Reviews for Baldr Force Exe Resolution (5.33) 1r4j3y

It's pretty sad if your only forte is the OST.

Baldr Force EXE is another game-to-anime adaption, which usually means that it is either really good or fails to live up to the original game. In this case, it tries too hard to stick to the story in the game, resulting in a rushed story in order to fit it all within 4 episodes.

Animation[/u]: Aside of the horrid CG, the characters actually look good.

I've previously seen some screenshots of the game, as well as the fansubbed OP-song, so I was expecting some less quality, but the characters looked pretty good.
The animation looked pretty solid most of the time, if you can actually look past the horrid CG they put on display sometimes. I'm not known as a CG-lover, nor am I a mecha-lover, but I do cringe whenever I see a badly made CG-mecha and that happened a bit too often with this show.

Sound: The OST is by far the best of this show.

The music is good and I dare to say that its OST is well worth listening to. I've sound is well known for its experimental music which often consists of techno. By applying these songs to the show, they manage at times to increase the expectations and to draw you in if the story doesn't do so.

Story: If they didn't try to fit it all in 4 episodes, it might've been something.

The story starts off pretty decently and it progresses fairly okay, but near the end it looks like they tried to stick too closely to the original game. In order to not stray too much, they seemed to have cut some sideplots which did explain a couple of issues. Because of that it you're bound to raise your eyebrows at times because events or dialogues don't make sense. At other times you feel like the story has plotholes big enough to swallow a truck. This is especially the case at the end, when you feel a particular ending coming up but which simply fails to be good.

If you ever played one of these kind of games, you probably know the feeling of having missed an event, leaving you with an incomplete ending - a long-winded romance without getting laid, a hero who beats the demon but loses his life in the process which causes you to miss the final ending movie, that kind of thing. This show feels pretty similar, as if they themselves forgot to integrate an event to conclude the show properly.

So yeah, it feels like a solid story, but if you have to fill in the numerous gaps yourself since they don't explain why things happen, it doesn't make things a lot more enjoyable, nor makes it the story accessible.

Characters[/u]: Too much character development, but not enough episodes to show it in.

The problem I mostly had with the characters was that there were simply too many of them. There are practically 3 seperate groups of people and every single one of them is supposed to have at least something to do with the story. The problem here is that in order to let them be what they're supposed to be, there is a lot of things to cram in the episodes they are allowed to make. This sometimes results in characters acting out of character, as if the watcher missed a particular scene where that character had its development to evolve into the character you see later in the show.
This also means that despite the characters actually getting character development, it doesn't feel natural, because you hardly ever get to see why that particular character has changed.
Unfortunately, this partly goes for the protagonist as well, despite him getting by far the most events to evolve.

Is this show worth watching at all then?[/u]

Well, actually - no. It has a solid story - but they forgot to explain half of it; it has some interesting characters - but they evolve without you seeing why they do so. So in the end, it is not a bad show, but there is plenty of the stuff missing which should make the connections.
That's why to me it feels like the only real way to really appreciate this show is to have played the game before it, since only then you know why things happen and why people suddenly change. To fill in the gaps they didn't tell you in the anime.
If they had extended it to 6-8 episodes, this might've been a lot better, making it a worthy show, but without it it is hard to make any recommendations for this show.

That is, except for the OST, which stands out from the rest of the show.