Tag Archives: broken blade

V: The Five-Part Collapse

Ouch.

In the second part of Break Blade, a running golem has its leg shot out. So great is its momentum that after initially sliding face-first into the ground, it enters a catastrophic bouncing roll making, by my count, five distinct contacts with the ground. (I found the ground itself unconvincing when I looked hard at it, but I suppose savings had to be made somewhere. Or else my amateurish sense for animation’s off, as usual.) Quite a departure for a robot which had performed so efficiently up to that point, but then we have a foot in the shot reminding us whose mecha is the really cool one.

Break (or Broken, maybe) Blade as a whole is a strange thing. Outside of the finely-detailed robot-on-robot violence, and the elegant super-real reversal built into the manga’s premise, it all feels a bit plodding to me. So it’s good that these guys can make a golem falling over look impressively nasty.