What They Say:
Aika lived according to the script of the mage of Exodus; Yoshino refuses to live by such foolishness.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Since it started half a year ago, Blast of Tempest has brought some big ideas and exciting twists each week. With so much on its plate, I wasn’t sure if it would be feasible to believe it could wrap everything up in a satisfactory manner in its final episode. The fact that the manga just ended meant that at least it wouldn’t have to make up its own ending in the middle of some bigger story, but that didn’t necessarily mean the manga wouldn’t have the same problems I thought the anime might. The final episode has now aired, and while it unsurprisingly wasn’t perfect by any means, it actually managed to do a very impressive job of bringing together a lot of what had been thrown into the mix throughout the story’s run to bring it to an appropriate ending.
The first part of the episode is obviously spent bringing the characters’ final mission to its climax, and it’s a rather glorious sight to behold. The music and emotion succeeds in building up the tension to a breaking point, and while it may feel just a tad rushed due to the eternal problem of needing to have both the climactic final battle and full closure on all the story’s plot points and character development, the payoff is quite satisfying. The cliffhanger the previous episode left on off is surprisingly brushed off with no real fanfare, and it wasn’t until I remembered how that episode had ended that I realized what the brief moment spend on it was referring to. I doubt anyone really thought the worst was going to happen, but when you end a penultimate episode on a life-or-death cliffhanger, you usually acknowledge it a bit more than this.
The action is nice to watch and become engaged in, but the real meat of these scenes, and of the series overall really, is in what’s being said. Even with the above disclaimer, it really would be spoiling too much to go into why a lot of these dialogues and monologues are very smart, but needless to say, there’s a lot more substance to this story than a generic action show.
Harkening back to the sense of finality I mentioned noticing in the previous episode, this episode is most definitely the finale of this story, and although it ends on the classic note of “the end is only the beginning”, that applies exclusively to the lives of its characters; there’s absolutely no room for continuation, barring some slice-of-life spinoff that obviously won’t be made. This is due to the fact the climax of the plot has brought an end to all of its conflicts, and with it the existence of magic in this world altogether. As the manga has ended, I doubt anyone was really expecting another season, so I’m pretty happy with the level of closure that this brings the series, something that many don’t get.
With all that out of the way, the only thing left is ultimately inconsequential to the grand scale the series has been focused on, but really the most important to those of us who have spent the past six months following these characters, and that’s the personal closure for the characters themselves. And in fact, while most of the bystanders would never have any way of knowing, the events that have been shaking the entire world are in fact directly tied to the lives of these unassuming young people. The reason Mahiro and Yoshino were involved in all this from the beginning was due to Aika’s death, and while they had gotten over it to some extent in the past couple of episodes in light of recent events and revelations, the final message she left them really brings that all the way home, not only giving them closure on her fate and their relationship with each other, but allowing them to face the future with a clean slate, rather than wallowing the baggage that has held them down all this time. An interesting decision is that, instead of diagnosing the series as either a Hamlet or a Tempest, the surviving characters choose to contradict Aika’s notion of life being simply a Shakespearean stage for them to follow a script upon and live out life like real people. And so it ends, as Yoshino and Hakaze are finally ready to have the relationship that had been waiting for so long.
In Summary:
Blast of Tempest has been all over the place since it started. First there was a very solid foundation, offering a great deal of potential. Unfortunately, it started to slack on that before too long, and the hopes from the beginning seemed lost. However, from that point forward it was always building up momentum more and more, and in the second there was a drastic change to the mood which made things a lot more enjoyable. The momentum continued to build from there, and this final episode finished the series off in a more impressive fashion than most of the episodes had managed. It may not have gotten quite as good as the beginning made me hope it might, but it was still very good considering some of the shortcomings the series has had and how ambitious a story it had set itself up to deal with.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Custom-Built PC, Hanns-G HG281 28” 1080p monitor.
