Plot: Thousands of years ago, at the dawn of humanity, God blessed the world with prosperity and light. However, the humans, greedy for more, wished for darkness as well. They were granted their wish, and darkness fell upon them. It invaded the hearts of men, and humanity had to fight against it. Warriors of light emerged and triumphed over the darkness, but now the darkness has returned, heralding in the call for warriors of light.
A dark and evil king named Nene is terrorizing villages everywhere looking for a special power, kidnapping children that he believes possess the ability to wield it. One day, Nene’s forces target the village of a boy named Shu, who wishes for nothing more than to be a brave warrior called a Knight Master and travel the world to look for adventure.
He believes he’s found a Knight Master when he meets the stoic woman named Zola, but is disappointed when she states that she is no such thing. When the attack commences on Shu’s village, he races to find Zola and her companion, a boy named Jiro, to recruit them to help fight them off. They refuse, however, and tell him that if he wants his village saved he must do it himself.
Jiro and his friends, a girl named Kluke and three others, make a valiant effort to fight off the soldiers, but to no avail. The leader of the soldiers is met with Zola and he prepares for battle by calling on his shadow, which turns into a goblin-like beast. Zola too calls upon her shadow, a killer bat.
The goblin is no match for Killer Bat, but the resulting battle causes debris to fly everywhere. Just as Shu’s friends are about to be killed by a falling heap of debris, he leaps into the path of danger with nothing but the wish to save them behind him. As he’s about to get crushed, his shadow suddenly emerges as a brilliant blue dragon, aptly named Blue Dragon, the incredible power everyone’s been looking for.
Breakdown: Blue Dragon is a title I’ve been aware of for quite some time, but I’ve never bothered to look up any information on it.
At face value, there’s not really anything special about this series so far besides the Akira Toriyama aesthetics. Being clear, Toriyama only lent his talent to the art. He had no hand in the story.
The opening in particular about the powers of light and darkness battling each other was very milquetoast. The aspect of the shadows is also not horribly creative since it’s basically just a fancy way of saying ‘familiar.’
As a first episode, it fares okay. We get the personalities of all of the main characters fairly effectively, even if a good chunk of them are also stereotypes. Shu is the headstrong shounen fighting fantasy anime lead character who has a heart of gold, wants to protect the people he loves and is kinda dense. But he has the best power because main character. I’ll stave off of making a stark comparison between him and Goku for now.
You have the perpetually grumpy rival in Jiro.
Kluke is a bit of a generic love interest, though she’s also sort of a big sister to Shu, and her love of gadgetry is a nice touch.
Zola in particular caught my eye because holy shit it has gotten annoying to not have many prominent legit female fighters throughout shounen. Zola is one kickass pirate-clad assassin girl.
The enemies are horribly generic, destroying villages and beating up kids while chuckling evilly. Even the leader’s shadow is a typical goblin thing.
Shu discovering his power through a desire to save his friends is also typical. Bear in mind, using tropes is not inherently bad. You just have to do enough with the tropes to make them interesting and as unique as possible, and they just aren’t doing that so far.
They don’t explain these powers much at all in this episode. We know that some people can summon monsters through their shadows and that’s about it. We have no clue what constitutes gaining this ability, why certain people get certain shadows, why it seems like they were collecting kids for the sake of summoning the blue dragon (you can’t really argue that only kids can summon shadows because the leader guy is definitely an adult and Zola’s a teen at least), what’s so special about the shadows, how they work etc. They don’t even explain Nene and the Gran Kingdom well.
That being said, it is obviously very stylized because Akira Toriyama, and I never felt bored while watching. I was never really immersed in it that much, but I didn’t find it to be that bad, especially with Zola.
Verdict:
A slightly reluctant yes. Yet another freshly hatched Shounen Step-By-Step. Hopefully it just gets better after this point.
Update: Shounen Step-By-Step has been started!
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The Anime Madhouse 
I heard of this, but never saw Blue Dragon. I thought it would be another DBZ rehash with Toriyama’s art style, but I didn’t know he wasn’t in charge of the story. There was also a manga spin-off called Ral Grad which had Takeshi Obata (Death Note, Hikaru no Go, Bakuman, etc.) doing the art.
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