Black Rock Shooter: Dawnfall

Black Rock Shooter: Dawnfall (ブラックロックシューター: Dawn Fall / Burakkurokkushūtā: Dawn Fall) is a 2022 Japanese anime series, Season 1 is now available for download and streaming on KatMovieHD. .

‘Black Rock Shooter: Dawnfall (Season 1) 2022’ Anime Review:

His show is an absolute edgelord nightmare of mediocre writing. In the early episodes it does its best to be gritty and dark, throwing around plenty of curses, death, and taunts about sex, along with on-screen rape. None of this serves any purpose other than trying to speed it up, though once it gets into the second half I find myself missing it because of a disappointing lack of shock value. The effort, while crude and unnecessary, was more than entertaining. The second half of the mill’s plot is filled with the same tropes and archetypes employed by characters with no notable characteristics or interesting personalities. Again, despite being called Black Rock Shooter, most of the characters and premises in this story are brand new, and if it weren’t for trying to promote milk sales from the anime days of the late 2000s, I might have Would have forgiven more. What has been added to the story is definitely not good but if it had tried to stand on its own, it might have been forced to do something interesting. Granted that the characters we take from BRS are so devoid of anything that actually made them likeable, we even named them based on tarot cards (since the power already was a tarot card). Not only is it weird to want to drag an IP through shit, but it’s even weirder to not call the main character by his own name 90% of the time afterwards. And in-universe justification is just as dumb as saying that Empress and Death are recognizable names for orphans. Again there is no good reason for changes regardless of quality.

The show is CG, which lets it down in a lot of people’s eyes. In its defense, the CGI is completely passable, and the weak parts are covered in fog and dim lighting like a Marvel movie. That being said the designs themselves are completely average with nothing that stands out or interesting, and the new designs for established characters are downright criminal. When Black Rock Shooter, Deadmaster, and Strength introduced themselves, I couldn’t help but verbally cry “What did they do to you?” The new designs aren’t foreign to this franchise as it had a lot of fandom power in its prime, but the problem is that these designs fall down visually and in terms of character expression.

The music commits the taboo of ignoring the old OP (yes it plays in the end credits but that’s to be expected and slapped in the face with that nonsense) and what replaces it. He is unreal bit rock. I enjoyed listening to ZAQ for the first time in a while, but the song shouldn’t be associated with Black Rock Shooter. The OST reminded me of the forgotten Marvel movies to the point where I was convinced I heard Disney Marvel’s copyrighted sound effects. This could be entirely possible considering Disney was involved and it was exclusive to their streaming service. (Gosh, I can’t imagine stumbling across the first episodes of Edge Lord after watching The Lion King or something, didn’t Disney see the script before greenlighting?)

I had a lot of problems with both of the other Black Rock Shooter adaptations, but five minutes into this show I was apologizing to Mari Okada for being so harsh. For all its flaws and odd choices it still felt like BRS and had a lot to admire. These adaptations had heart and understood the show’s need to stand on the strength of its emotions, making the story feel like a military otaku capturing figures and smashing them together. Nothing to praise or take away from this iteration… I guess the bragging rights have seen a veritable train wreck of a franchise that was a mistake from initial concept to completion. The voice cast does its best to inject some humanity and if you look closely, there are enough worthy choices or moments that I’m sure most of the crew tried their best too. But it was never working no matter how much effort was made, and many decisions made it worse.