In “Blast of Tempest”, magic and sorcery exist in the modern world. I found myself extremely excited about the plot when I first looked into this anime. Especially after I found out that the story was based off Shakespeare’s “Tempest”.

In this story, the main protagonists, Mahiro and Yoshino, are best friends. After the murder of Mahiro’s sister, Aika, he is obsessive over trying to find the killer responsible and avenge her death. The princess of the Kusaribe family, Hakaze, contacts Mahiro and he forms a contract with her, allowing him to use magic to help Hakaze return to Japan after her banishment. She must do this before the “Tree of Exodus” destroys the “Tree of Genesis” and ultimately destroys the world. The only thing he asks for in return is help to find his sister’s killer.

I was slightly disappointed with the story. I thought it was a great concept and I found myself really enjoying the opening episodes, but after this there was hardly any meaningful character development or progression. After initially setting up the characters, the story moved straight onto the main battle. I think it would have been better if there had been a lot more development for the characters, maybe a few battles and side stories, to stop this from happening so quickly. I know it’s only the first part of a season, but in my opinion they should have used a whole season to get to the final battle. To be fair, they had stuck to the manga – the same problem happened in this too, I was just expecting them to expand a bit more on the story so that nothing happened too quickly. Although this is a lot of negativity I did enjoy the story, I just thought that the story was too quick. So don’t let this put you off!

As for the characters, I really liked how they were presented as very dramatic and distinguishable, something needed for a story based of an influential play. Again, since they seem to | I wish there had been more room for development, but I expect this would happen in the second part of the anime.

The art style and animation were also very good. I’m personally a fan of the original creator’s style and ‘Bones’ did a good job of sticking to it. The animation was very smooth and fluid so I quite enjoyed this. They also made the colour scheme very realistic so I thought this helped relate to the story more.

“Blast of Tempest” is not available as a dubbed anime. The subbed voices are really good. They fit the characters, although it is a bit difficult distinguishing between the voices of Mahiro and Yoshino.

As for extras on the disc, the DVD offers the usual option to watch the textless opening and closing sequences. It also has the trailers for “Rosario + Vampire”, “The Garden of Sinners” and“Fate/Zero”.

Review Summary

On the whole I really enjoyed the anime. I thought it was a bit too quick and not even development but the story and characters were extremely good. It sticks to the manga well and I really liked that it was based off “The Tempest”.