This Week in Anime

Noblesse This Mess

Nicky
Hey Jean-Karlo, we're almost to the end of the year so why don't we do ourselves a favor and lower the stakes. Today we'll be covering a laidback comedy with lots of fun high school shenanigans like sports, romance, and of course, ramen!

Yep! Today we'll be covering the hot new Crunchyroll original, Noblesse!

I don't really feel like I'm lying though. On the surface Noblesse is a serious action series about a team of vampires fighting an evil organization, but underneath it's about 70% Dracula waking up from a long nap and deciding he wanted to go to high school for a bit.

Noblesse also ran from 2007 to 2019, and previously in 2016 it's first "volume" or arc of story was condensed into a 31 minute original net anime called Noblesse: Awakening, that's ALSO on Crunchyroll but NOT even grouped with the series even though the series uses the ONA as its pilot and picks up right where it left off, constantly referencing it as the inciting incident of the story. So basically if you're just gonna start with the series proper, you're going to be confused as hell!!

Those have you who read preview-guide may have noted the premiere coming off as jumbled and confusing because of this so I'm going to quickly summarize the events of the ONA for people reading here. Basically, our main character Cadis Etrama Di Raizel, a powerful noble was taking a dirt nap for the past 800 years until someone fished his bed out of the ocean Dio Brando-style. He wakes up in an abandoned building and decides to just get up and stretch his legs, eventually stumbling upon his old servant, Frankenstein, who is now the Director of Ye Ran High School. Since he's been asleep caveman-style he decides he needs to be re-educated and makes friends with some of his new classmates, who nickname him Rai. Meanwhile, an evil organization called the Union, that uses modified humans as soldiers, sends one of them codenamed M-21. In their quest for Ultimate Power, the Union puts Rai's new friends in danger. They are then saved by a combination M-21's partner sacrificing himself and Rai sweeping in for the rescue. Afterwards, the kids get their memory erased of the incident and since The Union was trying to dispose of M-21, he has no other option but to desert and take refuge in Frankenstein's house.

And yet I still stand by my statement that despite all this plot, the other 70% is still totally just lame-ass fish-out-of-water jokes like Rai learning to use a cellphone or drawing a cute kitty on Yusuke's cast (after he broke his arm in the ONA).

It's a bit tonally awkward and stiff like Rai passing a b-ball without dribbling but it does wear on you and start becoming endearing even though it's super juvenile and lame. I would rather have seen it embrace it because it's the only thing mildly interesting among all the other already-used tropes. It gets a little better as the cast grows and starts playing off of each-other. At which point our main character Rai basically does nothing but sit around and sip tea because he's got the wits and personality of a bag of hammers.

Though, tbh, I'm not quite sure if it's also just reviewer Stockholm Syndrome at this point. The first ramen joke is lame but then by the tenth time it's suddenly hilarious because it's the only oasis in bouts of dry exposition, even if it's about as shallow than most puddles.

Yeah, M-21 is basically the real protagonist in my eyes as Yu-chan and Rai don't have much in the head department, they're also lacking any succinct emotional conflict.

RWBY is a good comparison, though I'm going to note that as a production, Noblesse isn't incompetent, and most of the time the action by Production I.G. is actually quite good, I'm just often bored to tears by it because I don't find much of it original and the first half of the series fails to hook me emotionally when they're mostly just fighting random thugs.

What this also means that it's totally forgettable though, unlike RWBY or Gibiate where I can laugh at how absolutely incompetent they are that their awfulness sticks in my mind. Noblesse tries just enough that I feel bad mocking it in the same way, but it's also not good enough to be really worth my time, and if I wanted to watch I.G. do some sick vampire action with bits of family moments, I'd watched Blood+ again like I did in middle school, on my old CRT TV and everything.

I also watched most of those too! But still, Noblesse doesn't really do anything new with the concept of vampires. The biggest change is that true Nobles aren't inherently malevolent and instead represent represent a sort of Trickle Down style ecosystem which I guess works when everyone gets to live up at Franky's house and gets a fair job that pays. Sometimes to Franky's detriment as House Mom.

The superpowers are all vaguely defined too and only express themselves in the cool powered-up anime battles. Rai himself doesn't really do more than stand around compared to some of the more Brawl-y characters like Yusuke though, or Seira who actually gets a cool weapon.

Like if you're supposed to be the ultimate being why would you have problems learning information enough that you have to go to SCHOOL with a bunch of babies? Couldn't you just read about it?? Why would the ultimate being be bad at video games if they're supposed to have heightened senses, etc?? The most we see him do is some cool blood magic and mind control.

And it's kinda sad actually because not all the characters are bad either, just given very little material. The DA-5 start out as standard villains but end up being equally scary and somewhat compelling in ways that they're marginalized as soldiers. Seira and Regis help round out the casts without simply being fish-out-of-water in the same way Rai is. I even endeared to Yu's friend Manabu, who gained a friendship with a fellow hacker-bro, even if Yu is so dumb he mistakes it for flirting (and then resolves to support his bffsies no matter what his pref is)

While, I hesitate to call this bad, these are still just "moments" though and they never come together to make a cohesive show. There's not a big larger message or an ethos to get behind other than "Nakama" at some point, it's enough to string the show along but most of the time the show makes ME want to take a 800-year long nap, and since there's nothing to keep you around or that makes the show super-memorable, it'll probably be forgotten within the next few months. Even in terms of action, there are some better and more ambitious shows this season from Jujutsu Kaisen to Akudama Drive. Noblesse might share some tropes with other anime like it but what makes them memorable is when they give you something to really chew on.

Anyways, the lesson here is : don't let your noodles get soggy and don't let your anime be wet noodles! With so many options for anime out there everyday, it doesn't hurt to be more choosy with how you spend your time. Not everything shiny and new ends up being good or original.

Look, some of us just can't help but be tempted by a pretty face, alright?

Just be more careful how you go about it. You might just end up embarrassing yourself lol.