Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
You would have to be a very specific kind of person to prioritize watching Build Divide: Code Black over most of what’s airing this season.
The very first thing to know is this. Build Divide is based on a trading card game. The second thing to know is that said game appears to be paper-only. (I cursorily googled to try to find a digital client, official or otherwise, and had no luck.) The third thing to know is that this anime is produced by the famously spotty LIDEN FILMS, who seem to have picked up a weird habit of working on things with “Code Black” as a subtitle, following their excursion into Cells At Work: Code Black earlier this year.
So right off the top; you must ask yourself if you want to watch a decent but certainly not amazing-looking anime for a card game that you’re probably, just speaking statistically, never going to get to play. Oh, and it’s two cours. That’s a lot to ask upfront. There are a number of anime airing right now, both better and worse than this, that simply don’t demand you to care about quite this many things. To put it in video game critic journalist terms, I would not say that Build Divide: Code Black “respects your time.” Just from a practical point of view, no matter how good or bad the series up being, that is a pretty hefty disadvantage to have to overcome.
Normally I’d here segue into telling you what the show is actually is about, but the plot details we get here are hilariously sparse. Beating the local big kahuna at a card game lets you get a wish granted. Our female lead (Sakura Banka) has a wish she wants granted. Our male lead (Teruto Kurabe) doesn’t but is preternaturally good at TCGs. Also he has amnesia. There’s your plot beats, all of them, as laid out in the anime’s first 20-odd minutes. So we can safely toss this into the “ignore” pile, right?
Well, for many people, probably. The issue, at least for me, with writing Build Divide off is that while the first episode certainly didn’t wow me the way some have this season, it did leave an impression. Make no mistake; this is a very weird show, at least when measured against the general seasonal anime cycle.
With very few exceptions all the cards are represented by anime girls, by the way. If you were curious.
The obvious thing to try to do when your anime is based on a TCG is to have one character explain the basic rules concepts to another. If you don’t do that, you’re generally in subversive, dark-take-on-the-genre territory, and there aren’t a lot of anime that fit that bill. (I challenge anyone to name one that isn’t Wixoss.) So what do we make of what Build Divide does, where the rules are explained, but only very generally and briefly, to Teruto by Sakura? Halfway through their obligatory match in this episode, Teruto’s amnesia begins to crack and the entire thing turns into a long chain of complicated effect combos. Some of it is quite neat to look at, certainly, but there is no way that we, the audience, could possibly have any context for this.
Is that incompetence? Is it on purpose? If so, why? The odd writing applies to the entire episode, but is most obvious here, where the cliché plot beats of this sort of episode are reduced to almost impressionistic abstraction despite the workaday visual style. There’s a lot of cool imagery, including a recurring casino motif, and the episode is visually-speaking oddly moody in spots, taking place as it does entirely at night. There’s also the random aside where we learn that the cards of the game can somehow be used “outside of battle” to….cast spells, essentially? But none of this seems to really convey anything. It’s very hard to know if Build Divide knows what it’s doing.
And what do we make of Teruto himself? It’s not rare for this kind of thing to feature a protagonist who is, sometimes literally supernaturally, Just That Good at card games. Putting him in an admittedly stylish but still very peculiar bunny hoodie is a less common step, to say the least. Maybe this is how the Build Divide franchise plans to challenge Yu-Gi-Oh! By swapping gaudy hairstyles for weird hoodies. Oh, and he has a strange obsession with bread. Which includes at one point praying for a bear-shaped pastry that fell on the floor because it’s “dead.”
Maybe this is the season where writers finally learn that the way to make your stock brown-haired lead interesting is to just make him a total weirdo.
If it sounds like I just have no idea what to make of this series so far, it’s because I don’t. Build Divide: Code Black just doesn’t give us enough to go on. It’s a question mark both within its genre–a genre that itself is generally more associated with children’s anime, which this solidly isn’t–and within the broader season at large. It’s certainly interesting, but whether or not it will live up to its potential is a question that it is far too early to answer.
Grade: 6♦
The Takeaway: Look, on this one specifically you probably shouldn’t listen to me. I don’t even know if I’m going to watch more of it or not.
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