Yesterday, I made an epic trek to the mall to buy myself some anime. I ended up buying “Blood: The Last Vampire.” It’s amazing how something so beautiful can be so disappointing. B:tLV is an astounding film. It uses top-notch quality animation as well as sound and storytelling to bring the most fast-paced, pulse-pounding 30 minutes of anime I’ve ever seen. But it seems I always bring up the problem right in the middle of my positive messages… it’s only 30 freakin’ minutes long. All signs pointed to “feature-length film.” The box read “83 minutes.” “That’s a bit short for a film,” I told myself. “But it looks rather awesome anyway.” I pop it into my VCR (I don’t trust DVDs yet :P), and I get 10 minutes of previews, 15 minutes of “the making of B:tLV,” and 5 minutes of a completely unrelated cracked-out Japanese music video. That leaves me with 30 minutes of an amazing anime… cut terribly short. For the whole movie, I thought I was watching an opening scene to hype me up for the real action. What I got for my hopes was a “the end.”
This whole scenario is very similar to my encounter with Zone of the Enders. It comes with these great extra features (like the MGS2 demo), but leaves me wanting a HELL of a lot more. Fortunately, I’ll be able to tell my anime club about my woes before I show this to them. They’ll love it anyway.