Yes, the story takes place in the future, and fashion and clothing may have evolved. However the background characters and most of the secondary characters are clothed like people of today, so this is incoherent.

At some point, the loli with a weird dress that I mentioned earlier is arrested for doing bad stuff – murder of a policeman and assassination attempt on the ruler of the Tokyo area, but they forgive her so that she can join the protagonist’s harem and play the little sister fetish. Hilarious.

In one episode, the protagonist, who became the teacher of a classroom of red-eyed lolis (not commenting on that one), decides to go on a field trip, even though Tokyo is on the verge of being annihilated by a huge Gastrea.

Then there’s the fact that they never explain why they don’t use weapons of mass destruction against the Gastrea. True, normal bullets can’t kill them, but a nuke or some napalm should do the job.

But the thing that makes the less sense in this anime is the systemic racism against the red-eyed lolis. Yeah… That sounds pretty stupid – and it is! The “cursed children” are discriminated against by the vast majority of the people because they are mutant lolis who carry the Gastrea virus and have supernatural strength. In many episodes the anime shows citizens mistreating them and killing them. It is shown several times that it is not just the people who despise them, but also the government and the institutions. The red-eyed lolis live in an abandoned district, separated from the rest of the people. In one episode you see two or three policemen beating and then shooting a red-eyed loli who stole food. This isn’t very believable. That people are scared or suspicious of children with supernatural strength is understandable, but why would the state discriminate them too, when the “cursed children” are the only ones who can defeat the Gastrea and when the government could actually use their supernatural strength to assert their dominance over the masses? This makes no sense.

Rushed plot

Stuff happens way too fast in this anime. Some characters die one or two episodes after being introduced. Then you have Hiruko Kagetane, who is presented as the main antagonist in the first episodes, tries to bring the protagonist to the dark side as early as episode 2, and gets eliminated by him in episode 4, only to reappear towards the end of the series as the protagonist’s ally. The last episodes are even more rushed than the rest of the series: one of the huge Gastrea that is supposed to be very strong and dangerous is killed in a matter of seconds, the protagonist becomes a commander and suddenly turns into an authoritarian tyrant for like 5 minutes and then goes back to normal.

The characters are either cliché or incoherent

The protagonist is a high school student with a cyborg body made of Varanium, making him pretty overpowered and almost immortal – how convenient for the plot! By the way, why would a 16-year old high school student have such an expensive enhanced body? Good question! Probably because he needs it to hunt monsters with his red-eyed mutant loli “friend”. Right, that makes no sense. This character always gets angry and is constantly yelling for no reason. He also has a weird tendency to yell the name of his attacks which is a bit annoying. Well actually, he isn’t the only one. The antagonist, too, likes to spout nonsense like “Allelujah” or “Gospel” while fighting with the protagonist.

As I already said, this show is a harem and most of the female characters just want to have sex with the protagonist for some unknown reason. This automatically makes them bad and predictable characters with overused archetypes such as the tsundere with big boobs, the evil and bloodthirsty loli, and other boring clichés seen hundreds of times in anime. Then you also have Seitenshi, the ruler of the Tokyo area, the “too young too simple, sometimes naive” idealist who is clothed like a princess and somehow ascended to a position of power. How did she managed to do it when she is such a naive and stupid 16-year old girl? Good question! Go ask her advisor who looks like a Kung-fu master. Right, that makes no sense.

Then you have the cartoonishly evil characters with distorted and overly evil faces like Seitenshi’s bodyguard, whose only purpose in life is to be super angry at the protagonist, and the ruler of some other area in Japan who is nothing more than your cliché villain that wants the world under his boot.

Edginess

As I said earlier, towards the end of the series, the protagonist somehow becomes commander of the “civil officers” who must stop an incoming Gastrea invasion, and turns into a dictator, or at least that’s how the anime tries to portray him. In fact, the only authoritarian stuff that he does is shooting the leg of a deserter. But seriously, what kind of armed body allows desertion? Armies don’t, paramilitary groups don’t, mercenaries don’t. Why would the “civil officers” be allowed to desert when Tokyo is about to be destroyed by thousands of giant monsters? In times of war, desertion is punished way more harshly than this. During WW1 the French Army shot at least 918 of its own soldiers for cowardice, and we’re talking about reality here, not a post-apocalyptic world where giant monsters decimated mankind. So the protagonist only did what all commanders would (and should) have done, and I would even say he was pretty kind, as there wasn’t even any execution. Yet the anime tries to portray him as a tyrant, and the protagonist himself thinks he is being a tyrant when acting like this. What does that mean? That the anime tries to make the protagonist cool and edgy, but fails miserably and it ends up as ridiculous.

But that’s not the only time they fail at making their characters look cool. The ending actually manages to do worse than this. In the very last scenes of the last episode, a very evil dude is introduced. Very evil dude is Kisara’s (the protagonist’s tsundere boss with big boobs) brother. Very evil dude did very bad things that I will not explain here because the review would be too long. As a consequence, Kisara is very angry at him, and challenges him to a duel. She slashes him with her Japanese sword. Again, the anime tries to portray her as evil and dark, and she acts as if she is evil, even though the man clearly deserved his punishment. But the worst thing in this scene is that Kisara, who until now, acted as the typical tsundere who supports the protagonist and is in love with him, suddenly turns into some sort of crazy woman. There is no explanation as to why her personality changed so suddenly. What does that mean? That the anime tries to be very dark and edgy, but fails miserably and it ends up as hilariously bad. The anime ends on this unexplained personality change and on Kisara’s exaggeratedly evil looking face. A fitting ending for this dumb series.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, Black Bullet is yet another dumb harem show with a nonsensical plot and cliché characters. Yet another anime filled with “cute” lolis to appeal to the ped- I mean the “lolicons”. Yet another anime that tries to be dark and violent to impress the teenage anime fans who think that violence means maturity. Yet another light novel adaptation that had too much effort put into the animation and the music when the original story was garbage.

Black Bullet - Anime - AniDB (2024)

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