Trinity Blood: a disappointment

Trinity Blood is a series rife with drama and frustrations, and that started before I even started to watch the fucking series. I bought the series from my favorite bookstore and went home to watch it, and just as I was getting into it I got a lovely disk read error. I sighed and prepared to clean the disk to get whatever fingerprint or smudge was on my disk, but was shocked to find that brand new, out of the wrapping, there was a MASSIVE scratch on the damnable disk.

I went back to my bookstore and found out that, because the particular series release that I had purchased was no longer in stock, that meant that it was no easy task for the disks to be replaced and that my bookstore buddy would have to eat the cost of it. Fuck that. So I contacted the company directly and asked them to replace their shitty disks, and they responded saying that the place I bought it from would replace the disks, which I already know wasn't true. I started to worry that I really would have to let my bookstore buddy eat the cost of.

Then the brilliance of "what about the Internet, you sodding git," hit me. I have friends. They have DVD burners. I legally own the series. Asking a friend to give me a "backup"/replacement disk as downloaded from the internet was much smarter. In fact, when I did get my replacements, from a lovely friend indeed, the quality of those disks was higher than the unscratched normal disks in the series. Huzzah!

Now, a proper review of the anime. It starts slow. The general world is that after Armageddon, a proper end of the world with nukes and everything, the world goes on with the only notable difference from before being that there is now a vampire society for some reason that is at odds with the Vatican, the hope and the light of the human existence.

The main character, Father Able Nightroad, is a sort of helpless whiny twit who is still somehow endearing even as he's annoying. He attempts to help people without a huge amount of success, and there are other Vatican agents who are cool but more or less there to fill out the character list without ever actually getting any decent story about any of them. Oh, and for some reason Father Able is also a Crusnik, which is called the next step up from vampires, but has something to do with nanomachines and... Frankly it doesn't make a lot of goddamn sense, but he looks cool and kicks ass, so that should make up for some of the other details of the series.

Or not. This anmie suffers from a slew of over used anime mainstays. For instance, there is a beautiful female agent of the Vatican who looks like she's smuggling watermelons most of the time. There is a section with an incredibly irritating young girl with a mysterious past, woooo. All of the important characters are rather that being one dimensional are we'll say 1.1 dimensional; there's a pretense of characterization but in reality they remain the face with recognizable hair and a weapon that they were and that they always will be. Every weapon that is ever fired has a twenty second power up time and looks like it's becoming a sucking void of doom rather than a giant beam weapon. And, of course, the Father Able, the Crusnik, only uses his powers at a certain level for a while, but then after he updates, he only uses the second power; it all just feels tacked on and useless.

However, even for all my prattling on about the downsides, there are good things to this anmie. It is beautiful, and I mean really beautiful. They mix standard animation and computer generated animation very skillfully, and the one dimensional character are always drawn very well and the animation itself is smooth and elegant in its simplicity. The voice acting, though VERY annoying at times, is generally superb with interesting and talented actors for almost every character. And the music is sublime. My only complaint with the music is that it often feels out of place for the scene the music is in, but it is almost always beautiful and pleasant to listen to.

Ultimately, without giving too much away, the end of the series is VERY unsatisfying, even for an anime. I enjoyed the series generally, but too much was left wide open with not even a vague attempt to tie up loose ends. The series ends on a loose end. After having watched Samurai 7, a particularly good anime, this was lacking. So borrow it from me if you're interested, but I'd skip it if I were you.