I was very excited to learn about the new
Dororo anime. I was even more excited to find out that I would have enough time to put out a review of
Blood Will Tell before it came out. Well, it's a day late, but it's close enough.
I didn't want to have to review this so soon, but I'm glad I did. This game deserves more love and attention than it currently gets, and the best thing I can hope for is that the new anime brings more people to this title. Or perhaps the anime performs well enough that we could get a new
Dororo game.
So what more can I say about
Blood Will Tell that I didn't touch on in the video? For starters, the game barely has music. I usually play games with the sound off, so I can watch a movie, a video, or listen to a podcast on the side. Its not until I go to make the video when I listen to the game's music to find something I can put in the background.
Blood Will Tell's music consists of a couple actual songs, and the rest is just ambient noise you would associate with a game set in feudal Japan. So for the music I used tracks from Way of the Samurai 2 and Genji: Dawn of the Samurai, and also Sakura Wars for the ending. Its like the music department just took the day off when it came to
Blood Will Tell, and that's sad, because the game is a lot of fun.
By the time this comes out, the first episode of the anime has been released. I saw it, and while I mostly enjoyed it, I have some hesistations. Every adaption of
Dororo keeps the origin story the same, but goes in wildly different places when it comes to the rest of the tale. This is nothing new, we've seen it happen with lots of different franchises, but part of the reason it happens so often in this one is because the original manga did not have an ending. It ends with Hyakkimaru and Dororo parting ways, and then we get narration telling us that over the course of fifty years, Hyakkimaru killed the rest of the fiends. That's really boring and it leaves a lot of loose ends hanging around, and I hope that the new anime doesn't follow the exact same path of the manga.
After seeing the first episode, I think it will follow the manga more faithfully than
Blood Will Tell, but it will avoid the manga's shortcomings. From the promotional videos you can see clips of Hyakkimaru going crazy and slaughtering a bunch of samurai. The arc that that clip is taken from exists in
Blood Will Tell, but it's been completely butchered to remove any of the tension or emotion from the story. I'm glad to see that it's going to be part of the new anime. At the same time, after watching the first episode, I see some signs that the anime will also take some shortcuts. In the first episode, we're introduced to Hyakkimaru through an action scene where he saves Dororo from a river monster, and regains his face, which up until that point, was just a mask. It's not clear yet, but it looks like he also got his real eyes back at the same time, which to me I see as an indication that they might group body parts together. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, because I want the anime to be adventurous, and since the adventure is about Hyakkimaru getting all 48 of his body parts back, it would be dissatisfying to see him kill these fiends off-screen. I have no idea where the plot is going to go. I've studied the promotional videos and everything that they've shown comes from early storylines that appear in almost every adaptation of the manga.
One thing I am also glad for is the fact that Dororo looks like a little girl. Dororo is supposed to be a tiny, cute person, and the version of her we got in the game and in the live action film was an annoying teenager. However, I don't like how Hyakkimaru looks. He's supposed to be this muscular, sculpted man with a bit of an attitude, and the version of him I've seen so far looks slender and cold. Now, that could be on purpose, and as he grows more bones and muscles back he'll take on a shape I'm more familiar with, but at the moment he seems too generic for me.
That said, I just want the anime to be good. This franchise is too cool and too interesting to stay dormant. Have a good one.
