Street Date: June 17

Official Synopsis:
They are called Chiropterans, ravenous creatures that can change their form, disguising themselves as human beings. Immortal creatures that feed off blood, they hide themselves among us. An organization called the Red Shield has been waging a private war to wipe them out. Now the struggle has grown. Saya Otonashi is a normal high school student who suffers from amnesia; she can't remember anything before the past year of her life. Then one day, a man named Hagi appears and gives her a katana, and her destiny is only partially revealed. The journey for the truth begins...
  
Our Take:
Going into this review I hadn’t seen any episodes of Blood+ but I didn’t really feel like that was a factor because I figured this was just a show I would get to watch a couple of episodes of, enjoy and then forget about. Wrong.

After watching episode six (which is the first episode on this set) I had to go right out and pick up the first volume DVD. It was that cool. I love horror settings and within that I especially love vampires and while they never say “vampire” in this show, that’s exactly what it’s about. The animation is amazing, which only makes the show better.

Blood+ in its total is a fifty episode series and I can only imagine how intricate the plot, dealing with amnesia and vampire hunters, is going to get but the biggest problem with this DVD is the way it’s released. With this DVD, we only get five of the episodes. It angers me that they always do all this “volume” crap with anime shows. This is a show that needs to be released in full sets. Granted, there is a six-disc set that includes episodes 1-25, but it was released as a very expensive Limited Edition set with a T-shirt and Manga graphic novel in the package. Where’s the affordable season collection? So those of us on a budget have to buy the episodes five at a time. That’s just silly and ignorant.

Not only are there only five episodes here, but there aren’t even any special features on the disc.

I can definitely recommend this show to anyone with an interest in vampires or animation but what I cannot do is recommend this DVD. If I ever went into a store and walked out with a DVD that held only five of fifty episodes, I would feel like I wasted my money. And apparently that’s the way Sony wants you to feel after having purchased Blood+ Volume Two or else they would have made an affordable way to collect all the episodes rather than have them doled out a little at a time.

Overall Picture:
Movie: B+
DVD: CD

- Landen Chase Pelish
Staff Writer