armstrong.kenyon - 2016-12-23 16:58:02

I absolutely love the Cardfight Vanguard franchise as a whole, but even I’ll admit that the first season is an extremely slow start, which in turn leaves me with a dilemma.
You see, as a fan of the franchise I want as many people as possible to give this anime a chance, but as a reviewer I don’t want to give anything but my honest opinion. So of course, I will stay truthful and give you my genuine thoughts on Vanguard season 1.

First of all Vanguard does a great job of separating itself from its competitors (mainly yugioh), by having an interesting twist. Realism. This anime isn’t about fighting ancient egyptians with mystical artefacts or any of that kind of thing. Cardfight Vanguard season 1, is instead an underdog story of a teenage boy who gets into a trading card game, and enters tournaments to have fun and meet new people. He doesn’t really care about winning or anything, but instead about having fun, since the card game is his favorite hobby. For the most part there are very little stakes and is more about the card game itself. It really goes in depth and focuses on the deck building process along with the different strategies that the characters use. I’m going to be blunt right now and say that if you’re not willing to get into the nitty gritty and learn the meta of a card game, then this first season will be almost painfully boring for you.

And that’s the problem. Pacing. Vanguard has a lot of interesting elements, themes, characters ect that just haven’t gotten good yet. I do promise that everything does get better later on, but for now the characters are promising but don’t have much depth yet. Aichi and Rekka both eventually become two of my favorite anime characters, but right now they don’t really have anything going on for them.

Going back to the good, the soundtrack is great. It’s slow but still manages to create tension. Both of season 1’s openings are by Jam Project, the same guys that did the openings for a metric ton of anime, including One Punch Man.

The animation however, is very poor. The costume design is bafflingly bad right now. There is virtually no actual animation and the characters are almost constantly slightly off model. Not enough to truly be bad, but enough to be noticeable.

The English dub is one of my absolute favorites. They don’t use any well known voice actors like Johnny Yong Bosh or anything but this is to vanguard’s advantage in my opinion since these are almost guaranteed to be voices that don’t sound distractingly similar to 50 other anime characters, along with that I remember the voice direction being relatively solid.

Yes. This entire review has consisted of nothing but “it gets better later” but that’s really what it comes down to. I guess you could technically skip this first series but I personally can’t advocate skipping parts. Don’t get me wrong though, the first series does have a lot for good things to offer, The realistic tone, the focus on the card game itself, the main setting being a card shop, and speaking of the card game, the game itself is very good which in turn helps make the anime interesting.

But this first season is slow. Very slow. ESPECIALLY after you get to the halfway point where something happens, that does adhere to the realistic tone, but artificially lengthens this first series and adds a lot more filler.

Do cardgames/ interesting slice of life’s interest you? So much so that you’d be willing to slog through a mediocre first season? I’ll let you guys make that decision yourselves.