Black Clover ブラッククローバー

2017 fall | Episodes: 170 | Score: 8.1 (920017)

Updated every Tuesdays at 18:25 | Status: Finished Airing

Type: TV

Producers:TV Tokyo | Avex Pictures | Shueisha

Streaming: Crunchyroll | Netflix

Synopsis

Asta and Yuno were abandoned at the same church on the same day. Raised together as children, they came to know of the "Wizard King"—a title given to the strongest mage in the kingdom—and promised that they would compete against each other for the position of the next Wizard King. However, as they grew up, the stark difference between them became evident. While Yuno is able to wield magic with amazing power and control, Asta cannot use magic at all and desperately tries to awaken his powers by training physically. When they reach the age of 15, Yuno is bestowed a spectacular Grimoire with a four-leaf clover, while Asta receives nothing. However, soon after, Yuno is attacked by a person named Lebuty, whose main purpose is to obtain Yuno's Grimoire. Asta tries to fight Lebuty, but he is outmatched. Though without hope and on the brink of defeat, he finds the strength to continue when he hears Yuno's voice. Unleashing his inner emotions in a rage, Asta receives a five-leaf clover Grimoire, a "Black Clover" giving him enough power to defeat Lebuty. A few days later, the two friends head out into the world, both seeking the same goal—to become the Wizard King! [Written by MAL Rewrite]

Voice Actors

Kajiwara, Gakuto

Fujita, Nao

Yuuki, Kana

Shimazaki, Nobunaga

Sekine, Arisa

News

Reviews

zaharded
01/19/2025, 12:01 PM
Black Clover is a 12 episode anime stretched out into 170 episodes. It is a whole lot of nothing, you’re gonna finish this and question your life choices that led you to do absolutely nothing but watch this brainless dribble of a show. Firstly, the characters are extremely one-dimensional and surface level. I don’t know the best way to explain this without spoiling, but they get NO character development throughout the entirety of the 50 hour snooze fest. In fact, I think that nearing the end they were starting to regress and their ENTIRE personality began to get centred over one trope. Let me put thisinto an analogy - let’s say that you have a friend who likes football, but his obsession over football is so severe that his house is a ball and every time he sees you he starts yapping about wanting to kick a football 24/7. That is exactly what every character consists of in this series, one likes footballs, but the other likes basketballs and the other likes golf balls (etc etc). So every time these characters are introduced in unison, the animators like to individually present each character and make them monologue about how much they love balls rather than 1) have them all express their obsessions in tandem or 2) STOP WITH THE GENERIC AND BLAND tropes. An average episode of black clover will literally consist of 1) recap 2) intro 3) 5 minutes of talking about what was mentioned or 4) a backstory that lasts three more episodes, and this is without a joke nearly how every episode goes and develops itself without fail. Near the end, I started skipping full chunks and/or whole episodes if it was based on a backstory which we as the viewers hold full knowledge of. The main character, above all else, is the most insufferable. I’d like to think that the main character represents the whole cast of this show because whenever he thinks too much his head starts to steam and explode. He has no personality whatsoever and unfortunately suffers from the same problems that the side cast do too. The animation fluctuates episode-by-episode. Some episodes had world-class animation, while the others probably were made by just one person and this is very noticeable, but generally the animation and art style are good This show is definitely not for everyone and has worse pacing than something like one piece, but the concept and general gist are good if you suffer from a shortage of braincells.
Papitaa
11/08/2024, 07:40 AM
Black Clover has taken 2 years of my life. Was it worth it? Probably not, but it has yielded some interesting things to think about. Its biggest crime is that the author can't write characters for shit. Stupid two-dimensional characterisation prevents it from being something greater. Cool moments occasionally make their way through hours of rubbish comedy and boring sequences led by paper-thin characters repeating their one personality trait over and over again. Let me share with you a drinking game I've come up with, where you take a shot everytime one of these things happen: 1. Asta is impressed by something 2. Noelle says a cartoonishly typicaltsundere phrase 3. Noelle has family issues 4. Luck wants to fight 5. Gordon creepily talks about friendship 6. Vanessa drinks or talks about drinking 7. Charmy eats or talks about eating 8. Charmy is head over heels for Yuno 9. Yuno's fairy is head over heels for him 10. Mimosa is head over heels for Asta 11. Gauche is head over heels for his sister (...) 12. Finral hits on girls or talks about hitting on them 13. Charlotte is head over heels for Yami 14. Sol calls Charlotte "sister", which results in the latter getting annoyed 15. Sol hates men 16. Nero lands on Asta's head With this, you can actually have some fun, as these things happen so often you can get hammered in the span of a single episode! Well, you get my point now. While the plot itself does have some intense and fun-to-watch moments — such as the battle between Black Bulls and Vetto, Asta's special powers awakening (vague to avoid spoilers), the climax of the elves' scheme (same here), or Yami's poop jokes (funniest shit I've ever seen) — it is all incredibly infantile and lacks depth. The characters' motivations behind a plot point can be so shallow that at some point I legitimately viewed Black Clover as a collection of over-exaggerated parables, painfully mawkish to allegorically demonstrate the values beneath and make sure that no one misses them. And I almost accepted it because Black Clover's values are really positive and motivating, even if trite. That's also why for a while I developed another theory that Black Clover's world is like a family - a family in which there are flaws you grow to accept and cherish the ensuing highs. For some time, I had somehow accepted the shitty things and started perceiving even the filler sequences as family time as a result of spending a lot of time with the characters. But I think I got manipulated by Black Clover into refraining from criticising its repeated flaws, lmao. That's just bad writing. Good moments are placed within hours of either poor humour that oversimplifies the characters to the point of them seeming as caricatures, or tiresome fight scenes consisting of repetitive cant and a random clusterfuck of spells and attacks at which my brain turned off. You also can't accept lack of nuance as an intended measure — as is the case with the LOTR books, for example, where everything is set in stone and the story unfolds like fulfilling a destiny — just because it's long-running. I wonder if that's what the majority of shounen giants suffer from, baiting the audience into forgiving the flaws for an interspersed cool moment or two. I also want to mention the last arc specifically because I think it needs individual treatment. The build-up to it is literally just one big filler that is justified by "training". Another thing are the plot twists. They have overall been quite random, forcing their way into a previously established landscape and flipping it on its head as a cheap solution to a problem. But the one with the emergence of a new character in the last few episodes is just taking the piss, you know what I'm talking about. There were moments when I had fun, I can't lie. I also like the core ideas behind a lot of the stuff here. The poor writing is just inexcusable, though. It feels to me as if Black Clover was straight-up disrespectful towards its viewers, even if with good heart all throughout.
Anifek
10/15/2024, 09:03 AM
Black Clover is a pretty good anime but lacks some things: 1. The animation and pacing are not very good. The animation is sometimes pretty mid and not well done in many episodes. This is probably because Black Clover is a weekly anime and not seasonal and the same goes for the pacing. The pacing is kinda bad because they didn't want to get close to the manga since the manga is still airing and the anime is weekly. Other than the animation and pacing there are some fillers or "Anime Canon" stuff but this is not really hurting the anime. Another thing that Ihave a problem with is Asta as an MC. Now don't get me wrong I love Asta but listen he is very similar to Naruto and much more annoying sometimes. At the start of the anime, his yells were unbearable and annoying but that was fixed with time. Until the time skip, I would give Black Clover a 7/10 but the time skip did good to this anime and made it much better. To conclude I recommend Black Clover to anyone who likes fantasy, shonen, and someone who likes the Naruto series because Black Clover is highly inspired by Naruto and has lots of similarities but it's not for everyone due to the bad pacing and animation, for example, some episodes are boring and kind of slice of life stuff that involves around comedy and romance although they aren't funny and boring and sometimes they show tons of repetitive flashbacks that were already been shown and all of this is just to make the anime slower so it won't pass the manga. This is a problem with almost every weekly anime such as One Piece Naruto Bleach and more so keep that in mind. I would still recommend you to try it and see if you like it or not.
Naherth
01/15/2024, 08:51 AM
ok, that is one of the worst animes that i have ever seen, is not the worst but even so it is very bad at start, the story is full of conveniences, generic things and scenes that wanna be good and epic bot finally it has some interesting moments but it is only 10% or 20% off all story, its very simple and even sometimes its a little boring The characters are so mid, there are some interesting or decent like zora, Asta, Nacht o yami but they are only a 10% of this history, the others are very simply and basic The production is quite standrad,at least the music is good, the animetion sometimes are so bad and sometimes are nice, the best of this part are the openings, almos ever opening are very very good
tcandy19
07/11/2023, 10:28 PM
as someone who dropped bc in the first 3 eps then came back years later to complete it - lemme say im so glad i picked it back up and gave it a chance. this is a show that really gatekeeps itself, especially given how good it is. terrible word of mouth and jarring first 3 episodes is enough to keep people away and discourage them from continuing. but if you do overlook/get past those, you’re in for a really fun ride with great storytelling, characters and world building. what makes bc really fun for me is that it really leans in to typical shonentropes but embraces the corniness as well as addresses some of the problems. ‘power of friendship’ isnt just some crap used to bail mc out of a situation. instead, power of friendship means the team training together and actually showing/explaining their strategy as to complement each others powers. it helps that all of the black bulls are well written, likeable with realistic flaws, fears and challenges to overcome. lets talk about the mc. hes loud, obnoxious and in your face. this all also makes him so lovable and funny! hes really the type to grow on you. before i knew it i was laughing at the dumb shit he does while also rooting for him to grow stronger and stronger. hes the type to make friendships with everyone but the show doesnt rub that in your face. instead you can interpret how he would naturally do so based on his outgoing nature and kind personality. romance - bc has some good ass romance and does not shy away from addressing the topic. they feed you with lots of ships and also give enough content to keep all the shippers happy. if you like asta x noelle, mimosa, nero, any one You will be given plenty of content. even side characters have good ships. yami x vanessa or charlotte, finral and the princess, grey x gauche. so much romantic intrigue without being cringey or having the mc randomly pop up with a girl he never interacted with (ahem naruto and bleach ahem hem) but the biggest praise i have for bc is how it treats female characters. I never thought i’ll see the day a shonen anime properly writes female characters as more than just sex objects. Yes there is fan service of course, but that isnt what the women are reduced to (im looking you post time skip one piece). the women of black clover are strong, independent, free thinking and interesting. they struggle with societal issues like gender expectations, poverty, discrimination and more. noelle as the female lead of the series is not a mere side character which exists to be rescued by the men around her. she is encouraged by those around her to step up to the plate and fight for what she believes in - and she does just that. she has tangible growth in both her powers and her personality, not just reduced to astas love interest (sakura and ochaco 😐). Its so refreshing how the women are free to have romantic interests and it doesnt take over their entire personality/reason for existing! Mimosa, noelle, and vanessa all have crushes whos crush doesnt become their character trait. if i have to say something negative, i'd say the show is lacking a compelling villain. all the villains are so one note and uninteresting. either they are pure evil or secretly good - then they become the mc's friend. another thing that becomes super repetitive is the "backlash" or whatever from the people in the capital. they're like "youre just a COMMONER with NO MAGIC what could you possibly do? >:(" *cue cool ass move by asta* *cue asta/black bulls getting overlooked in favor of golden dawn*. really that shit gets so old. especially because golden dawn is not very likeable at all save for klaus and mimosa. but what about yuno? if thats the question you had, then i'll respond that he did absolutely nothing for me. he didn't stand out in anyway except to outscale asta at every turn and just show the huge gap between them as rivals. bro is already the vice captain of golden dawn and he started out at the same time as asta! I mean for fucks sake on this track he should be wizard king in the next 2-3 years easily! he has NO personality except asta is my rival (btw theres really funny and cute scenes in petit clover which embrace this so ill kinda give them a pass for owning up to it). hes like a bad rip off sasuke if sasuke had no individualism. how much are you gonna milk that one flashback of asta saving your necklace?! get new flashbacks dawg. overall though this series was such an enjoyable watch. the power scaling was easy to follow, the plot flowed naturally, hell even the fillers were so damn good! I didnt skip a single filler! They were literally all interesting and fun in their own way. im so glad i picked this back up and you can be damn sure i’ll be seated for future seasons.
peshala
09/03/2022, 11:34 AM
This anime definitely doesn't deserve an 8+ score. I hate myself for watching 170 episodes of this garbage. The plot is garbage. The characters are copy and pastes from other shounen anime, but they have somehow managed to screw that up also. Dialogues keep repeating far too many times, it's nauseating. After a dozen episodes you can guess pretty well what the characters are going to say and do in a given situation. Power of the protagonist is a literal cheat code. They have taken all the tropes of shounen anime and made them worse. The characters and the plot is so boring. Can't decidewhat the worst thing about this anime is, because there is just so many things to choose from. Please save your time and watch something else. Don't be fooled by the score. This anime sucks ass.
ma1kawa11
06/11/2021, 10:24 AM
In my opinion, Black Clover is a fairly overrated anime which has major issues in many different aspects of its production. Having watched it until it's completion it was a huge disappointment for me, considering that the original idea sounded intriguing. I've also heard the manga is much better (though at the time of writing I've not read it), so I'm rather miffed that they studio put this low a quality into what probably was a fairly decent series. Worldbuilding: 2/10 While the writers of Black Clover did create a somewhat extensive world to work with especially when it comes to the magic system, the applicationwas overall underwhelming. The entire universe only consists of four countries, and the relations between them tend to be very basic. We know the Clover Kingdom and the Diamond Kingdom are at war, and we know that the spade kingdom is struggling for resources, but we've never really gotten to see enough to completely understand why they would be willing to literally abuse and mutilate children in order to gain more military power. Blatant terrifying acts like that only hold weight if we are able to really spend time with some exposition about the country as a whole. That being said, we only learn about the Heart kingdom extremely late in the series, and we know perhaps even less about it than the Diamond kingdom. Why would the Heart Kingdom isolate itself if it objectively had more military might than probably the Heart and Clover kingdom combined. Granted that it seems to be run over an absolute monarchical rule, It doesn't make sense that all of the ruler's have been benevolent for some reason. That goes against the most blatant weakness of authoritarianism, which is that it is extremely prone to corruption. And the spade kingdom is barely mentioned at all until the very end of the season when it becomes the capitol of the dark triad. As for the magic system, although it might appear to be extensive at a first glance, it's only complex at face value. Yes, there are different types which can counter each other (which in and of itself is a rather basic concept of a magic system which includes types), but the overall adaptability and application of each power is limited heavily on a person's grimoire. The extent to which they can use their powers and their special abilities are specifically limited to spells written in the grimoire. And their powers are only ever used at face value, no one is stretching exactly how far they can take their powers and using that to develop new ones. And although we see people 'train' or try to develop emotionally, the correlation to them getting a new spell is non-dependent. The character isn't developing their powers themselves, the new spell just appears out of thin air, and the character had no say whatsoever in what the power does. It's extremely uncreative and really does a magic system injustice, especially considering the potential it had to be good. Imagine if through training you could write your own spells in your book. Or if we saw powers being adapted in uncanny ways like Finral's portals being used to easily accelerate objects. Plot: 1/10 The plot in the anime is rather generic and cliched especially for shonen which is already oversaturated as is. We've seen it so many times, a character doesn't have any powers, but then it turns out he either has some huge innate power, or inherits the power from something. Examples of this are Fire Force, My Hero Academia, I could go on. Some of the arcs were interesting, personally I enjoyed the fairy arc with Licht the most out of all of them. Honestly if it had ended there my score might have been higher. However with the introduction of the demons as antagonists the quality just went down. The demons became an escape from proper pacing and power scaling. The pacing of the series itself is fairly decent up to the end of the first demon fight. I'm saying that purely in terms of new plot though. The amount of flashbacks and narration is an obvious attempt at trying to stretch the length of the series as much as possible. new plot doesn't start until 6 minutes in most episodes. If you count the outro as well that's about 8 minutes of the show doing absolutely nothing. considering 24 minutes episode times that's only a 16 minute actual episode length, which is ignoring that flashbacks in some episodes might take around half of that time (especially nearing the end of the anime). Before the last arc of the anime (dark triad), the timeline skips an entire 6 months, during which time most of the characters have apparently become ridiculously overpowered. And then we're thrown suddenly into fights with a ton of new enemies which we had not seen before and have no emotional connection towards, and somehow they are just as powerful, or even more powerful than asta and the commanders. Not to mention, 3 episodes from the end a new mentor is introduced. However my biggest gripe, is that the series ended.... WITHOUT THE FINAL FIGHT. Yes, I know it's getting a movie sequel. But still. A 170 episode buildup, and we get a corny ending about how they are going to get stronger and defeat the dark triad. Yes, I'm getting a little emotional here, but seeing the ending really upset me. It really upset me. Characters: 1/10 I of course don't mean to say that all of the characters are bad, but unfortunately most of them are extremely 1 dimensional and based on cliches. Asta has one goal, and one goal alone. He's unrealistically optimistic, and he never goes through any substantial character development. Most of the time, the show portrays him as completely perfect. Maybe not in physique, but in character. People who throw any actually valid criticism at him about his mantra of 'never giving up', even when realistically he ought to have died several times over are generally thrown under the bus at some point. That's essentially the definition of a Mary Sue. Why would I like Asta when he essentially is constantly screaming, and believes that if he swings his sword faster, and rushes at his enemy in a slightly different way than before, and for some reason the writers say that it ought to work. There's no way people would enjoy Asta if he was a person in real life. Yuno isn't that much better. He has the exact same goal as Asta, and the two are said to be in a rivalry over it, Yet we don't actually see much of a rivalry. Maybe this is a mistranslation of the original Japanese meaning, but rivalry generally implies conflict and a distaste towards the rival which we don't see. Another problem is Yuno's power scaling generally happens off screen, so we generally don't have any emotional connection with him. This is further amplified by the fact that he's portrayed as being stuck up and somewhat elitist. And I don't want to spoil the fine details of the plot but there are some very very cliche explanations for Yuno's past which is a letdown because it was hidden from us for most of the series. As for the Dark Triad, their personalities are probably the most one dimensional out of all the villains in the series. They embrace evil for the sake of evil. One is a megalomaniac, one is a narcissist, and the last is a masochist. If you've seen it you probably already know which characters I'm referring to. Their underlings have the same one-dimensional personalities (often time relating extremely obviously to the actual power they have like the tongue dude being a pervert). But the largest problem is we only get to see them extremely late in the series. They don't have time for any character development at all, Especially when compared to Licht. That being said, I'd say Licht was my favorite character because he at least seemed to have more than one motivation for his actions and ideals, and you couldn't just lump him in there with the notion that he was completely evil. Although, the same can't be said for his minions. There are plenty of other side characters I could talk about as well, but the cast is so broad that it would be impossible to get into all the details in this already long review. Art/Animation: 3/10 When the anime tries, it does well. Still scenes look pretty decent, the animation quality is nice. However, in the fight scenes, where arguably the most effort ought to be put in, the quality greatly diminishes. Lazy fails to describe it enough. Ground ceasing to have any texture whatsoever. Characters loosing some discernable features occasionally. It completely breaks the atmosphere of the fight scenes. This problem becomes much worse in the later arcs of the anime. Sound: 5/10 Of all things, the sound gets rated the highest I'd say. Mainly because the music wasn't that bad. Sure it was somewhat generic in terms of compositional style, but for the most part the music matched the mood of the scenes, and the production quality was up to standard. It's forgettable, but it serves its purpose. However the voice acting for asta in particular wasn't that great. I know a lot of other people have mentioned this but his screaming is just ear-grating and there is no real point to it at all. Overall: 3/10 Unfortunately I just can't recommend this show to a new viewer. It has extensive flaws in many aspects of production that just ruins its potential. It relies heavily on cliches, and generic plot devices to drive the story forward, and the ending is extremely anti-climatic. If you decide to watch please keep these points in mind. Don't go into it expecting an innovative shonen or a great plot.
mistersunday
03/30/2021, 09:08 AM
The trickling sound of raindrops echoes throughout your room as you stretch your legs under the covers. Looking through the glass panes on your window, you unfurl the overcast sky with your eyes. A sense of sloth weeps over your body while you sift through the potential ways you can entertain yourself on such a gloomy day. You weigh your options and eventually stumble on some reality show from the mid 2000s. As you begin to watch you realize that there’s something almost reminiscent about it. It’s like you’ve seen this scripted story play out before. You let yourself be guided by the charm ofthe heavily-edited storyline that the producers set up for your entertainment. At times you even question whether they know that everyone can see through the conspicuously manufactured storytelling. Nonetheless, you let the Hollywood producers that orchestrated this show and its motley cast of characters take you on their journey... and you end up kinda digging it? Black Clover is like that reality show that you binge on a rainy day. It’s not a sophisticated or groundbreaking piece of media, perhaps it’s even your guilty pleasure; however, the anime manages to be entertaining enough to make you stick around. Let’s be real, any one of us can come up with Black Clover’s plot. I’m sure I could pick out one of my friends at random to create a story of equal depth and detail as Black Clover’s premise easily. That being said, the execution of said plot is still entertaining and somewhat successful. Don’t get me wrong, just because the story isn’t some intricate narrative full of complex themes doesn’t mean it can’t hold its own against its peers. We don’t need to consume revolutionary media all the time, it’s fine to let your mind take a break and engage with straightforward storytelling; in fact, I think Black Clover allows its viewers to do this quite well. The dynamic between the characters becomes more endearing as the story progresses. The plot also contains some nuance that gets fleshed out as you move through the episodes, with the peak being the Elf Reincarnation Arc. In terms of production quality Black Clover has its ups and downs. There are times when the animation is not up to par with modern anime whereas in other instances it excels. In general, Black Clover manages to successfully adapt the source material despite fluctuations in quality. My favorite part of the show is probably the opening and ending themes. Almost every OP/ED delivers a fantastic musical performance with visuals that are just as good. This is ultimately one of Black Clover’s strongest points. Breakdown Story: 5/10 I’ve penalized this category mostly due to originality. Since most people I know could come up with a story of this caliber I can’t give it more than a 5. I don’t mind watching an archetypal shounen plot unfold, but some of the naming choices make me wonder if this was written by a middle schooler.. “Princess-Healing Flower Robe”?? “Curse-Breaking Blood Cocoon”? whose kid came up with that, please lmk. The first few episodes are also a little bit insufferable, relying too much on shounen tropes. Art: 7/10 As mentioned earlier, there are some fluctuations in the animation’s quality, especially during the Royal Knights Arc. Overall Black Clover still maintains a competent level of animation with a nice art style. Sound: 8/10 The openings slapppppp, that’s all I have to say. Character: 6/10 The characters are charming and fun to watch, some of them are annoying but what can you expect from a long-running shounen. Other characters remain a bit questionable (I’m looking at you Gauche) but overall they’re well thought out. Enjoyment: 7/10 If you’re looking to sit back and relax while watching a straightforward action anime I think you might enjoy this pick. Black Clover probably checks every box on the list of Generic Anime 101, but hey, when did returning to the fundamentals become so bad? Overall: 6/10
Marinate1016
03/30/2021, 06:31 AM
No long running show and fanbase has got as much disrespect as Black Clover(ok, Boruto probably has got more). Yet, the fans have stuck by it for years and as Black Clover’s story continues to surpass its limits, their loyalty is finally paying off. Black Clover is a show that is in many ways the literal embodiment of its protagonist’s struggle. Asta goes from being the laughingstock of town to the literal saviour of the kingdom. During that internal journey, we also watched the anime gradually evolve and get better as time went on. Production qualities seemingly increased as the popularity increased as well. Asta’s journeyis extremely satisfying and well written. It’s done so well in fact, that it feels like we’ve been on this journey right with Asta. Everyone loves a feel good underdog story. There’s been no bigger underdog than Black Clover. For me, the mark of a well written series is how well you’re able to immerse yourself and truly feel apart of the story. When I first got into Black Clover a couple of years ago, I was easily able to binge the first 99 episodes which were out up to that point in the span of a few days. Episodes went by in what felt like a breeze. I found myself in awe at the quality of writing and the magical concepts used. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why so many people shit on the series or rated it lowly. I’ve said numerous times that if Black Clover went seasonal, it would be one of the highest rated Jump Series. The story is better than MHA and JJK. What has unfortunately been the big bump in the road for BC is the inconsistent production quality throughout. At points, Pierrot have literally had to beg on Twitter for people to help out with episodes. Fortunately, the series is going on hiatus due to how close its getting to the manga, and I really hope Pierrot use this opportunity to make it a seasonal show after the movie. The long running anime model is dead, and doesn’t give animation staffs the time they need to make high quality episodes. If you’re on the fence about watching Black Clover, do it. Yes, it has some inconsistent animation at times, but the story is genuinely the best in shonen. Loveable characters, an immersive world and amazing action sequences make Black Clover one of the only ongoing shonen that I enjoy. Black Clover gets 10 grimoires out of 10.
ThatAnimeSnobRE
03/30/2021, 06:27 AM
Black Clover is your cookie cutter fighting shonen, which was heavily promoted as the KING OF SHONEN ANIME because the industry really wants your money. It’s nothing more than ideas from older shows. Naruto wants to take part in the Hunter Exam, gets chosen by a Shinigami Captain, and enters the Fairy Tail Guild, so he can become the Pirate King. Despite occasionally doing some things better than its predecessors, such as having boy protagonist who was ACTUALLY training for years to be strong as opposed to be given the ultimate power right away like in My Hero Academia, it’s largely typical and by thenumbers. The protagonist still relies on some demonic power he was given out of nowhere for not dying five minutes into his first mission. So yeah, it’s still another one of those stories that give the ultimate power to losers just for the sake of bottom tier empowerment fantasy. That wouldn’t be a problem for most casuals, since it was never aiming to be more than easily digestible, but the early episodes were a slog to get through. The first impression you get from the main characters is a boy who screams nonstop and wants to force himself on a nun. Right off the bat you get pedophilic antichristian deviance with a lot of terrible screaming, which alienated a big portion of its potential audience. So, the protagonist is your Naruto clone, who begins seemingly weak and lacks something for making him sympathetic to the viewer. He remains an obnoxious loudmouth with no redeeming qualities until a lot more characters are introduced into the show for mitigating the suffering via comedy and other types of personalities. And by other types, I mean making most bad guys to come off as one-dimensional evil freaks, just for making the obnoxious protagonist to seem heroic in comparison. They are always acting like bullies or sexual deviants or coward rulers, just so Naruto Clone can jump in and tell them how mean they are, thus getting the moral high ground despite being a nun rapist. So this Naruto clone (some call him Asta for some reason) has a rival, like all shonen do, but there is no reason for the rivalry to exist. The emotionless pretty boy (some call him Yuno) grew up with Asta as if they were brothers. They are super friendly with each other and constantly save each other in the battles, so you see no actual rivalry going on. It’s like they are best buddies, but call each other a rival for the sake of ticking the square on the must-have list of shonen clichés. A similar issue appears when Naruto clone gets chosen by the Black Bulls because of his attitude instead of his skill at magic. It’s like hiring the guy who directed and played in The Room just because he has guts. Anyways, Naruto clone goes to a guild where everyone is as annoying as him. They all have one-trait personalities and are defined by one gag, which they repeat as often as they can. For example, there is a guy who is obsessed with his 5 year old sister. She’s the only person he talks about in the whole damn manga, and even has nosebleeds whenever he looks at her. Eventually, these Pokémon like characters get fleshed out once they do various missions later on, but their personality remains the same one liner and their power ups are mostly the result of willpower instead of some sort of tactic. Anyways, the main appeal is obviously the action, which at certain highlights can be pretty awesome because the animation is not the typical lazy crap studio Pierrot does all the time. But for about 80% of the duration you are stuck with subpar animation that makes the show to be completely passable in terms of entertainment compared to Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen. Even so, there are battles that can last for dozens of episodes and which seem to be epic because of their duration, but to the most part they are a waste of time since they come down to spars between minor characters. No joke, there are parts where you can skip twenty episodes and nothing will be lost since it’s just nobodies fighting nobodies (I’m looking at you, people in the magic tournament, and you who got possessed by elves, and the rest of you who were given powers by the Dark Triad). And even when you get to the finales, which are the good parts of the fighting, you still get typical magic conveniences that always trigger when some nakama is in danger. The battles lose most of their impact when you know it all comes down to ‘whatever dude, it happened’. For example, there is a part where all you see is this: one bad guy teleporting in, attacking, getting blocked by a good guy who also teleports in, powers up, attacks, then another villain teleports in, and so on and so on for a dozen times. It’s literally like the imaginary wars children are playing, where they make up attacks and the one being attacked says why it doesn’t work and how he counters it with more imaginary attacks. As for the end of that battle, the villains just teleport away, aka the exact same ability they have been using for several episodes that allows any battle to begin and end in whenever way the author wants. The resolutions feel very cheap in general. Examples include: -A bird comes out of nowhere and gives a macguffin to the good guys, who didn’t even know the villains were looking for. -A sprite that appears out of nowhere and saves the good guys with hax magic, just because. -They expose a traitor amongst the captains. The traitor is someone we haven’t seen before and know nothing about, thus his reveal means nothing to the reader. The method they used for exposing him was magical mind reading, which makes the reveal to feel easy and cheap. Also there is a second traitor within the same group and for some reason they don’t find him, despite having the ability to mind read him as well. -Yummy (easily the best character in the show) is trapped inside an unbreakable barrier. What does he do for escaping and for saving his teammates? He… breaks the barrier with a new power up and easily saves the day. No tactics whatsoever. -Naruto clone has his arms disabled by a curse and there is nothing that can heal them. What does he do for still being useful? He finds a witch and she cures him. Just like that. -How do you stop a crazy woman that wants to kill everyone? You unlock your hidden familiar out of nowhere, which resets the plot however it wants, so anyone who gets killed is instantly returned to life. As deus ex machina as it gets. -What do you do after the wizard king gets assassinated? Nothing. He returns to life on his own. Such a shame; his apparent death was the most tragic scene in the whole show. Anyways, you are not supposed to think when you watch this show, because if you do nothing makes sense. It’s a dumb action flick for ten year olds, so don’t bother asking why they are sending rookies in S-difficulty missions. Oh, hey, here is a dungeon that can potentially destroy the world with the artifacts stored inside it. It’s super dangerous and only the strongest wizards must go there. Which is why we allow the worst guild to send its worst members who never work as a team, nor are that strong. Don’t forget to get molested by a plant that looks like a vagina, but do forget to use the magic barrier you asspulled out of nowhere in the previous arc. In the meantime, the rest of us will do absolutely nothing, and we won’t even give you a promotion for saving the world. Yeah, that’s how you prove how serious the situation is. Eventually, Naruto clone gets a promotion. Not for saving the world, but for getting captured with magic while he can counter magic. And he gets it from the wizard king himself, who is the strongest mortal in the whole show, but never does anything in the missions because that would make everything to run on easy mode. The first time he eventually does something is for saving the protagonist and for giving him a promotion, which is followed by the protagonist forming a large harem of fangirls and lots of episodes about girls in bikinis or naked in spas. Because that is how empowerment fantasy works. After the promotion, the show becomes far more predictable, as it’s just the Naruto clone constantly being taken over by his hidden demonic power, which obviously they want to make you think it will lead to him killing his friends. And obviously it never happens, because it’s a show for kids. He always regains control and always befriends his enemies and always gets more powers that make him look more and more like a demon. And the show never forgets to give us double standards, such as that he has no magic, despite having the most powerful magic, or that he never gets rewarded for his actions, although he is one of the strongest in the kingdom. He even goes as far as telling you the moral message of the whole show comes down to: You are nothing special, and that is what makes you special. I am not joking; this is an actual quote in the story. The author is literally promoting loser mentality. Being last makes you the best of the worst, well done. Anyways, I wouldn’t mind all that so much if the show wasn’t coming off as pretentious. And it did. It kept shoving this anti-racism message down our throats and we were supposed to take it seriously when the presentation was as childish as it gets. Supposed, humans hated elves and that led to a big war, only to be proven it was just some demon brainwashing them into acting like that. There is no free will involved, which means there is also no depth to the theme as well. What anti-racism? It was brainwashing all along! And what a great way to solve the conflict by having both the elves and the humans to be teaming up against a one dimensional evil demon that is laughing like an idiot and even outright called everyone a fool for falling for it, just to make it even easier for the audience to hate him. Oh, and all the hatred the good guys were feeling towards the elves and the assassin of the wizard king are erased from existence, because thereafter everyone is friendly to each other and act like they never harmed anyone. As a whole, Black clover is a pile of mediocrity. It just rehashes ideas of earlier shonen and does nothing special with them, thus forever being stuck at a demographic for ten year olds. Plus it looks subpar 80% of the time and the protagonist is a screaming idiot who wants everything to go his way because he is not special... and that is supposed what makes him special XD.
iishoxyii
03/30/2021, 05:53 AM
This past season of anime has been full of adventures, romance, and a bit of strangeness, with the likes of Attack On Titan, Horimiya, and now Redo of the Healer as we have drawn curtains on this action, comedy, shounen adventure show “Black Clover”. This particular anime has stood out as an example of hope during the gloomy snowy days, since it started giving an adventure shounen with a different type of storytelling it’s been quite the journey of 170 episodes. “Black Clover” is an anime series that has been written and illustrated by Yuki Tabata, if you liked “Fairy Tale” then I’m sure you’lllove this show as well as for rooting for the underdog characters this show is the one for you if you’re into that. The show began in 2017, the first few episodes showing the character and protagonist Asta, a brash yet modest peasant without any powers nor capabilities, making do somehow in the society that totally depends on magic for their everyday life usage. In a world where magic determines your rank and social class is not new as we’ve seen in many shows like Fairy Tail, Konosuba, and many more that have come and go but his determination seeks to become the Wizard King despite his position in humanity. Story ~ 8 Two orphan children, Asta and Yuno are left as babies near the doorstep of a church on the outside border of the Clover Kingdom. The story surrounds the boy Asta, a young boy who’s ostensibly is born without magical powers, while he tries to gain magical powers and the talent to control them. Moved by a desire to become the succeeding wizard king, a consultant character to the clover kingdom, the two protagonists develop a friendly competition. The different features, like humor and the heartwarming moments that this show has helped to build the show from the ground up and build a solid status for the show making it a shounen heavy-duty. Animations ~ 6 The show in itself isn’t flawless. The animations fell rusty and can be missing consistency. However, all of that can be justified due to the financial issues and creating episodes for almost three years weekly. The only break the show ever took until now was due to the pandemic. Unlike other long-running animes, Black Clover has only had a minority of filler episodes, but some episodes just outshine radiance like the 63rd which is probably the best-animated episode of the show according to me which showed the ultimate dealings with the Eye of the Midnight Sun and the reincarnation of the elves. Even though some of the episodes have been phenomenally uncertain and exquisite the animations could’ve been way better. Sound ~ 8 The music for Black Clover has been always uplifting and up to the point that you can listen to it on repeat. The show has had 10 openings throughout the entirety of the show it’s a bit hard to choose from these 10 which have been the best because the songs were great, but if I had to choose a few I’d say Black Rover from Vickeblanka and Black Catcher from Vickeblanka have been my favorites. Characters ~ 7 Asta is that one guy who’s an underdog who’s in the world of magic but does not know magic. He’s a little simple yet humble and loud protagonist who strives to excel even though his hindrances Yuno on the other hand is enormously talented and a natural when it comes to controlling magic and its incredible use. At the age of 15, both boys set out to receive extraordinary books called grimoires which help each conduit their own power. The characters are persistent and crave the hunger to change to become better than they were before to become a man that can overcome all. Throughout every character goes to the phase to transform into a newer self and becoming a new person altogether. This show does not go on easy on character developments as one has to perceiver long to change into someone they want to be. Overall ~ 8 Though this anime had made a bad impression on me while it was just beginning because of Asta’s strident temperament and a methodic set up, those who’ve stuck with the show have grown to like it to some extent eventually. By now, this show will often be considered a contestant among the likes of Ao No Exorcist, Soul Eater, Naruto, Bleach, and My Hero Academia in the shounen genre. The show's charm has grown slowly climbing the stairs of success so much that it is close to impossible for an anime fan like me to not come across it. Reviews about a show break or make a show, but for me, the expression of the anime has changed drastically from not even being interested in the show to yeah I’ve got to watch the next episode I can’t wait. It’s unavoidably popular now, which helps it to qualify for the Jump’s “Big Three” now and the show just keeps on giving. From being just an average shounen genre show to being Crunchyroll’s “Most Popular Anime of Winter In 2020” capturing the top 20 most widely held titles and the top most popular anime ranked in UK, Canada, Mexico, Russia, France, and Germany. It certainly isn’t for every anime watcher over there and it starts slow as well until its 20th episode as well, but trust me it gets great, the character developments, the animations, if you’re looking to watch something new in the shounen genre this could just be your cup of tea. The show became wonderful.
AvoidLight
03/30/2021, 04:31 AM
Black Clover, Asta, Yuni, Noelle, Yami. A family.. A story of 2 orphans living in the darkness of the corrupt Clover Kingdom with a goal. A goal that many shows use, a goal that many would say is just like naruto or one piece and my hero academia. Asta and Yuno don’t just want to be like every other shonen. They don’t just want to be the #1 of their universe. Asta and Yuno want everyone to change as they change the world and it’s history. Asta and Yuno want to be accepted and want everyone to accept each other for who they are notby a social class or a ranking. Labels don’t mean a single thing to them... Black clover a show that was hated by many but many grew to love. A generic story about the protagonist and his rival trying to make it to the top. But something is different... Black Clover was different in a way that it knew it was generic and it worked with it. People tend to compare it and shit on the show but never really give it a chance, No it’s not a show to watch when you’re brain dead, No it’s not trash and No it’s not a clone. Black Clover is a show that worked for its name, it worked harder than any show and it will continue to fight for its name. Just like Asta and Yuno, black clover grew to be loved. Thank you Tabata and thank you black clover for this series. Story: I gave black clover story a 9 as it basically built up the villains for 100 episodes with a great amount of dedicated development for every cast in the Bulls and then it had a perfect foreshadowed turn of the devils being behind everything. The dark triad, they are what they war is all about, anime fails to adapt that war is not slow and that war is out of the blue, shit happens and you can not change it. Yami got taken in an instant for example, it felt real, in a real war situation stuff happens and you can’t change it. Most anime give the protagonist time to change an outcome which shouldn’t be changed. Black clover is a 9 for tan amazing executed story. Art: I don’t even want to explain, black clover has its ups and downs and clearly everyone knows the downs are stronger. Sound: Best openings in all of anime Character: every character in the Bulls got their own dedicated development and it was not rushed like other mangas or anime’s like My Hero or Naruto. The watcher grows to loving every Bull and gets sad, mad happy when they do. The Bulls are more family than any other cast, they lean on each other and fight and cry for each other like no other. I find it funny how many people don’t talk about how good Tabata is at writing female characters. Noelle has better development than most female protagonist and its shun solely by the fact that people think this show is a joke. Enjoyment: I would’ve gave this a 10 but the animation really does kill the mood sometimes. But I don’t think the animation ruins how fun it is watching Asta try his hardest, Asta at his lowest and Asta inspiring people to be better or just like him. This show really does have a way of making you feel for characters who may not even be that important. It was a great ride and black clover was fun to watch.
tenshibeat
03/30/2021, 04:16 AM
What a long journey of a story. From a kid who has no magic to becoming a formidable Magic Knight, there's no story that's refreshing like Black Clover. From the beginning, we start off with a very slow, and boring introduction. It's really boring to start. Asta is annoyingly loud. There's not much story progression. It feels like you're watching every other shounen anime but worse. But even with this boring, start, we do see the embers of a wonderful story. The story develops very nicely throughout the story. We go from becoming Magic Knights, to defeating many enemies to save the Black Bulls, Clover Kingdom andthe entirety of humanity. The changes are paced well enough to be familiar, but also enjoyable and easy to watch. With characters that develop well, and amazing fight scenes, it's a great plot with great characters. A world of magic, and a kid with no magic and his rival, a kid with amazing magic, begin their journey for Wizard King. There's no telling that Asta and Yuno's rivalry feels similar, but also refreshing. Sure there's the no power vs all power dynamic, but their interactions with one another smooth out and develop in a uniquely Black Clover way. Characterisation throughout the series is very deep. From a squad full of delinquents, to the powerful elves and the deadly devils, there is always something that feel refreshing with characters. All of the Magic Knights and their squads have refreshing personalities and traits. The enemies all develop and grow; maybe they'll realise their faults, maybe they'll demise Clover Kingdom - it's all there. From comic relief characters. to serious contenders, there is a character for everyone here. The soundtrack and music choices here are some of the best. It's known that Black Clover has some of the best, A+ anime openings and endings, and each and every one of them has pumped me up for every episode. The score is also highly commendable - it's action filled, and supplements the plot very well. The artwork throughout the series has never been it's strong point. You can feel that Pierrot just gave up some episodes. Some feel unpolished. Some of the art is amazing. But even with the terrible art, it definitely doesn't detract from the experience. Black Clover is such an enjoyable anime. Yes you have to get through the boring first 28 episodes, but that initial investment is highly worth it. The development, characters, music, lore, and world are some of the most refined and refreshing of all shounens, and a great show just to enjoy.
Ellenwitch
03/30/2021, 04:12 AM
There is a lot to say on Black Clover. A whole lot. While I got into the series late, but it was still a blast from start to end. Let me explain. Story and characters: Black Clover's main story focuses on four different kingdoms, Clover, Spade, Heart, and Diamond. As we mainly follow the Clover country then any other. Where many years ago, a battle between a demon, and a Wizard king happened which help shaped the foundations for it's story. As Black Clover follows magic mainly, all kinds of magic. From Dark magic, light magic, Wind magic, Steel magic, fire magic, water magic. All kinds ofmagic. If you're a magic nut, or have an interest in magic in general, you may dig this a whole lot, it was one of the hooks that got me into this show. Seeing all different forms of magic. The story follows two young boys to start off with, living in an orphanage, a wild and adventures boy in Asta, who may seem unbearable at the start, but he's got good motives, and a good heart. Along with the more stoic Yuno. As both dream of one day becoming the wizard king. When a person becomes of certain age, they're given their grimoire, which decides what kind of magic they get, and if they're good enough, they have a chance of joining magic knights. Knights who protect the Clover Kingdom. As we follow that, and face the challenges along the way. The story goes from there, and we've thrown right into the action. Showing how dangerous it is to be a magical knight, and it's really well done. There is no rest at the start, as it's interesting and engaging plot unravels before you during all of this. Really well done here. As for more of the characters? There is a real mix of blend of characters that all bounce off of each other, that really carry the show honestly. That's another hook of Black Clover, it's characters. I could list them all in this review, but there are so many to chose from. Black Clover has many characters to love from their backgrounds, personalities, their values, along with the magic that they process in general. Can't go wrong there, and basically what I am saying, is that there is a character for everyone. With the growth within those characters, and other characters being well done in my book. Music and Art The music is always great, far as I'm concerned, lot of great OPS and EDs, like you can't go wrong there, but also the tone and the style of music within the show is just great too. From the battles, to comedic moments, or to something more serious. It's all really well done. While for the art, it depends your tastes. I personally had no issues or problems with it throughout. But so many have had issues with it declining in airs, which can be a little turn off, but it isn't overbearing to the point you'd turn your eyes away. It's style is still great in many ways, from how it looks in scenes, to how bright and dark the grmoires can look. Along with how the characters look in general. I personality liked it, and I'm sure many will too. Black Clover means a lot to me honestly, it's something I binged after being curious about it, and I was hooked on it within moments. If you were waiting to start this, honestly do so. You'll love it. It's not perfect by any means, but it's still a really great show. It's a show that I highly recommend to so many of you. It'll be a show that I'll remember for years and year, and I cannot wiat for more of it honestly.
Fotsuan
03/30/2021, 03:41 AM
Black Clover has received tons of hate and criticism, so my role here is to make it clear; why someone should go for it or ignore it. Of course, there are many flaws, but it is undeniable that some things were handled well for a battle shounen anime. Starting as an adventure of two brothers who dive into the world of magic, Black Clover introduces us to a world full of colour, battles and a big number of characters. But aside from that, Tabata Yuuki tries to deliver political and moral messages in his own way. The main arcs revolve around pacifism, trust, hope and positiveenergy; the villains are the complete opposite, thus the protagonists will either end up changing their mind or destroying them. In addition, the hierarchy and political systems are interesting in this one; the satirical presentation of the kingdom’s king, the arrogance of higher-ups and the – unfair – rankings and labels of the Magic Knight squads. One of the biggest minuses is the power system, how the main characters suddenly gain unreal power and defeat their villains. But the battles are mostly used as fan service and the result includes a moral message that watchers do not care about, and it is not their fault. Although there might be good meaning behind all the fights, it is not easily spotted. The main reason people like me do not like Black Clover as a whole (don’t get me wrong, some parts are likable), is the ridiculously repetitive comedy, which is not even funny to begin with. Many characters are mostly used for comedic purposes and have their own comedic patterns, and this approach ruins the character part too in this show - even if there are a few exceptions and some good character backstories (Zora, William and some more). And it is not surprising that everyone has heard negative comments about Asta and some main characters, because their repetitive behaviour may end up irritating. In terms of Black Clover comedy, there’s also Petit Clover, which is the short chibi scene at the end of each episode. Fans of chibi anime may check Mugyutto Black Clover too, a short ONA with a good opening song…and nothing more. The animation is nothing special, but it is colourful and leads to an enjoyable experience. The kingdom’s medieval setting, the different forms of magic and the squad colour patterns are the pros, while the lack of details and spectacular animation are the cons. Mixed feelings on voice acting too, since there were amazing performances and awful ones too. Some of the most noteworthy ones are Suwabe Junichi’s as Yami and Koyama Rikiya’s as Dante. Soundtrack for dessert, because my words about it can only be sweet. Starting with an amazing combination of OP and ED - kankakupiero’s Haruka Mirai and ITOWOKASHI’S Aoi Honoo – Black Clover never disappointed us with its exceptional opening and ending songs. Many of them are listed on youtube playlists, even by people who have never watched the anime. The battle OST is decent, and the only soundtrack that is poor is the goofy / comedic one, but I don’t take it into consideration since, like I said, the comedic scenes in Black Clover are bad. To sum up, as far as I’m concerned Black Clover has definitely not been a bad experience overall, but not a good one either. Sometimes it was fun, though the writing and execution lacked a lot and could have done much better. If you ask me if Black Clover is one of the worst shounen anime like many people say, though, I would reply that I’ve seen much worse, and this is the main reason I wrote this review. Any questions and discussion topics will be gladly accepted, feel free to text me. Thank you for reading!
NinjasonFG
03/30/2021, 03:29 AM
Thank you for everything for this 3 and a half years of joy and happiness. The anime gave me hope that the new age shonen can be good when i was stuck at watching old ones Thank you Tabata for making this awesome story and characters Thank you staff,directors,story writers everyone involved in the anime process. And i hope we will watch Black clover again as an anime!!! I hope alot of people come and watch the anime because it was amazing yes it had it's flaws but overrall i love it THANK YOU for everythin and the community I suggest everyone to read the manga and to seehow great it is The manga has average sellings but the anime onlys can rise everthing And i can't wait to watch the movie and wait for the anime to come back strong as ever and show why it's soooo good!!
debochca
03/30/2021, 03:13 AM
Well, well, well, what do we have here? The anime that I thought that would be the next Naruto in terms of length, already got to an end. Black Clover is an anime that I started watching right after I ended watching Naruto, so you may understand my confusion when, back in 2017, I started this anime with a friend after school and I asked him “why is this so much similar to Naruto?”. It was like my tenth anime, so I was actually and purely confused. However, we promised that we would watch it together in my house, but then college happened and we hadto drop it. This year I retook it by myself, by the 15th episode, I think? And it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The premise is as classic as a premise shounen tends to be. Asta is a young boy that wants to become the next magic emperor, but he doesn’t have mana nor magic powers; his adoptive brother (let’s say) and rival, Yuno, is a prodigy boy that is the mangaka’s favourite one. When they go through a ceremony where they can see whether they can or not be magicians (by receiving a magical grimoire), the mangaka’s favourite gets the best grimoire ever that only the chosen ones can have, so you can’t forget Yuno is way better than Asta, and even than you. Asta, on the other hand, is the poor little thing that ends up having some sort of evil grimoire. From that moment, they decide they will be magic knights in order to be the next magic emperor. They have always declared each other their rival, but from that moment they actually become rivals. As the story continues, we get to see how Asta screams all day and says the same stuff about not giving up and that he will marry a nun once he become the emperor. At first it is unbearable, but you eventually get used to ears pain. Meanwhile, we get to see how every person in that kingdom falls for Yuno and how indredibly he is and how Asta is a loser, and of course, when they have to be chosen for a captain from an organization (there are like 12) during the the exam to become magic knights, every captain asks for Yuno as some sort of The X Factor move when everybody press the buttom for the same guy and he gets to decide which one he wants to join. He, obviously, accepts the offer of the biggest organization’s captain; Asta, at the same time, is not chosen by any captain, except for the poorest one, at last moment. After this they start their lives separate and they start this adventure. As the viewer can appreciate, Black Clover falls in every possible cliche. The beginning is completely predictable and doesn’t make any effort to try to add new nuances to such a classical shounen story formula. It’s a beginning made for beginners. If you watch Black Clover as one of your first animes it is fun, but if you watch it after that you have seen a lot of shows, this starting is rather boring and insurmountably generical. As I always state, I’m not against generical animes, but please, at least try to change a personality, a motive, a rivalry. Anything would have add anything to this, but it didn’t happen. Even talking about characters presentation are poor. Asta screams and shouts and claims he’ll be the next Hokage, Yuno doesn’t talk at all and has a resting face all day, but he is perfect and has whatever he wants and you are not (in case you didn’t notice). It does not only falls in story’s cliche but in characters. Most of them are a walking stereotype: the incestuous unbearable character that is disgustingly obssessed with his little sister, the shy one, the womanizer, the glutton that only fights when there’s food in the middle, the tsundere one that falls in love with the main character because he treats her as a person, and the lazy leader (captain) that is a bastard. However, the interaction between them has also its pros and contras. The rivalry between Yuno and Asta is forced, lacks of interest and depth, and comes off as a bad use of a cliche: they want the same thing, and clearly Yuno is the blessed one that has more chances to win. They appear, they say “I’m going to beat him and become the magic emperor!” and that’s it. The rivalry is weak because their both motivations are weak. Asta’s motivation is to marry the nun and to demonstrate that he can win without magic powers. Yuno doesn’t have motivations because he doesn’t have any development. You see Yuno and you can’t tell if his face is because he is sad, because he is motivated, because he is happy, or because he is just hungry. He is just too overpowered to care for anything. On the other hand, what I do like about their interactions is how the partnership is handled. The Black Bulls are not good characters as such, but their friendship and union is managed with subtlety, is gradual and is pretty natural. After 100 episodes, when you see them support each other, it becomes touching because trust was slowly built and is something the mangaka succeeds in. Maybe I’m such a crybaby and that’s it. I liked the Black Bulls, and I liked to watch them grow. I like the way Vanessa becomes a elemental character; I enjoyed the background of Finral; I liked the way the incestuous guy opened up to his comrades. I like the annoying thing between Luck and Magna, and I liked the way they helped Noelle to grow as well. One thing that I like about series like this, is that its world has a big amount of characters to know and care. Although, at the same time, in a world like this where everytime there’s war and figths, this big lot of characters must be reduced. That’s how it is. In Game of Thrones you have more than one hundred characters, and when you make a list of your favourites you just have to enlist thirty of them at least, but eventually they die like some sort of ant that is crushed by the author, and that’s how is supposed to be. If we have a lot of magic knights, most of them will have to die since they have to fight all the time and not everytime they are going to win, won’t they? A lot of battles in Black Clover don’t have useful conclusions. A fight can endure eight episodes, and by the end of it, no one is going to die and the enemy is going to retrieve “haha, I’ll see you soon” (This Licht guy does that like three times). I don’t say that the author have to kill them indiscriminately, but he shouldn’t be afraid to kill some of them either. That’s a problem to me. Even in the hardest situation, at least in the first half of the anime, all of them survive, most of the times and battles, and that’s a plot armor that I dislike, not only because it becomes a bothersome, but because every fight comes off as irrelevant. The enemies don’t die, but the main cast don’t either; the enemies don’t win, but the main cast don’t either. If there are going to be arcs with fights that involve ten episodes (or more), at least make it juicy and with important consequences. Captains injured to death survived in ways that it shouldn’t be possible; also the enemies, even the secondaries. Please, dude, killing Fuegoleon in that first fight would have been a good impact, but no. An author must not be afraid of killing his characters in good moments, and that’s essential. Villains leave much to be desired. Villains without substance that are just full of hate. They don’t have ideals, they just want revenge and to exterminate. The same speech is repeated a lot of times. We get it, the elves hate humanity. We get it, we saw that flashbacks a lot of times. Female characters are... well, average. They are not that bad, since they are, at least, useful. Nevertheless, what is, actually their weight on the work? How much do they add to this, more than being in love with the two male leads? Noelle is a character that I personally like a lot, I don’t know why, I just have affection for her, but the 80% of her character is being in love with Asta and chasing after him, and being jealous and tsundere type. An exaggerated tsundere type, I must admit. However, she gets a gradual development that is clearly notorious, and is not forced. She starts being the clumsy magician that gets bullied by her siblings because she belongs to royalty and it’s the weakest of the family, and ends up being an interesting character that has a noticeable development as a magician and as a piece in this work; she demonstrates that she can be a lot more than Asta’s fangirl. Mimosa is like Noelle (is funny because they are cousins) but worse. She is way dumber and is a lot more undeveloped. She falls in love with Asta because of a fight and his great abs. She starts to blush and that’s all she does. She has a protective abilitie, but that’s all she does, again. I like her though. Charlotte is a captain that I thought would be different, but at the end of the day is a woman that is in love with Yami, Asta’s captain, and that behaves almost the same way as Noelle, synthesizing her personality around her romantic attitudes. The same goes for every woman in this anime that meets Asta. Two words and they fall for him. Almost the same case with Yuno, but he doesn’t need to speak at all, since he is perfect as Sasuke. Sasuke misstreats a woman and she swears etern loyalty to him. Yuno doesn’t misstreat them, but he sees them as the same way he can see a tree. Everything applies for every woman in this anime, except for Mereoleona, and maybe Vanessa. Mereoleona, however, THAT IS A HELL OF A WOMAN: interesting backstory, explosive personality, imponent, strong. My favourite, by far; she may be the stereotypical overpowered, but she is so charismatic that I could hear her scream all day and I wouldn’t mind. The comedy in Black Clover is really poor; is VERY repetitive. When I say VERY, I mean it. Jokes about Charlotte correcting her subordinate is repeated like 10 times per episode every time they appear. When some sort of sensei to Asta appears, they make jokes about him being naked like… I’m sorry, I can’t recall how many times they did it. You could even see it coming. Yami threatening Asta by pressing his head is another thing that you get to see too many times. Jokes about Noelle and Charlotte acting extremely tsundere are on another level of repetition. Nonetheless, when you have watched like 70 episodes, you just get used to it and pretend to laugh when they repeat the same joke for the 3rd time in the episode, but that’s how they are; if you like the characters, those jokes won’t be a bothersome for you, like it was in my case. The humor is mediocre? It is. Did I have a good time laughing at it? Well, of course. At the same time, Black Clover is not only full of filler episodes, but it’s also full of plot armors and incoherences that complexed the story without apparent reason. I’m talking about all the entire White Eye arc and its elf-revenge stuff, with reincarnations and pasts lifes and so; some things made sense, at least a little bit, and some things were just too much convenient for them to actually bother. Some evangelisms were forced, like Finral’s brother, like half of the guys that Asta touches. That true reason behind Nozel’s contempt towards Noelle was so ridiculous. I like Nozel because he is a stoic character, but I would have preferred him as a cold brother, rather than the “I wanted to protect you” brother. Ruining your sister’s self esteem because you wanted to protect her is not allowed in this house. As I said in other reviews, I hate studios Pierrot. After I watched Akudama Drive I thought “definitely, Pierrot improved a lot”, but then I returned to Black Clover and I knew why I hated them. Fights’ animations are lousy, character’s movements are inconsistent and in one frame you have Noelle and in the next frame you have N0ell3. In a moment you see Yami and in the next moment you see Yami without eyebrows and with his muscles like made of paperboard. There are animes that make bad frames in the middle of a fight because that way those can sleep by unseen; however, Black Clover has those stinky frames even when they are talking about the weather. There are a couple of fight that nobody knows what they wanted to do, like Asta vs Ladros. That coreography is so terrible that the viewer doesn’t have a clue of what’s going on. It seemed like a Devilman Crybaby fight that didn’t go well. In conclusion, I’m not going to lie: my friend also retook it and we both had good laughs talking about this anime, we both shared fun experiences while watching this and we never suffered it. Black Clover is an anime full of flaws, filler episodes, not the best characters ever, and with a lousy animation and some things more that make it an average shounen, but if you like simple things without paying attention to mistakes and cliches, or if you aren’t tired of shounens, you should watch it. Besides that, I want to add that the second half is a lot better than the first one. Generical mediocre shounen or not, I don’t regret watching this.
_cjessop19_
03/30/2021, 02:56 AM
Black Clover has probably had the best and most significant turnaround in quality of any anime series I’ve seen so far, and it surely deserves all the praise and hype that it gets now as it trends worldwide more often than not, earning itself (in my book) the title of being a quality shounen series. I think we can all agree that Black Clover started off quite poorly. Bad voice acting, bad animation, it was just overall shit. Having started later throughout the series’s release (around episode 120), I decided to stick around in the promise of it improving thanks to word of mouth by fansof the series, and it paid off. Little by little, episode after episode, I began to notice that more quality and care was being put into each episode. I began to enjoy this series more and more until I was up to date, going all the way up to the final episode, becoming one of my most anticipated series currently airing, alongside with One Piece and a few other seasonals. Instead of writing 5 or 6 bullshit paragraphs to fill up space and to seem sophisticated and bash on about the series’s bad points, I’ll sum things up with a list of pros and cons, and it’ll be up to you whether you’ll heed my wisdom and watch the show. Pros: - All the openings are 10/10 bangers - There are loads of hype fight scenes with excellent animation to match - Some of the villains and protagonists are excellently written, fleshed out & compelling - The power scale is balanced well and the characters progress smoothly as the series progresses - Most members in the Black Bulls get a dedicated arc to flesh their characters out - All the climactic fight scenes are hype as fuck (kept me glued to the screen) - Not much fan service pushed in our faces like other shounen series, with exception of a couple of juicy scenes/ending card sprinkled in - Yami Sukehiro Cons: - Asta’s yelling (though it stops around episode 15 or so) - Poor animation (until after the first main arc, also due to being a weekly series) - Some of the smaller villains are just pointless and badly written - Most of the characters are your standard character tropes - Not much relationship development as some of the characters are thick as lead or too tsundere and are afraid of rejection - 17 filler episodes, though considered low for a long running shounen series - The anime catching up to the manga and having to slow down by introducing an anime canon training arc (before the time skip occurs) - The smaller character arcs go by too quickly I could’ve added the point of it being “clichéd”, but that is a superficial argument that could be said about every and any shounen/action series you can think of. Although it’s sad to see this show end for now, which is sorely needed as the manga needs to get far ahead, I hope this break will prove beneficial for future adaptations of this series if they decide to go with seasonal releases. I’m hoping the series will continue to work it’s magic (pun intended), as you cannot deny the wild success and popularity that it has endured up until now. Black Clover is a solid 8/10.
KANLen09
03/30/2021, 02:55 AM
This is the first time that I'll be reviewing a long-running series, so spare the pardon if there's any for pleasantries. But without further ado..."Please marry me, Sister Lily! I won't give up until I've hit my limits!" "If you flip the 10, it becomes a 01!" - Some Jerk a.k.a remember how Black Clover was despised by everyone? Black Clover is one of the many myriad of Shonen shows that Weekly Shonen Jump has been banking on imitating the success Shueisha once had since the diminishing of the Big 3 (One Piece, Bleach, Naruto), alongside many other WSJ titles that have constantly received headlines for breakingsales and adaptations that make up the modern age of the anime landscape. Unfortunately, at a time when the Big 3 were all but fizzled out of the community's eyes, there was but one mangaka amongst the many other Shonen authors who were trying to get the attention of Weekly Shonen Jump to have their works publicized...his name is Yuki Tabata. Being a sophomore into the manga industry, his first work of the short-lived and then cancelled 3-volume long Hungry Joker was not received well, and if you know anything about the intense competition of Weekly Shonen Jump: "If your manga doesn't sell well, we will take it off indefinitely without trial. We have more titles that we are ever ready to sink our time and resources into promoting new material and publicity to the large population who are always ever hungry for more." OK, shame on you for the first try. But take a look at his second work...and yet it still doesn't sell when this came out in early 2015 when it was serialized in WSJ. But Shueisha at least had a good idea that while this work started off being blantantly and averagely similar to the Big 3 in terms of the story and plot, and so they released the first volume thereafter in June of the same year. And to say the rest is history is an understatement, because even in the Oricon charts, Yuki Tabata just couldn't do enough to maintain the growing popularity of his work, only selling within the Top 25 and not even cracking the Top 10, even after the anime adaptation came out (at least for the 1st year running). It's only through the sheer talent of director Tatsuya Yoshihara and his production team at Studio Pierrot that would propel this "then infamous, now famous" work into the greatest of great oblivion with the passing of time, that Yuki Tabata finally can breathe a heavy sigh and continue developing Black Clover into one of the many modern Shonen juggernauts that we know today, selling from the thousands to the millions. I'm not gonna say that what Yuki Tabata did here was plentiful, the story plot was rife of a roller-coaster ride of the usual Shonen tropes and cliches that quickly garnered attention as one of the worst series to be published and then through Studio Pierrot's infamous low-budget visuals, another strike as one of the worst modern Shonen shows that aired back in 2017. Heck, I probably would not want to include what Black Clover is all about, you can refer to the MAL synopsis or even Wikipedia to read it. In a nutshell, think of the Big 3 and the main MC's aspiration of "I want to be <fill in the blanks of the usual Shonen archetype>", add in a fellow rival, and there you have it. It feels just as awful as any kind of minimalistic story from the start, and the usual shenangians from some heavy power fantasy action to the occasional comedy that just doesn't feel as cohesive, and that's not to mention the immense boredom that quickly sets in if you're not the type to stick around for just "one more chapter". Not gonna lie, the first thing that everyone will remember is the crudely annoying MC that is Asta, especially in particular towards newbie VA Gakuto Kajiwara at the time when he first debuted with Asta. Try to compare the criticisms from Day 1 of the anime to now, and most people will say: "I still remember the days when people hated his voice days after his debut on Black Clover. Although I also wasn't very fond of it too, I found it very funny later, gotta love him and his voice acting now." or "I used to think that he (Gakuto Kajiwara) did a bad job with Asta...I take back what I said. His voice matches Asta completely and it's not bad at all, I've gotten used to it overtime." We've come a long way, friends. To see a rookie VA on his first debut getting flamed for all the wrong reasons, to now seeing the light that no one can replace Gakuto Fujiwara for the long-term investment. Overtime, we get to see the extensive character cast of Black Clover, and I'm still going to rely on my gut feelings here: each and everyone of them feels like cardboard cut-outs that are worth surmising to invoke the feelings of just blantantly plagarizing from other Weekly Shonen Jump works, and that's where Yuki Tabata can be faulted with trying to make do of the cliches and tropes of the Shonen genre that worked well at the time. The problem is with his way of execution of character traits that we've seen way too often to try lifting inspirations from one source to another, so much so that it becomes overbearing and full of cringe. Let's say Asta's rival Yuno. He's a skilled Wind Magic user, blessed by the gods to have magnificent power for OP prodigy powers, and as indicated by the magic books known as Grimoires: he's the four-lead clover magic user. Now tell me if any of those traits are lifted whether in and out of context of similar characters you might have seen throughout your read list of Shonen lookalikes. But as further evidenced, it's with the passing of time that helps distinguish each and every character to their types and whatnot, giving us the audience enough time to digest about what makes them tick and work, and appreciate them for their presence to the different progressing story arcs of the main series. You know me, I'm very critical when it comes to studio productions, and Studio Pierrot to me, stands as one of the worst studios to ever exist, even if they adapt works that often lose out on the quality of the source materials that fans so desired to see on the small screen. Black Clover is no different with the stigma that Pierrot productions tend to have, and for 1001 good reasons. But once again, like I've said at the beginning, it's thanks to director Tatsuya Yoshihara for helming this long-running project that has seen its fair shares of highs and lows. Black Clover might've started on the wrong foot for being the similar case towards Studio Deen at being decades-old studios with variable quality, for the test of time stands between the production staff team to stand in the gap and make their efforts worth it, and the payoff was certainly worth it in the long-run that was only destined to run for the full length of a year, that subsequently got lengthened and amounted to 3.5 years worth of time that increased the hype with some episodes having the Asta trademark of "I will hit my limits!" that expressively shared the experience of sticking in the long-run. AND BOY, DO THOSE EPISODES DELIVER with at best 9-turned-10/10 ratings that even trended on Twitter. YES, Black Clover IS BIG in both Japan and the West, and with Crunchyroll being the biggest benefactor that this show has garnered the No. 1 top spot in 80+ countries, you can't certainly lie at where Black Clover is now with the insane popularity. To that I say, great job Pierrot for making me love a show that I now endear as one of the many Shonen long-running series that I can recommend. Even the music can't be understated. For as many as 13 sets of OSTs within the 3.5 year long run of Black Clover, we've definitely heard some "diamond in the rough" gems that we've gotten used to overtime, with many songs that really stick out to be the series' representatives when it comes to recognizing that it originated from Black Clover. Sound director Hajime Takakuwa certainly did wonders at what he does best, but for this one I have to give props to the many artists that have contributed cult-classic songs, from the OPs: Kankaku Piero's "Haruka Mirai" to Vickeblanca's hit songs "Black Rover" and "Black Catcher", and EDs: Itowokashi's "Aoi Honoo" to Faky's "four". These are just some of my top favourite songs from Black Clover, but there's just too many to list them, because most of them are bangers in their own right (with some just being decent at best). Like what @Goober-fish has said: "Whatever the case may be, Black Clover is my ultimate guilty pleasure and I wave that 10 with pride." And I reverse the words of some jerk that said the sentence at the beginning: "If you flip the 01, it becomes a 10!" Black Clover may have started with being a score of 01, but looking at it now, it's definitely worthy of the 10 score in every possible way: the story that got better overtime with the characters, the insane Pierrot animation quality and right down to the fantastic OSTs that we are graced with to our pairs of eyes and ears. Never have I thought that I will return from a hatred of a stigma to loving them for Shonen shows, and even if I or you have never watched the Big 3 before, Black Clover is EASILY the best recommended entry show for anyone wanting to dive into Shonen shows...that's if you can last all 170 episodes in one go. Thanks Black Clover, now it's no longer just a guilty pleasure, and I'm an addition to wearing that 10 with pride.
LordSozin
03/30/2021, 02:36 AM
Black Clover is not for everyone, I’ll admit. It’s the trashiest to mid-tier Shounen series out there that manages to gravitate to a certain group of viewers with its cliches, tropes, and generic power fantasy. It lacks anything substantial or impactful. It doesn’t reinvent the Shounen wheel or elevates it. It’s a lackluster written series that exists purely for entertainment for people like me--who self indulges in battle shounen without a second thought--even if it’s the same type of blueprint that I’ve seen before, but with its own modifications. Thus, I don’t have any hate or resentment directed towards this controversial series. I simply can’t.I’ve been following the series since its inception. I’ve read and re-read its source material and, I can say it does improve--for a Black Clover standard, that is. This series received hate, backlash, and terrible reception since the onset of its TV anime. And to nobody’s surprise, it’s the most hated series of modern Shounen--2014 and onwards, right after the era of the big three. If there’s any advice I can give for people interested in watching this series, it is to go into it for pure entertainment. Be open-minded, have low expectations, ignore the hate, and watch it for yourselves. Black Clover anime started ugly. The pacing, sheer predictability, genericness, and the dreadful usage of Shounen tropes turned off people--understandably so. But for me, I loved it. I loved it not because it was good, but because it was the purest generic anime that was not afraid for what it was. It knows its production was constrained. It knows its plot and characters took “inspiration” from previous works with few tweaks here and there, and most importantly, it knows its target audience. With this, once the show solved its pacing issues, it quickly flew from arc to arc with hype moments after hype moments, and all I did was to turn off my brain and enjoy the shit show. To provide some examples, after the dungeon expedition arc, Asta, Noelle, Yuno, and some other magic knight squad members were summoned for recognition medals. In that banquet, the show introduced more of its supporting casts. It demonstrated its power system, characters’ abilities, showcased some of its societal structure and prejudices, and then jumped straight to the Clover Kingdom’s invasion. Throughout this invasion arc, it entertained me by never letting go of its accelerator. All the Magic Knight captains that were introduced previously got their moments to show off. Whether be their magic or personality, it showed all of it. The show then exploits each of its newly introduced characters to the limit by having them interact and fight alongside each other. The dynamics between characters such as Fuegoleon and Nozel, Asta, Yuno, and Noelle, Yami and Jack, provided the fun. It’s cheap, it’s lazy, but it worked so well for a braindead like me. The other aspect of Black Clover’s storytelling is the seamless transition from an arc to another. If some terrorists brutally wounded a beloved character, the most logical route is for the main casts to go after them. And they do. If the vice-captain of the Golden Dawn is acting out of character, the most logical thinking is to seek out the true identity. And they do. How do they do it? They do it by the classic shounen way: Tournament arc--my favorite aspect of mindless battle shounen. But along the way, the show plants some seeds of suspicion--there’s something more sophisticated with the adversaries that the Clover Kingdom were up against. It’s these careful hints here and there that made the grand finale of Black Clover’s first saga a memorable one. And it is in my humble opinion that the first saga of Black Clover is one of the best of modern shounen. The finale wrapped up every plot point presented up to then, it concluded characters’ development until that point, and it answered every question along the way. Not to mention, the final plot twist was a phenomenon to be held. Yuki Tabata’s writing isn’t anything revolutionary. He takes inspiration and does his own twists. He utilizes whatever skills he has got at his disposal and tells his own story within the Shounen genre’s confinement. And I enjoyed every second of it. I have no regrets. As I aforementioned, Black Clover’s production was severely constrained. From the start, the anime lacked staffing--specifically, key animators and animation directors--and had an unsustainable schedule. Before the first episode of Black Clover even premiered, the Black Clover anime production team was given only 5 months of pre-production, for a long-running battle shounen. To put it into perspective, a 12 episode regular anime usually takes a year of pre-production. Thus, it’s no surprise that the animation in Black Clover declined significantly soon after it began airing. As that happened, it’s also reported that some of the staff working on the anime had gone through physical and mental exhaustion, which they eventually fell ill. Now, why does it matter? Well, it doesn’t--at least from a show’s quality standpoint. But then I don’t want to clown on Black Clover’s animation either because of this information. I know the animation and art are inconsistent; the consensus is that Black Clover’s animation is inconsistent. It can be mindblowing for a single episode, and then for the next 10 to 20 episodes can range from unbearable to mediocracy. I can list every single flaw of Black Clover’s art and animation, but then that would be repetitive since I’m sure those aspects have been talked about over the years. Lastly, I’m fine with it. I’m okay with its inconsistency in art and animation because I love this series. I grew up with it, I enjoyed it, and I’m willing to forgive its flaws. If you have read this far, I just want to thank you for taking your time. Score: 5/10

Black Clover ブラッククローバー

2017 fall | Episodes: 170 | Score: 8.1 (920017)

Updated every Tuesdays at 18:25 | Status: Finished Airing

Type: TV

Producers:TV Tokyo | Avex Pictures | Shueisha

Streaming: Crunchyroll | Netflix

Synopsis

Voice Actors

Kajiwara, Gakuto

Fujita, Nao

Yuuki, Kana

Shimazaki, Nobunaga

Sekine, Arisa

News

Reviews

zaharded
01/19/2025, 12:01 PM
Black Clover is a 12 episode anime stretched out into 170 episodes. It is a whole lot of nothing, you’re gonna finish this and question your life choices that led you to do absolutely nothing but watch this brainless dribble of a show. Firstly, the characters are extremely one-dimensional and surface level. I don’t know the best way to explain this without spoiling, but they get NO character development throughout the entirety of the 50 hour snooze fest. In fact, I think that nearing the end they were starting to regress and their ENTIRE personality began to get centred over one trope. Let me put thisinto an analogy - let’s say that you have a friend who likes football, but his obsession over football is so severe that his house is a ball and every time he sees you he starts yapping about wanting to kick a football 24/7. That is exactly what every character consists of in this series, one likes footballs, but the other likes basketballs and the other likes golf balls (etc etc). So every time these characters are introduced in unison, the animators like to individually present each character and make them monologue about how much they love balls rather than 1) have them all express their obsessions in tandem or 2) STOP WITH THE GENERIC AND BLAND tropes. An average episode of black clover will literally consist of 1) recap 2) intro 3) 5 minutes of talking about what was mentioned or 4) a backstory that lasts three more episodes, and this is without a joke nearly how every episode goes and develops itself without fail. Near the end, I started skipping full chunks and/or whole episodes if it was based on a backstory which we as the viewers hold full knowledge of. The main character, above all else, is the most insufferable. I’d like to think that the main character represents the whole cast of this show because whenever he thinks too much his head starts to steam and explode. He has no personality whatsoever and unfortunately suffers from the same problems that the side cast do too. The animation fluctuates episode-by-episode. Some episodes had world-class animation, while the others probably were made by just one person and this is very noticeable, but generally the animation and art style are good This show is definitely not for everyone and has worse pacing than something like one piece, but the concept and general gist are good if you suffer from a shortage of braincells.
Papitaa
11/08/2024, 07:40 AM
Black Clover has taken 2 years of my life. Was it worth it? Probably not, but it has yielded some interesting things to think about. Its biggest crime is that the author can't write characters for shit. Stupid two-dimensional characterisation prevents it from being something greater. Cool moments occasionally make their way through hours of rubbish comedy and boring sequences led by paper-thin characters repeating their one personality trait over and over again. Let me share with you a drinking game I've come up with, where you take a shot everytime one of these things happen: 1. Asta is impressed by something 2. Noelle says a cartoonishly typicaltsundere phrase 3. Noelle has family issues 4. Luck wants to fight 5. Gordon creepily talks about friendship 6. Vanessa drinks or talks about drinking 7. Charmy eats or talks about eating 8. Charmy is head over heels for Yuno 9. Yuno's fairy is head over heels for him 10. Mimosa is head over heels for Asta 11. Gauche is head over heels for his sister (...) 12. Finral hits on girls or talks about hitting on them 13. Charlotte is head over heels for Yami 14. Sol calls Charlotte "sister", which results in the latter getting annoyed 15. Sol hates men 16. Nero lands on Asta's head With this, you can actually have some fun, as these things happen so often you can get hammered in the span of a single episode! Well, you get my point now. While the plot itself does have some intense and fun-to-watch moments — such as the battle between Black Bulls and Vetto, Asta's special powers awakening (vague to avoid spoilers), the climax of the elves' scheme (same here), or Yami's poop jokes (funniest shit I've ever seen) — it is all incredibly infantile and lacks depth. The characters' motivations behind a plot point can be so shallow that at some point I legitimately viewed Black Clover as a collection of over-exaggerated parables, painfully mawkish to allegorically demonstrate the values beneath and make sure that no one misses them. And I almost accepted it because Black Clover's values are really positive and motivating, even if trite. That's also why for a while I developed another theory that Black Clover's world is like a family - a family in which there are flaws you grow to accept and cherish the ensuing highs. For some time, I had somehow accepted the shitty things and started perceiving even the filler sequences as family time as a result of spending a lot of time with the characters. But I think I got manipulated by Black Clover into refraining from criticising its repeated flaws, lmao. That's just bad writing. Good moments are placed within hours of either poor humour that oversimplifies the characters to the point of them seeming as caricatures, or tiresome fight scenes consisting of repetitive cant and a random clusterfuck of spells and attacks at which my brain turned off. You also can't accept lack of nuance as an intended measure — as is the case with the LOTR books, for example, where everything is set in stone and the story unfolds like fulfilling a destiny — just because it's long-running. I wonder if that's what the majority of shounen giants suffer from, baiting the audience into forgiving the flaws for an interspersed cool moment or two. I also want to mention the last arc specifically because I think it needs individual treatment. The build-up to it is literally just one big filler that is justified by "training". Another thing are the plot twists. They have overall been quite random, forcing their way into a previously established landscape and flipping it on its head as a cheap solution to a problem. But the one with the emergence of a new character in the last few episodes is just taking the piss, you know what I'm talking about. There were moments when I had fun, I can't lie. I also like the core ideas behind a lot of the stuff here. The poor writing is just inexcusable, though. It feels to me as if Black Clover was straight-up disrespectful towards its viewers, even if with good heart all throughout.
Anifek
10/15/2024, 09:03 AM
Black Clover is a pretty good anime but lacks some things: 1. The animation and pacing are not very good. The animation is sometimes pretty mid and not well done in many episodes. This is probably because Black Clover is a weekly anime and not seasonal and the same goes for the pacing. The pacing is kinda bad because they didn't want to get close to the manga since the manga is still airing and the anime is weekly. Other than the animation and pacing there are some fillers or "Anime Canon" stuff but this is not really hurting the anime. Another thing that Ihave a problem with is Asta as an MC. Now don't get me wrong I love Asta but listen he is very similar to Naruto and much more annoying sometimes. At the start of the anime, his yells were unbearable and annoying but that was fixed with time. Until the time skip, I would give Black Clover a 7/10 but the time skip did good to this anime and made it much better. To conclude I recommend Black Clover to anyone who likes fantasy, shonen, and someone who likes the Naruto series because Black Clover is highly inspired by Naruto and has lots of similarities but it's not for everyone due to the bad pacing and animation, for example, some episodes are boring and kind of slice of life stuff that involves around comedy and romance although they aren't funny and boring and sometimes they show tons of repetitive flashbacks that were already been shown and all of this is just to make the anime slower so it won't pass the manga. This is a problem with almost every weekly anime such as One Piece Naruto Bleach and more so keep that in mind. I would still recommend you to try it and see if you like it or not.
Naherth
01/15/2024, 08:51 AM
ok, that is one of the worst animes that i have ever seen, is not the worst but even so it is very bad at start, the story is full of conveniences, generic things and scenes that wanna be good and epic bot finally it has some interesting moments but it is only 10% or 20% off all story, its very simple and even sometimes its a little boring The characters are so mid, there are some interesting or decent like zora, Asta, Nacht o yami but they are only a 10% of this history, the others are very simply and basic The production is quite standrad,at least the music is good, the animetion sometimes are so bad and sometimes are nice, the best of this part are the openings, almos ever opening are very very good
tcandy19
07/11/2023, 10:28 PM
as someone who dropped bc in the first 3 eps then came back years later to complete it - lemme say im so glad i picked it back up and gave it a chance. this is a show that really gatekeeps itself, especially given how good it is. terrible word of mouth and jarring first 3 episodes is enough to keep people away and discourage them from continuing. but if you do overlook/get past those, you’re in for a really fun ride with great storytelling, characters and world building. what makes bc really fun for me is that it really leans in to typical shonentropes but embraces the corniness as well as addresses some of the problems. ‘power of friendship’ isnt just some crap used to bail mc out of a situation. instead, power of friendship means the team training together and actually showing/explaining their strategy as to complement each others powers. it helps that all of the black bulls are well written, likeable with realistic flaws, fears and challenges to overcome. lets talk about the mc. hes loud, obnoxious and in your face. this all also makes him so lovable and funny! hes really the type to grow on you. before i knew it i was laughing at the dumb shit he does while also rooting for him to grow stronger and stronger. hes the type to make friendships with everyone but the show doesnt rub that in your face. instead you can interpret how he would naturally do so based on his outgoing nature and kind personality. romance - bc has some good ass romance and does not shy away from addressing the topic. they feed you with lots of ships and also give enough content to keep all the shippers happy. if you like asta x noelle, mimosa, nero, any one You will be given plenty of content. even side characters have good ships. yami x vanessa or charlotte, finral and the princess, grey x gauche. so much romantic intrigue without being cringey or having the mc randomly pop up with a girl he never interacted with (ahem naruto and bleach ahem hem) but the biggest praise i have for bc is how it treats female characters. I never thought i’ll see the day a shonen anime properly writes female characters as more than just sex objects. Yes there is fan service of course, but that isnt what the women are reduced to (im looking you post time skip one piece). the women of black clover are strong, independent, free thinking and interesting. they struggle with societal issues like gender expectations, poverty, discrimination and more. noelle as the female lead of the series is not a mere side character which exists to be rescued by the men around her. she is encouraged by those around her to step up to the plate and fight for what she believes in - and she does just that. she has tangible growth in both her powers and her personality, not just reduced to astas love interest (sakura and ochaco 😐). Its so refreshing how the women are free to have romantic interests and it doesnt take over their entire personality/reason for existing! Mimosa, noelle, and vanessa all have crushes whos crush doesnt become their character trait. if i have to say something negative, i'd say the show is lacking a compelling villain. all the villains are so one note and uninteresting. either they are pure evil or secretly good - then they become the mc's friend. another thing that becomes super repetitive is the "backlash" or whatever from the people in the capital. they're like "youre just a COMMONER with NO MAGIC what could you possibly do? >:(" *cue cool ass move by asta* *cue asta/black bulls getting overlooked in favor of golden dawn*. really that shit gets so old. especially because golden dawn is not very likeable at all save for klaus and mimosa. but what about yuno? if thats the question you had, then i'll respond that he did absolutely nothing for me. he didn't stand out in anyway except to outscale asta at every turn and just show the huge gap between them as rivals. bro is already the vice captain of golden dawn and he started out at the same time as asta! I mean for fucks sake on this track he should be wizard king in the next 2-3 years easily! he has NO personality except asta is my rival (btw theres really funny and cute scenes in petit clover which embrace this so ill kinda give them a pass for owning up to it). hes like a bad rip off sasuke if sasuke had no individualism. how much are you gonna milk that one flashback of asta saving your necklace?! get new flashbacks dawg. overall though this series was such an enjoyable watch. the power scaling was easy to follow, the plot flowed naturally, hell even the fillers were so damn good! I didnt skip a single filler! They were literally all interesting and fun in their own way. im so glad i picked this back up and you can be damn sure i’ll be seated for future seasons.
peshala
09/03/2022, 11:34 AM
This anime definitely doesn't deserve an 8+ score. I hate myself for watching 170 episodes of this garbage. The plot is garbage. The characters are copy and pastes from other shounen anime, but they have somehow managed to screw that up also. Dialogues keep repeating far too many times, it's nauseating. After a dozen episodes you can guess pretty well what the characters are going to say and do in a given situation. Power of the protagonist is a literal cheat code. They have taken all the tropes of shounen anime and made them worse. The characters and the plot is so boring. Can't decidewhat the worst thing about this anime is, because there is just so many things to choose from. Please save your time and watch something else. Don't be fooled by the score. This anime sucks ass.
ma1kawa11
06/11/2021, 10:24 AM
In my opinion, Black Clover is a fairly overrated anime which has major issues in many different aspects of its production. Having watched it until it's completion it was a huge disappointment for me, considering that the original idea sounded intriguing. I've also heard the manga is much better (though at the time of writing I've not read it), so I'm rather miffed that they studio put this low a quality into what probably was a fairly decent series. Worldbuilding: 2/10 While the writers of Black Clover did create a somewhat extensive world to work with especially when it comes to the magic system, the applicationwas overall underwhelming. The entire universe only consists of four countries, and the relations between them tend to be very basic. We know the Clover Kingdom and the Diamond Kingdom are at war, and we know that the spade kingdom is struggling for resources, but we've never really gotten to see enough to completely understand why they would be willing to literally abuse and mutilate children in order to gain more military power. Blatant terrifying acts like that only hold weight if we are able to really spend time with some exposition about the country as a whole. That being said, we only learn about the Heart kingdom extremely late in the series, and we know perhaps even less about it than the Diamond kingdom. Why would the Heart Kingdom isolate itself if it objectively had more military might than probably the Heart and Clover kingdom combined. Granted that it seems to be run over an absolute monarchical rule, It doesn't make sense that all of the ruler's have been benevolent for some reason. That goes against the most blatant weakness of authoritarianism, which is that it is extremely prone to corruption. And the spade kingdom is barely mentioned at all until the very end of the season when it becomes the capitol of the dark triad. As for the magic system, although it might appear to be extensive at a first glance, it's only complex at face value. Yes, there are different types which can counter each other (which in and of itself is a rather basic concept of a magic system which includes types), but the overall adaptability and application of each power is limited heavily on a person's grimoire. The extent to which they can use their powers and their special abilities are specifically limited to spells written in the grimoire. And their powers are only ever used at face value, no one is stretching exactly how far they can take their powers and using that to develop new ones. And although we see people 'train' or try to develop emotionally, the correlation to them getting a new spell is non-dependent. The character isn't developing their powers themselves, the new spell just appears out of thin air, and the character had no say whatsoever in what the power does. It's extremely uncreative and really does a magic system injustice, especially considering the potential it had to be good. Imagine if through training you could write your own spells in your book. Or if we saw powers being adapted in uncanny ways like Finral's portals being used to easily accelerate objects. Plot: 1/10 The plot in the anime is rather generic and cliched especially for shonen which is already oversaturated as is. We've seen it so many times, a character doesn't have any powers, but then it turns out he either has some huge innate power, or inherits the power from something. Examples of this are Fire Force, My Hero Academia, I could go on. Some of the arcs were interesting, personally I enjoyed the fairy arc with Licht the most out of all of them. Honestly if it had ended there my score might have been higher. However with the introduction of the demons as antagonists the quality just went down. The demons became an escape from proper pacing and power scaling. The pacing of the series itself is fairly decent up to the end of the first demon fight. I'm saying that purely in terms of new plot though. The amount of flashbacks and narration is an obvious attempt at trying to stretch the length of the series as much as possible. new plot doesn't start until 6 minutes in most episodes. If you count the outro as well that's about 8 minutes of the show doing absolutely nothing. considering 24 minutes episode times that's only a 16 minute actual episode length, which is ignoring that flashbacks in some episodes might take around half of that time (especially nearing the end of the anime). Before the last arc of the anime (dark triad), the timeline skips an entire 6 months, during which time most of the characters have apparently become ridiculously overpowered. And then we're thrown suddenly into fights with a ton of new enemies which we had not seen before and have no emotional connection towards, and somehow they are just as powerful, or even more powerful than asta and the commanders. Not to mention, 3 episodes from the end a new mentor is introduced. However my biggest gripe, is that the series ended.... WITHOUT THE FINAL FIGHT. Yes, I know it's getting a movie sequel. But still. A 170 episode buildup, and we get a corny ending about how they are going to get stronger and defeat the dark triad. Yes, I'm getting a little emotional here, but seeing the ending really upset me. It really upset me. Characters: 1/10 I of course don't mean to say that all of the characters are bad, but unfortunately most of them are extremely 1 dimensional and based on cliches. Asta has one goal, and one goal alone. He's unrealistically optimistic, and he never goes through any substantial character development. Most of the time, the show portrays him as completely perfect. Maybe not in physique, but in character. People who throw any actually valid criticism at him about his mantra of 'never giving up', even when realistically he ought to have died several times over are generally thrown under the bus at some point. That's essentially the definition of a Mary Sue. Why would I like Asta when he essentially is constantly screaming, and believes that if he swings his sword faster, and rushes at his enemy in a slightly different way than before, and for some reason the writers say that it ought to work. There's no way people would enjoy Asta if he was a person in real life. Yuno isn't that much better. He has the exact same goal as Asta, and the two are said to be in a rivalry over it, Yet we don't actually see much of a rivalry. Maybe this is a mistranslation of the original Japanese meaning, but rivalry generally implies conflict and a distaste towards the rival which we don't see. Another problem is Yuno's power scaling generally happens off screen, so we generally don't have any emotional connection with him. This is further amplified by the fact that he's portrayed as being stuck up and somewhat elitist. And I don't want to spoil the fine details of the plot but there are some very very cliche explanations for Yuno's past which is a letdown because it was hidden from us for most of the series. As for the Dark Triad, their personalities are probably the most one dimensional out of all the villains in the series. They embrace evil for the sake of evil. One is a megalomaniac, one is a narcissist, and the last is a masochist. If you've seen it you probably already know which characters I'm referring to. Their underlings have the same one-dimensional personalities (often time relating extremely obviously to the actual power they have like the tongue dude being a pervert). But the largest problem is we only get to see them extremely late in the series. They don't have time for any character development at all, Especially when compared to Licht. That being said, I'd say Licht was my favorite character because he at least seemed to have more than one motivation for his actions and ideals, and you couldn't just lump him in there with the notion that he was completely evil. Although, the same can't be said for his minions. There are plenty of other side characters I could talk about as well, but the cast is so broad that it would be impossible to get into all the details in this already long review. Art/Animation: 3/10 When the anime tries, it does well. Still scenes look pretty decent, the animation quality is nice. However, in the fight scenes, where arguably the most effort ought to be put in, the quality greatly diminishes. Lazy fails to describe it enough. Ground ceasing to have any texture whatsoever. Characters loosing some discernable features occasionally. It completely breaks the atmosphere of the fight scenes. This problem becomes much worse in the later arcs of the anime. Sound: 5/10 Of all things, the sound gets rated the highest I'd say. Mainly because the music wasn't that bad. Sure it was somewhat generic in terms of compositional style, but for the most part the music matched the mood of the scenes, and the production quality was up to standard. It's forgettable, but it serves its purpose. However the voice acting for asta in particular wasn't that great. I know a lot of other people have mentioned this but his screaming is just ear-grating and there is no real point to it at all. Overall: 3/10 Unfortunately I just can't recommend this show to a new viewer. It has extensive flaws in many aspects of production that just ruins its potential. It relies heavily on cliches, and generic plot devices to drive the story forward, and the ending is extremely anti-climatic. If you decide to watch please keep these points in mind. Don't go into it expecting an innovative shonen or a great plot.
mistersunday
03/30/2021, 09:08 AM
The trickling sound of raindrops echoes throughout your room as you stretch your legs under the covers. Looking through the glass panes on your window, you unfurl the overcast sky with your eyes. A sense of sloth weeps over your body while you sift through the potential ways you can entertain yourself on such a gloomy day. You weigh your options and eventually stumble on some reality show from the mid 2000s. As you begin to watch you realize that there’s something almost reminiscent about it. It’s like you’ve seen this scripted story play out before. You let yourself be guided by the charm ofthe heavily-edited storyline that the producers set up for your entertainment. At times you even question whether they know that everyone can see through the conspicuously manufactured storytelling. Nonetheless, you let the Hollywood producers that orchestrated this show and its motley cast of characters take you on their journey... and you end up kinda digging it? Black Clover is like that reality show that you binge on a rainy day. It’s not a sophisticated or groundbreaking piece of media, perhaps it’s even your guilty pleasure; however, the anime manages to be entertaining enough to make you stick around. Let’s be real, any one of us can come up with Black Clover’s plot. I’m sure I could pick out one of my friends at random to create a story of equal depth and detail as Black Clover’s premise easily. That being said, the execution of said plot is still entertaining and somewhat successful. Don’t get me wrong, just because the story isn’t some intricate narrative full of complex themes doesn’t mean it can’t hold its own against its peers. We don’t need to consume revolutionary media all the time, it’s fine to let your mind take a break and engage with straightforward storytelling; in fact, I think Black Clover allows its viewers to do this quite well. The dynamic between the characters becomes more endearing as the story progresses. The plot also contains some nuance that gets fleshed out as you move through the episodes, with the peak being the Elf Reincarnation Arc. In terms of production quality Black Clover has its ups and downs. There are times when the animation is not up to par with modern anime whereas in other instances it excels. In general, Black Clover manages to successfully adapt the source material despite fluctuations in quality. My favorite part of the show is probably the opening and ending themes. Almost every OP/ED delivers a fantastic musical performance with visuals that are just as good. This is ultimately one of Black Clover’s strongest points. Breakdown Story: 5/10 I’ve penalized this category mostly due to originality. Since most people I know could come up with a story of this caliber I can’t give it more than a 5. I don’t mind watching an archetypal shounen plot unfold, but some of the naming choices make me wonder if this was written by a middle schooler.. “Princess-Healing Flower Robe”?? “Curse-Breaking Blood Cocoon”? whose kid came up with that, please lmk. The first few episodes are also a little bit insufferable, relying too much on shounen tropes. Art: 7/10 As mentioned earlier, there are some fluctuations in the animation’s quality, especially during the Royal Knights Arc. Overall Black Clover still maintains a competent level of animation with a nice art style. Sound: 8/10 The openings slapppppp, that’s all I have to say. Character: 6/10 The characters are charming and fun to watch, some of them are annoying but what can you expect from a long-running shounen. Other characters remain a bit questionable (I’m looking at you Gauche) but overall they’re well thought out. Enjoyment: 7/10 If you’re looking to sit back and relax while watching a straightforward action anime I think you might enjoy this pick. Black Clover probably checks every box on the list of Generic Anime 101, but hey, when did returning to the fundamentals become so bad? Overall: 6/10
Marinate1016
03/30/2021, 06:31 AM
No long running show and fanbase has got as much disrespect as Black Clover(ok, Boruto probably has got more). Yet, the fans have stuck by it for years and as Black Clover’s story continues to surpass its limits, their loyalty is finally paying off. Black Clover is a show that is in many ways the literal embodiment of its protagonist’s struggle. Asta goes from being the laughingstock of town to the literal saviour of the kingdom. During that internal journey, we also watched the anime gradually evolve and get better as time went on. Production qualities seemingly increased as the popularity increased as well. Asta’s journeyis extremely satisfying and well written. It’s done so well in fact, that it feels like we’ve been on this journey right with Asta. Everyone loves a feel good underdog story. There’s been no bigger underdog than Black Clover. For me, the mark of a well written series is how well you’re able to immerse yourself and truly feel apart of the story. When I first got into Black Clover a couple of years ago, I was easily able to binge the first 99 episodes which were out up to that point in the span of a few days. Episodes went by in what felt like a breeze. I found myself in awe at the quality of writing and the magical concepts used. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why so many people shit on the series or rated it lowly. I’ve said numerous times that if Black Clover went seasonal, it would be one of the highest rated Jump Series. The story is better than MHA and JJK. What has unfortunately been the big bump in the road for BC is the inconsistent production quality throughout. At points, Pierrot have literally had to beg on Twitter for people to help out with episodes. Fortunately, the series is going on hiatus due to how close its getting to the manga, and I really hope Pierrot use this opportunity to make it a seasonal show after the movie. The long running anime model is dead, and doesn’t give animation staffs the time they need to make high quality episodes. If you’re on the fence about watching Black Clover, do it. Yes, it has some inconsistent animation at times, but the story is genuinely the best in shonen. Loveable characters, an immersive world and amazing action sequences make Black Clover one of the only ongoing shonen that I enjoy. Black Clover gets 10 grimoires out of 10.
ThatAnimeSnobRE
03/30/2021, 06:27 AM
Black Clover is your cookie cutter fighting shonen, which was heavily promoted as the KING OF SHONEN ANIME because the industry really wants your money. It’s nothing more than ideas from older shows. Naruto wants to take part in the Hunter Exam, gets chosen by a Shinigami Captain, and enters the Fairy Tail Guild, so he can become the Pirate King. Despite occasionally doing some things better than its predecessors, such as having boy protagonist who was ACTUALLY training for years to be strong as opposed to be given the ultimate power right away like in My Hero Academia, it’s largely typical and by thenumbers. The protagonist still relies on some demonic power he was given out of nowhere for not dying five minutes into his first mission. So yeah, it’s still another one of those stories that give the ultimate power to losers just for the sake of bottom tier empowerment fantasy. That wouldn’t be a problem for most casuals, since it was never aiming to be more than easily digestible, but the early episodes were a slog to get through. The first impression you get from the main characters is a boy who screams nonstop and wants to force himself on a nun. Right off the bat you get pedophilic antichristian deviance with a lot of terrible screaming, which alienated a big portion of its potential audience. So, the protagonist is your Naruto clone, who begins seemingly weak and lacks something for making him sympathetic to the viewer. He remains an obnoxious loudmouth with no redeeming qualities until a lot more characters are introduced into the show for mitigating the suffering via comedy and other types of personalities. And by other types, I mean making most bad guys to come off as one-dimensional evil freaks, just for making the obnoxious protagonist to seem heroic in comparison. They are always acting like bullies or sexual deviants or coward rulers, just so Naruto Clone can jump in and tell them how mean they are, thus getting the moral high ground despite being a nun rapist. So this Naruto clone (some call him Asta for some reason) has a rival, like all shonen do, but there is no reason for the rivalry to exist. The emotionless pretty boy (some call him Yuno) grew up with Asta as if they were brothers. They are super friendly with each other and constantly save each other in the battles, so you see no actual rivalry going on. It’s like they are best buddies, but call each other a rival for the sake of ticking the square on the must-have list of shonen clichés. A similar issue appears when Naruto clone gets chosen by the Black Bulls because of his attitude instead of his skill at magic. It’s like hiring the guy who directed and played in The Room just because he has guts. Anyways, Naruto clone goes to a guild where everyone is as annoying as him. They all have one-trait personalities and are defined by one gag, which they repeat as often as they can. For example, there is a guy who is obsessed with his 5 year old sister. She’s the only person he talks about in the whole damn manga, and even has nosebleeds whenever he looks at her. Eventually, these Pokémon like characters get fleshed out once they do various missions later on, but their personality remains the same one liner and their power ups are mostly the result of willpower instead of some sort of tactic. Anyways, the main appeal is obviously the action, which at certain highlights can be pretty awesome because the animation is not the typical lazy crap studio Pierrot does all the time. But for about 80% of the duration you are stuck with subpar animation that makes the show to be completely passable in terms of entertainment compared to Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen. Even so, there are battles that can last for dozens of episodes and which seem to be epic because of their duration, but to the most part they are a waste of time since they come down to spars between minor characters. No joke, there are parts where you can skip twenty episodes and nothing will be lost since it’s just nobodies fighting nobodies (I’m looking at you, people in the magic tournament, and you who got possessed by elves, and the rest of you who were given powers by the Dark Triad). And even when you get to the finales, which are the good parts of the fighting, you still get typical magic conveniences that always trigger when some nakama is in danger. The battles lose most of their impact when you know it all comes down to ‘whatever dude, it happened’. For example, there is a part where all you see is this: one bad guy teleporting in, attacking, getting blocked by a good guy who also teleports in, powers up, attacks, then another villain teleports in, and so on and so on for a dozen times. It’s literally like the imaginary wars children are playing, where they make up attacks and the one being attacked says why it doesn’t work and how he counters it with more imaginary attacks. As for the end of that battle, the villains just teleport away, aka the exact same ability they have been using for several episodes that allows any battle to begin and end in whenever way the author wants. The resolutions feel very cheap in general. Examples include: -A bird comes out of nowhere and gives a macguffin to the good guys, who didn’t even know the villains were looking for. -A sprite that appears out of nowhere and saves the good guys with hax magic, just because. -They expose a traitor amongst the captains. The traitor is someone we haven’t seen before and know nothing about, thus his reveal means nothing to the reader. The method they used for exposing him was magical mind reading, which makes the reveal to feel easy and cheap. Also there is a second traitor within the same group and for some reason they don’t find him, despite having the ability to mind read him as well. -Yummy (easily the best character in the show) is trapped inside an unbreakable barrier. What does he do for escaping and for saving his teammates? He… breaks the barrier with a new power up and easily saves the day. No tactics whatsoever. -Naruto clone has his arms disabled by a curse and there is nothing that can heal them. What does he do for still being useful? He finds a witch and she cures him. Just like that. -How do you stop a crazy woman that wants to kill everyone? You unlock your hidden familiar out of nowhere, which resets the plot however it wants, so anyone who gets killed is instantly returned to life. As deus ex machina as it gets. -What do you do after the wizard king gets assassinated? Nothing. He returns to life on his own. Such a shame; his apparent death was the most tragic scene in the whole show. Anyways, you are not supposed to think when you watch this show, because if you do nothing makes sense. It’s a dumb action flick for ten year olds, so don’t bother asking why they are sending rookies in S-difficulty missions. Oh, hey, here is a dungeon that can potentially destroy the world with the artifacts stored inside it. It’s super dangerous and only the strongest wizards must go there. Which is why we allow the worst guild to send its worst members who never work as a team, nor are that strong. Don’t forget to get molested by a plant that looks like a vagina, but do forget to use the magic barrier you asspulled out of nowhere in the previous arc. In the meantime, the rest of us will do absolutely nothing, and we won’t even give you a promotion for saving the world. Yeah, that’s how you prove how serious the situation is. Eventually, Naruto clone gets a promotion. Not for saving the world, but for getting captured with magic while he can counter magic. And he gets it from the wizard king himself, who is the strongest mortal in the whole show, but never does anything in the missions because that would make everything to run on easy mode. The first time he eventually does something is for saving the protagonist and for giving him a promotion, which is followed by the protagonist forming a large harem of fangirls and lots of episodes about girls in bikinis or naked in spas. Because that is how empowerment fantasy works. After the promotion, the show becomes far more predictable, as it’s just the Naruto clone constantly being taken over by his hidden demonic power, which obviously they want to make you think it will lead to him killing his friends. And obviously it never happens, because it’s a show for kids. He always regains control and always befriends his enemies and always gets more powers that make him look more and more like a demon. And the show never forgets to give us double standards, such as that he has no magic, despite having the most powerful magic, or that he never gets rewarded for his actions, although he is one of the strongest in the kingdom. He even goes as far as telling you the moral message of the whole show comes down to: You are nothing special, and that is what makes you special. I am not joking; this is an actual quote in the story. The author is literally promoting loser mentality. Being last makes you the best of the worst, well done. Anyways, I wouldn’t mind all that so much if the show wasn’t coming off as pretentious. And it did. It kept shoving this anti-racism message down our throats and we were supposed to take it seriously when the presentation was as childish as it gets. Supposed, humans hated elves and that led to a big war, only to be proven it was just some demon brainwashing them into acting like that. There is no free will involved, which means there is also no depth to the theme as well. What anti-racism? It was brainwashing all along! And what a great way to solve the conflict by having both the elves and the humans to be teaming up against a one dimensional evil demon that is laughing like an idiot and even outright called everyone a fool for falling for it, just to make it even easier for the audience to hate him. Oh, and all the hatred the good guys were feeling towards the elves and the assassin of the wizard king are erased from existence, because thereafter everyone is friendly to each other and act like they never harmed anyone. As a whole, Black clover is a pile of mediocrity. It just rehashes ideas of earlier shonen and does nothing special with them, thus forever being stuck at a demographic for ten year olds. Plus it looks subpar 80% of the time and the protagonist is a screaming idiot who wants everything to go his way because he is not special... and that is supposed what makes him special XD.
iishoxyii
03/30/2021, 05:53 AM
This past season of anime has been full of adventures, romance, and a bit of strangeness, with the likes of Attack On Titan, Horimiya, and now Redo of the Healer as we have drawn curtains on this action, comedy, shounen adventure show “Black Clover”. This particular anime has stood out as an example of hope during the gloomy snowy days, since it started giving an adventure shounen with a different type of storytelling it’s been quite the journey of 170 episodes. “Black Clover” is an anime series that has been written and illustrated by Yuki Tabata, if you liked “Fairy Tale” then I’m sure you’lllove this show as well as for rooting for the underdog characters this show is the one for you if you’re into that. The show began in 2017, the first few episodes showing the character and protagonist Asta, a brash yet modest peasant without any powers nor capabilities, making do somehow in the society that totally depends on magic for their everyday life usage. In a world where magic determines your rank and social class is not new as we’ve seen in many shows like Fairy Tail, Konosuba, and many more that have come and go but his determination seeks to become the Wizard King despite his position in humanity. Story ~ 8 Two orphan children, Asta and Yuno are left as babies near the doorstep of a church on the outside border of the Clover Kingdom. The story surrounds the boy Asta, a young boy who’s ostensibly is born without magical powers, while he tries to gain magical powers and the talent to control them. Moved by a desire to become the succeeding wizard king, a consultant character to the clover kingdom, the two protagonists develop a friendly competition. The different features, like humor and the heartwarming moments that this show has helped to build the show from the ground up and build a solid status for the show making it a shounen heavy-duty. Animations ~ 6 The show in itself isn’t flawless. The animations fell rusty and can be missing consistency. However, all of that can be justified due to the financial issues and creating episodes for almost three years weekly. The only break the show ever took until now was due to the pandemic. Unlike other long-running animes, Black Clover has only had a minority of filler episodes, but some episodes just outshine radiance like the 63rd which is probably the best-animated episode of the show according to me which showed the ultimate dealings with the Eye of the Midnight Sun and the reincarnation of the elves. Even though some of the episodes have been phenomenally uncertain and exquisite the animations could’ve been way better. Sound ~ 8 The music for Black Clover has been always uplifting and up to the point that you can listen to it on repeat. The show has had 10 openings throughout the entirety of the show it’s a bit hard to choose from these 10 which have been the best because the songs were great, but if I had to choose a few I’d say Black Rover from Vickeblanka and Black Catcher from Vickeblanka have been my favorites. Characters ~ 7 Asta is that one guy who’s an underdog who’s in the world of magic but does not know magic. He’s a little simple yet humble and loud protagonist who strives to excel even though his hindrances Yuno on the other hand is enormously talented and a natural when it comes to controlling magic and its incredible use. At the age of 15, both boys set out to receive extraordinary books called grimoires which help each conduit their own power. The characters are persistent and crave the hunger to change to become better than they were before to become a man that can overcome all. Throughout every character goes to the phase to transform into a newer self and becoming a new person altogether. This show does not go on easy on character developments as one has to perceiver long to change into someone they want to be. Overall ~ 8 Though this anime had made a bad impression on me while it was just beginning because of Asta’s strident temperament and a methodic set up, those who’ve stuck with the show have grown to like it to some extent eventually. By now, this show will often be considered a contestant among the likes of Ao No Exorcist, Soul Eater, Naruto, Bleach, and My Hero Academia in the shounen genre. The show's charm has grown slowly climbing the stairs of success so much that it is close to impossible for an anime fan like me to not come across it. Reviews about a show break or make a show, but for me, the expression of the anime has changed drastically from not even being interested in the show to yeah I’ve got to watch the next episode I can’t wait. It’s unavoidably popular now, which helps it to qualify for the Jump’s “Big Three” now and the show just keeps on giving. From being just an average shounen genre show to being Crunchyroll’s “Most Popular Anime of Winter In 2020” capturing the top 20 most widely held titles and the top most popular anime ranked in UK, Canada, Mexico, Russia, France, and Germany. It certainly isn’t for every anime watcher over there and it starts slow as well until its 20th episode as well, but trust me it gets great, the character developments, the animations, if you’re looking to watch something new in the shounen genre this could just be your cup of tea. The show became wonderful.
AvoidLight
03/30/2021, 04:31 AM
Black Clover, Asta, Yuni, Noelle, Yami. A family.. A story of 2 orphans living in the darkness of the corrupt Clover Kingdom with a goal. A goal that many shows use, a goal that many would say is just like naruto or one piece and my hero academia. Asta and Yuno don’t just want to be like every other shonen. They don’t just want to be the #1 of their universe. Asta and Yuno want everyone to change as they change the world and it’s history. Asta and Yuno want to be accepted and want everyone to accept each other for who they are notby a social class or a ranking. Labels don’t mean a single thing to them... Black clover a show that was hated by many but many grew to love. A generic story about the protagonist and his rival trying to make it to the top. But something is different... Black Clover was different in a way that it knew it was generic and it worked with it. People tend to compare it and shit on the show but never really give it a chance, No it’s not a show to watch when you’re brain dead, No it’s not trash and No it’s not a clone. Black Clover is a show that worked for its name, it worked harder than any show and it will continue to fight for its name. Just like Asta and Yuno, black clover grew to be loved. Thank you Tabata and thank you black clover for this series. Story: I gave black clover story a 9 as it basically built up the villains for 100 episodes with a great amount of dedicated development for every cast in the Bulls and then it had a perfect foreshadowed turn of the devils being behind everything. The dark triad, they are what they war is all about, anime fails to adapt that war is not slow and that war is out of the blue, shit happens and you can not change it. Yami got taken in an instant for example, it felt real, in a real war situation stuff happens and you can’t change it. Most anime give the protagonist time to change an outcome which shouldn’t be changed. Black clover is a 9 for tan amazing executed story. Art: I don’t even want to explain, black clover has its ups and downs and clearly everyone knows the downs are stronger. Sound: Best openings in all of anime Character: every character in the Bulls got their own dedicated development and it was not rushed like other mangas or anime’s like My Hero or Naruto. The watcher grows to loving every Bull and gets sad, mad happy when they do. The Bulls are more family than any other cast, they lean on each other and fight and cry for each other like no other. I find it funny how many people don’t talk about how good Tabata is at writing female characters. Noelle has better development than most female protagonist and its shun solely by the fact that people think this show is a joke. Enjoyment: I would’ve gave this a 10 but the animation really does kill the mood sometimes. But I don’t think the animation ruins how fun it is watching Asta try his hardest, Asta at his lowest and Asta inspiring people to be better or just like him. This show really does have a way of making you feel for characters who may not even be that important. It was a great ride and black clover was fun to watch.
tenshibeat
03/30/2021, 04:16 AM
What a long journey of a story. From a kid who has no magic to becoming a formidable Magic Knight, there's no story that's refreshing like Black Clover. From the beginning, we start off with a very slow, and boring introduction. It's really boring to start. Asta is annoyingly loud. There's not much story progression. It feels like you're watching every other shounen anime but worse. But even with this boring, start, we do see the embers of a wonderful story. The story develops very nicely throughout the story. We go from becoming Magic Knights, to defeating many enemies to save the Black Bulls, Clover Kingdom andthe entirety of humanity. The changes are paced well enough to be familiar, but also enjoyable and easy to watch. With characters that develop well, and amazing fight scenes, it's a great plot with great characters. A world of magic, and a kid with no magic and his rival, a kid with amazing magic, begin their journey for Wizard King. There's no telling that Asta and Yuno's rivalry feels similar, but also refreshing. Sure there's the no power vs all power dynamic, but their interactions with one another smooth out and develop in a uniquely Black Clover way. Characterisation throughout the series is very deep. From a squad full of delinquents, to the powerful elves and the deadly devils, there is always something that feel refreshing with characters. All of the Magic Knights and their squads have refreshing personalities and traits. The enemies all develop and grow; maybe they'll realise their faults, maybe they'll demise Clover Kingdom - it's all there. From comic relief characters. to serious contenders, there is a character for everyone here. The soundtrack and music choices here are some of the best. It's known that Black Clover has some of the best, A+ anime openings and endings, and each and every one of them has pumped me up for every episode. The score is also highly commendable - it's action filled, and supplements the plot very well. The artwork throughout the series has never been it's strong point. You can feel that Pierrot just gave up some episodes. Some feel unpolished. Some of the art is amazing. But even with the terrible art, it definitely doesn't detract from the experience. Black Clover is such an enjoyable anime. Yes you have to get through the boring first 28 episodes, but that initial investment is highly worth it. The development, characters, music, lore, and world are some of the most refined and refreshing of all shounens, and a great show just to enjoy.
Ellenwitch
03/30/2021, 04:12 AM
There is a lot to say on Black Clover. A whole lot. While I got into the series late, but it was still a blast from start to end. Let me explain. Story and characters: Black Clover's main story focuses on four different kingdoms, Clover, Spade, Heart, and Diamond. As we mainly follow the Clover country then any other. Where many years ago, a battle between a demon, and a Wizard king happened which help shaped the foundations for it's story. As Black Clover follows magic mainly, all kinds of magic. From Dark magic, light magic, Wind magic, Steel magic, fire magic, water magic. All kinds ofmagic. If you're a magic nut, or have an interest in magic in general, you may dig this a whole lot, it was one of the hooks that got me into this show. Seeing all different forms of magic. The story follows two young boys to start off with, living in an orphanage, a wild and adventures boy in Asta, who may seem unbearable at the start, but he's got good motives, and a good heart. Along with the more stoic Yuno. As both dream of one day becoming the wizard king. When a person becomes of certain age, they're given their grimoire, which decides what kind of magic they get, and if they're good enough, they have a chance of joining magic knights. Knights who protect the Clover Kingdom. As we follow that, and face the challenges along the way. The story goes from there, and we've thrown right into the action. Showing how dangerous it is to be a magical knight, and it's really well done. There is no rest at the start, as it's interesting and engaging plot unravels before you during all of this. Really well done here. As for more of the characters? There is a real mix of blend of characters that all bounce off of each other, that really carry the show honestly. That's another hook of Black Clover, it's characters. I could list them all in this review, but there are so many to chose from. Black Clover has many characters to love from their backgrounds, personalities, their values, along with the magic that they process in general. Can't go wrong there, and basically what I am saying, is that there is a character for everyone. With the growth within those characters, and other characters being well done in my book. Music and Art The music is always great, far as I'm concerned, lot of great OPS and EDs, like you can't go wrong there, but also the tone and the style of music within the show is just great too. From the battles, to comedic moments, or to something more serious. It's all really well done. While for the art, it depends your tastes. I personally had no issues or problems with it throughout. But so many have had issues with it declining in airs, which can be a little turn off, but it isn't overbearing to the point you'd turn your eyes away. It's style is still great in many ways, from how it looks in scenes, to how bright and dark the grmoires can look. Along with how the characters look in general. I personality liked it, and I'm sure many will too. Black Clover means a lot to me honestly, it's something I binged after being curious about it, and I was hooked on it within moments. If you were waiting to start this, honestly do so. You'll love it. It's not perfect by any means, but it's still a really great show. It's a show that I highly recommend to so many of you. It'll be a show that I'll remember for years and year, and I cannot wiat for more of it honestly.
Fotsuan
03/30/2021, 03:41 AM
Black Clover has received tons of hate and criticism, so my role here is to make it clear; why someone should go for it or ignore it. Of course, there are many flaws, but it is undeniable that some things were handled well for a battle shounen anime. Starting as an adventure of two brothers who dive into the world of magic, Black Clover introduces us to a world full of colour, battles and a big number of characters. But aside from that, Tabata Yuuki tries to deliver political and moral messages in his own way. The main arcs revolve around pacifism, trust, hope and positiveenergy; the villains are the complete opposite, thus the protagonists will either end up changing their mind or destroying them. In addition, the hierarchy and political systems are interesting in this one; the satirical presentation of the kingdom’s king, the arrogance of higher-ups and the – unfair – rankings and labels of the Magic Knight squads. One of the biggest minuses is the power system, how the main characters suddenly gain unreal power and defeat their villains. But the battles are mostly used as fan service and the result includes a moral message that watchers do not care about, and it is not their fault. Although there might be good meaning behind all the fights, it is not easily spotted. The main reason people like me do not like Black Clover as a whole (don’t get me wrong, some parts are likable), is the ridiculously repetitive comedy, which is not even funny to begin with. Many characters are mostly used for comedic purposes and have their own comedic patterns, and this approach ruins the character part too in this show - even if there are a few exceptions and some good character backstories (Zora, William and some more). And it is not surprising that everyone has heard negative comments about Asta and some main characters, because their repetitive behaviour may end up irritating. In terms of Black Clover comedy, there’s also Petit Clover, which is the short chibi scene at the end of each episode. Fans of chibi anime may check Mugyutto Black Clover too, a short ONA with a good opening song…and nothing more. The animation is nothing special, but it is colourful and leads to an enjoyable experience. The kingdom’s medieval setting, the different forms of magic and the squad colour patterns are the pros, while the lack of details and spectacular animation are the cons. Mixed feelings on voice acting too, since there were amazing performances and awful ones too. Some of the most noteworthy ones are Suwabe Junichi’s as Yami and Koyama Rikiya’s as Dante. Soundtrack for dessert, because my words about it can only be sweet. Starting with an amazing combination of OP and ED - kankakupiero’s Haruka Mirai and ITOWOKASHI’S Aoi Honoo – Black Clover never disappointed us with its exceptional opening and ending songs. Many of them are listed on youtube playlists, even by people who have never watched the anime. The battle OST is decent, and the only soundtrack that is poor is the goofy / comedic one, but I don’t take it into consideration since, like I said, the comedic scenes in Black Clover are bad. To sum up, as far as I’m concerned Black Clover has definitely not been a bad experience overall, but not a good one either. Sometimes it was fun, though the writing and execution lacked a lot and could have done much better. If you ask me if Black Clover is one of the worst shounen anime like many people say, though, I would reply that I’ve seen much worse, and this is the main reason I wrote this review. Any questions and discussion topics will be gladly accepted, feel free to text me. Thank you for reading!
NinjasonFG
03/30/2021, 03:29 AM
Thank you for everything for this 3 and a half years of joy and happiness. The anime gave me hope that the new age shonen can be good when i was stuck at watching old ones Thank you Tabata for making this awesome story and characters Thank you staff,directors,story writers everyone involved in the anime process. And i hope we will watch Black clover again as an anime!!! I hope alot of people come and watch the anime because it was amazing yes it had it's flaws but overrall i love it THANK YOU for everythin and the community I suggest everyone to read the manga and to seehow great it is The manga has average sellings but the anime onlys can rise everthing And i can't wait to watch the movie and wait for the anime to come back strong as ever and show why it's soooo good!!
debochca
03/30/2021, 03:13 AM
Well, well, well, what do we have here? The anime that I thought that would be the next Naruto in terms of length, already got to an end. Black Clover is an anime that I started watching right after I ended watching Naruto, so you may understand my confusion when, back in 2017, I started this anime with a friend after school and I asked him “why is this so much similar to Naruto?”. It was like my tenth anime, so I was actually and purely confused. However, we promised that we would watch it together in my house, but then college happened and we hadto drop it. This year I retook it by myself, by the 15th episode, I think? And it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The premise is as classic as a premise shounen tends to be. Asta is a young boy that wants to become the next magic emperor, but he doesn’t have mana nor magic powers; his adoptive brother (let’s say) and rival, Yuno, is a prodigy boy that is the mangaka’s favourite one. When they go through a ceremony where they can see whether they can or not be magicians (by receiving a magical grimoire), the mangaka’s favourite gets the best grimoire ever that only the chosen ones can have, so you can’t forget Yuno is way better than Asta, and even than you. Asta, on the other hand, is the poor little thing that ends up having some sort of evil grimoire. From that moment, they decide they will be magic knights in order to be the next magic emperor. They have always declared each other their rival, but from that moment they actually become rivals. As the story continues, we get to see how Asta screams all day and says the same stuff about not giving up and that he will marry a nun once he become the emperor. At first it is unbearable, but you eventually get used to ears pain. Meanwhile, we get to see how every person in that kingdom falls for Yuno and how indredibly he is and how Asta is a loser, and of course, when they have to be chosen for a captain from an organization (there are like 12) during the the exam to become magic knights, every captain asks for Yuno as some sort of The X Factor move when everybody press the buttom for the same guy and he gets to decide which one he wants to join. He, obviously, accepts the offer of the biggest organization’s captain; Asta, at the same time, is not chosen by any captain, except for the poorest one, at last moment. After this they start their lives separate and they start this adventure. As the viewer can appreciate, Black Clover falls in every possible cliche. The beginning is completely predictable and doesn’t make any effort to try to add new nuances to such a classical shounen story formula. It’s a beginning made for beginners. If you watch Black Clover as one of your first animes it is fun, but if you watch it after that you have seen a lot of shows, this starting is rather boring and insurmountably generical. As I always state, I’m not against generical animes, but please, at least try to change a personality, a motive, a rivalry. Anything would have add anything to this, but it didn’t happen. Even talking about characters presentation are poor. Asta screams and shouts and claims he’ll be the next Hokage, Yuno doesn’t talk at all and has a resting face all day, but he is perfect and has whatever he wants and you are not (in case you didn’t notice). It does not only falls in story’s cliche but in characters. Most of them are a walking stereotype: the incestuous unbearable character that is disgustingly obssessed with his little sister, the shy one, the womanizer, the glutton that only fights when there’s food in the middle, the tsundere one that falls in love with the main character because he treats her as a person, and the lazy leader (captain) that is a bastard. However, the interaction between them has also its pros and contras. The rivalry between Yuno and Asta is forced, lacks of interest and depth, and comes off as a bad use of a cliche: they want the same thing, and clearly Yuno is the blessed one that has more chances to win. They appear, they say “I’m going to beat him and become the magic emperor!” and that’s it. The rivalry is weak because their both motivations are weak. Asta’s motivation is to marry the nun and to demonstrate that he can win without magic powers. Yuno doesn’t have motivations because he doesn’t have any development. You see Yuno and you can’t tell if his face is because he is sad, because he is motivated, because he is happy, or because he is just hungry. He is just too overpowered to care for anything. On the other hand, what I do like about their interactions is how the partnership is handled. The Black Bulls are not good characters as such, but their friendship and union is managed with subtlety, is gradual and is pretty natural. After 100 episodes, when you see them support each other, it becomes touching because trust was slowly built and is something the mangaka succeeds in. Maybe I’m such a crybaby and that’s it. I liked the Black Bulls, and I liked to watch them grow. I like the way Vanessa becomes a elemental character; I enjoyed the background of Finral; I liked the way the incestuous guy opened up to his comrades. I like the annoying thing between Luck and Magna, and I liked the way they helped Noelle to grow as well. One thing that I like about series like this, is that its world has a big amount of characters to know and care. Although, at the same time, in a world like this where everytime there’s war and figths, this big lot of characters must be reduced. That’s how it is. In Game of Thrones you have more than one hundred characters, and when you make a list of your favourites you just have to enlist thirty of them at least, but eventually they die like some sort of ant that is crushed by the author, and that’s how is supposed to be. If we have a lot of magic knights, most of them will have to die since they have to fight all the time and not everytime they are going to win, won’t they? A lot of battles in Black Clover don’t have useful conclusions. A fight can endure eight episodes, and by the end of it, no one is going to die and the enemy is going to retrieve “haha, I’ll see you soon” (This Licht guy does that like three times). I don’t say that the author have to kill them indiscriminately, but he shouldn’t be afraid to kill some of them either. That’s a problem to me. Even in the hardest situation, at least in the first half of the anime, all of them survive, most of the times and battles, and that’s a plot armor that I dislike, not only because it becomes a bothersome, but because every fight comes off as irrelevant. The enemies don’t die, but the main cast don’t either; the enemies don’t win, but the main cast don’t either. If there are going to be arcs with fights that involve ten episodes (or more), at least make it juicy and with important consequences. Captains injured to death survived in ways that it shouldn’t be possible; also the enemies, even the secondaries. Please, dude, killing Fuegoleon in that first fight would have been a good impact, but no. An author must not be afraid of killing his characters in good moments, and that’s essential. Villains leave much to be desired. Villains without substance that are just full of hate. They don’t have ideals, they just want revenge and to exterminate. The same speech is repeated a lot of times. We get it, the elves hate humanity. We get it, we saw that flashbacks a lot of times. Female characters are... well, average. They are not that bad, since they are, at least, useful. Nevertheless, what is, actually their weight on the work? How much do they add to this, more than being in love with the two male leads? Noelle is a character that I personally like a lot, I don’t know why, I just have affection for her, but the 80% of her character is being in love with Asta and chasing after him, and being jealous and tsundere type. An exaggerated tsundere type, I must admit. However, she gets a gradual development that is clearly notorious, and is not forced. She starts being the clumsy magician that gets bullied by her siblings because she belongs to royalty and it’s the weakest of the family, and ends up being an interesting character that has a noticeable development as a magician and as a piece in this work; she demonstrates that she can be a lot more than Asta’s fangirl. Mimosa is like Noelle (is funny because they are cousins) but worse. She is way dumber and is a lot more undeveloped. She falls in love with Asta because of a fight and his great abs. She starts to blush and that’s all she does. She has a protective abilitie, but that’s all she does, again. I like her though. Charlotte is a captain that I thought would be different, but at the end of the day is a woman that is in love with Yami, Asta’s captain, and that behaves almost the same way as Noelle, synthesizing her personality around her romantic attitudes. The same goes for every woman in this anime that meets Asta. Two words and they fall for him. Almost the same case with Yuno, but he doesn’t need to speak at all, since he is perfect as Sasuke. Sasuke misstreats a woman and she swears etern loyalty to him. Yuno doesn’t misstreat them, but he sees them as the same way he can see a tree. Everything applies for every woman in this anime, except for Mereoleona, and maybe Vanessa. Mereoleona, however, THAT IS A HELL OF A WOMAN: interesting backstory, explosive personality, imponent, strong. My favourite, by far; she may be the stereotypical overpowered, but she is so charismatic that I could hear her scream all day and I wouldn’t mind. The comedy in Black Clover is really poor; is VERY repetitive. When I say VERY, I mean it. Jokes about Charlotte correcting her subordinate is repeated like 10 times per episode every time they appear. When some sort of sensei to Asta appears, they make jokes about him being naked like… I’m sorry, I can’t recall how many times they did it. You could even see it coming. Yami threatening Asta by pressing his head is another thing that you get to see too many times. Jokes about Noelle and Charlotte acting extremely tsundere are on another level of repetition. Nonetheless, when you have watched like 70 episodes, you just get used to it and pretend to laugh when they repeat the same joke for the 3rd time in the episode, but that’s how they are; if you like the characters, those jokes won’t be a bothersome for you, like it was in my case. The humor is mediocre? It is. Did I have a good time laughing at it? Well, of course. At the same time, Black Clover is not only full of filler episodes, but it’s also full of plot armors and incoherences that complexed the story without apparent reason. I’m talking about all the entire White Eye arc and its elf-revenge stuff, with reincarnations and pasts lifes and so; some things made sense, at least a little bit, and some things were just too much convenient for them to actually bother. Some evangelisms were forced, like Finral’s brother, like half of the guys that Asta touches. That true reason behind Nozel’s contempt towards Noelle was so ridiculous. I like Nozel because he is a stoic character, but I would have preferred him as a cold brother, rather than the “I wanted to protect you” brother. Ruining your sister’s self esteem because you wanted to protect her is not allowed in this house. As I said in other reviews, I hate studios Pierrot. After I watched Akudama Drive I thought “definitely, Pierrot improved a lot”, but then I returned to Black Clover and I knew why I hated them. Fights’ animations are lousy, character’s movements are inconsistent and in one frame you have Noelle and in the next frame you have N0ell3. In a moment you see Yami and in the next moment you see Yami without eyebrows and with his muscles like made of paperboard. There are animes that make bad frames in the middle of a fight because that way those can sleep by unseen; however, Black Clover has those stinky frames even when they are talking about the weather. There are a couple of fight that nobody knows what they wanted to do, like Asta vs Ladros. That coreography is so terrible that the viewer doesn’t have a clue of what’s going on. It seemed like a Devilman Crybaby fight that didn’t go well. In conclusion, I’m not going to lie: my friend also retook it and we both had good laughs talking about this anime, we both shared fun experiences while watching this and we never suffered it. Black Clover is an anime full of flaws, filler episodes, not the best characters ever, and with a lousy animation and some things more that make it an average shounen, but if you like simple things without paying attention to mistakes and cliches, or if you aren’t tired of shounens, you should watch it. Besides that, I want to add that the second half is a lot better than the first one. Generical mediocre shounen or not, I don’t regret watching this.
_cjessop19_
03/30/2021, 02:56 AM
Black Clover has probably had the best and most significant turnaround in quality of any anime series I’ve seen so far, and it surely deserves all the praise and hype that it gets now as it trends worldwide more often than not, earning itself (in my book) the title of being a quality shounen series. I think we can all agree that Black Clover started off quite poorly. Bad voice acting, bad animation, it was just overall shit. Having started later throughout the series’s release (around episode 120), I decided to stick around in the promise of it improving thanks to word of mouth by fansof the series, and it paid off. Little by little, episode after episode, I began to notice that more quality and care was being put into each episode. I began to enjoy this series more and more until I was up to date, going all the way up to the final episode, becoming one of my most anticipated series currently airing, alongside with One Piece and a few other seasonals. Instead of writing 5 or 6 bullshit paragraphs to fill up space and to seem sophisticated and bash on about the series’s bad points, I’ll sum things up with a list of pros and cons, and it’ll be up to you whether you’ll heed my wisdom and watch the show. Pros: - All the openings are 10/10 bangers - There are loads of hype fight scenes with excellent animation to match - Some of the villains and protagonists are excellently written, fleshed out & compelling - The power scale is balanced well and the characters progress smoothly as the series progresses - Most members in the Black Bulls get a dedicated arc to flesh their characters out - All the climactic fight scenes are hype as fuck (kept me glued to the screen) - Not much fan service pushed in our faces like other shounen series, with exception of a couple of juicy scenes/ending card sprinkled in - Yami Sukehiro Cons: - Asta’s yelling (though it stops around episode 15 or so) - Poor animation (until after the first main arc, also due to being a weekly series) - Some of the smaller villains are just pointless and badly written - Most of the characters are your standard character tropes - Not much relationship development as some of the characters are thick as lead or too tsundere and are afraid of rejection - 17 filler episodes, though considered low for a long running shounen series - The anime catching up to the manga and having to slow down by introducing an anime canon training arc (before the time skip occurs) - The smaller character arcs go by too quickly I could’ve added the point of it being “clichéd”, but that is a superficial argument that could be said about every and any shounen/action series you can think of. Although it’s sad to see this show end for now, which is sorely needed as the manga needs to get far ahead, I hope this break will prove beneficial for future adaptations of this series if they decide to go with seasonal releases. I’m hoping the series will continue to work it’s magic (pun intended), as you cannot deny the wild success and popularity that it has endured up until now. Black Clover is a solid 8/10.
KANLen09
03/30/2021, 02:55 AM
This is the first time that I'll be reviewing a long-running series, so spare the pardon if there's any for pleasantries. But without further ado..."Please marry me, Sister Lily! I won't give up until I've hit my limits!" "If you flip the 10, it becomes a 01!" - Some Jerk a.k.a remember how Black Clover was despised by everyone? Black Clover is one of the many myriad of Shonen shows that Weekly Shonen Jump has been banking on imitating the success Shueisha once had since the diminishing of the Big 3 (One Piece, Bleach, Naruto), alongside many other WSJ titles that have constantly received headlines for breakingsales and adaptations that make up the modern age of the anime landscape. Unfortunately, at a time when the Big 3 were all but fizzled out of the community's eyes, there was but one mangaka amongst the many other Shonen authors who were trying to get the attention of Weekly Shonen Jump to have their works publicized...his name is Yuki Tabata. Being a sophomore into the manga industry, his first work of the short-lived and then cancelled 3-volume long Hungry Joker was not received well, and if you know anything about the intense competition of Weekly Shonen Jump: "If your manga doesn't sell well, we will take it off indefinitely without trial. We have more titles that we are ever ready to sink our time and resources into promoting new material and publicity to the large population who are always ever hungry for more." OK, shame on you for the first try. But take a look at his second work...and yet it still doesn't sell when this came out in early 2015 when it was serialized in WSJ. But Shueisha at least had a good idea that while this work started off being blantantly and averagely similar to the Big 3 in terms of the story and plot, and so they released the first volume thereafter in June of the same year. And to say the rest is history is an understatement, because even in the Oricon charts, Yuki Tabata just couldn't do enough to maintain the growing popularity of his work, only selling within the Top 25 and not even cracking the Top 10, even after the anime adaptation came out (at least for the 1st year running). It's only through the sheer talent of director Tatsuya Yoshihara and his production team at Studio Pierrot that would propel this "then infamous, now famous" work into the greatest of great oblivion with the passing of time, that Yuki Tabata finally can breathe a heavy sigh and continue developing Black Clover into one of the many modern Shonen juggernauts that we know today, selling from the thousands to the millions. I'm not gonna say that what Yuki Tabata did here was plentiful, the story plot was rife of a roller-coaster ride of the usual Shonen tropes and cliches that quickly garnered attention as one of the worst series to be published and then through Studio Pierrot's infamous low-budget visuals, another strike as one of the worst modern Shonen shows that aired back in 2017. Heck, I probably would not want to include what Black Clover is all about, you can refer to the MAL synopsis or even Wikipedia to read it. In a nutshell, think of the Big 3 and the main MC's aspiration of "I want to be <fill in the blanks of the usual Shonen archetype>", add in a fellow rival, and there you have it. It feels just as awful as any kind of minimalistic story from the start, and the usual shenangians from some heavy power fantasy action to the occasional comedy that just doesn't feel as cohesive, and that's not to mention the immense boredom that quickly sets in if you're not the type to stick around for just "one more chapter". Not gonna lie, the first thing that everyone will remember is the crudely annoying MC that is Asta, especially in particular towards newbie VA Gakuto Kajiwara at the time when he first debuted with Asta. Try to compare the criticisms from Day 1 of the anime to now, and most people will say: "I still remember the days when people hated his voice days after his debut on Black Clover. Although I also wasn't very fond of it too, I found it very funny later, gotta love him and his voice acting now." or "I used to think that he (Gakuto Kajiwara) did a bad job with Asta...I take back what I said. His voice matches Asta completely and it's not bad at all, I've gotten used to it overtime." We've come a long way, friends. To see a rookie VA on his first debut getting flamed for all the wrong reasons, to now seeing the light that no one can replace Gakuto Fujiwara for the long-term investment. Overtime, we get to see the extensive character cast of Black Clover, and I'm still going to rely on my gut feelings here: each and everyone of them feels like cardboard cut-outs that are worth surmising to invoke the feelings of just blantantly plagarizing from other Weekly Shonen Jump works, and that's where Yuki Tabata can be faulted with trying to make do of the cliches and tropes of the Shonen genre that worked well at the time. The problem is with his way of execution of character traits that we've seen way too often to try lifting inspirations from one source to another, so much so that it becomes overbearing and full of cringe. Let's say Asta's rival Yuno. He's a skilled Wind Magic user, blessed by the gods to have magnificent power for OP prodigy powers, and as indicated by the magic books known as Grimoires: he's the four-lead clover magic user. Now tell me if any of those traits are lifted whether in and out of context of similar characters you might have seen throughout your read list of Shonen lookalikes. But as further evidenced, it's with the passing of time that helps distinguish each and every character to their types and whatnot, giving us the audience enough time to digest about what makes them tick and work, and appreciate them for their presence to the different progressing story arcs of the main series. You know me, I'm very critical when it comes to studio productions, and Studio Pierrot to me, stands as one of the worst studios to ever exist, even if they adapt works that often lose out on the quality of the source materials that fans so desired to see on the small screen. Black Clover is no different with the stigma that Pierrot productions tend to have, and for 1001 good reasons. But once again, like I've said at the beginning, it's thanks to director Tatsuya Yoshihara for helming this long-running project that has seen its fair shares of highs and lows. Black Clover might've started on the wrong foot for being the similar case towards Studio Deen at being decades-old studios with variable quality, for the test of time stands between the production staff team to stand in the gap and make their efforts worth it, and the payoff was certainly worth it in the long-run that was only destined to run for the full length of a year, that subsequently got lengthened and amounted to 3.5 years worth of time that increased the hype with some episodes having the Asta trademark of "I will hit my limits!" that expressively shared the experience of sticking in the long-run. AND BOY, DO THOSE EPISODES DELIVER with at best 9-turned-10/10 ratings that even trended on Twitter. YES, Black Clover IS BIG in both Japan and the West, and with Crunchyroll being the biggest benefactor that this show has garnered the No. 1 top spot in 80+ countries, you can't certainly lie at where Black Clover is now with the insane popularity. To that I say, great job Pierrot for making me love a show that I now endear as one of the many Shonen long-running series that I can recommend. Even the music can't be understated. For as many as 13 sets of OSTs within the 3.5 year long run of Black Clover, we've definitely heard some "diamond in the rough" gems that we've gotten used to overtime, with many songs that really stick out to be the series' representatives when it comes to recognizing that it originated from Black Clover. Sound director Hajime Takakuwa certainly did wonders at what he does best, but for this one I have to give props to the many artists that have contributed cult-classic songs, from the OPs: Kankaku Piero's "Haruka Mirai" to Vickeblanca's hit songs "Black Rover" and "Black Catcher", and EDs: Itowokashi's "Aoi Honoo" to Faky's "four". These are just some of my top favourite songs from Black Clover, but there's just too many to list them, because most of them are bangers in their own right (with some just being decent at best). Like what @Goober-fish has said: "Whatever the case may be, Black Clover is my ultimate guilty pleasure and I wave that 10 with pride." And I reverse the words of some jerk that said the sentence at the beginning: "If you flip the 01, it becomes a 10!" Black Clover may have started with being a score of 01, but looking at it now, it's definitely worthy of the 10 score in every possible way: the story that got better overtime with the characters, the insane Pierrot animation quality and right down to the fantastic OSTs that we are graced with to our pairs of eyes and ears. Never have I thought that I will return from a hatred of a stigma to loving them for Shonen shows, and even if I or you have never watched the Big 3 before, Black Clover is EASILY the best recommended entry show for anyone wanting to dive into Shonen shows...that's if you can last all 170 episodes in one go. Thanks Black Clover, now it's no longer just a guilty pleasure, and I'm an addition to wearing that 10 with pride.
LordSozin
03/30/2021, 02:36 AM
Black Clover is not for everyone, I’ll admit. It’s the trashiest to mid-tier Shounen series out there that manages to gravitate to a certain group of viewers with its cliches, tropes, and generic power fantasy. It lacks anything substantial or impactful. It doesn’t reinvent the Shounen wheel or elevates it. It’s a lackluster written series that exists purely for entertainment for people like me--who self indulges in battle shounen without a second thought--even if it’s the same type of blueprint that I’ve seen before, but with its own modifications. Thus, I don’t have any hate or resentment directed towards this controversial series. I simply can’t.I’ve been following the series since its inception. I’ve read and re-read its source material and, I can say it does improve--for a Black Clover standard, that is. This series received hate, backlash, and terrible reception since the onset of its TV anime. And to nobody’s surprise, it’s the most hated series of modern Shounen--2014 and onwards, right after the era of the big three. If there’s any advice I can give for people interested in watching this series, it is to go into it for pure entertainment. Be open-minded, have low expectations, ignore the hate, and watch it for yourselves. Black Clover anime started ugly. The pacing, sheer predictability, genericness, and the dreadful usage of Shounen tropes turned off people--understandably so. But for me, I loved it. I loved it not because it was good, but because it was the purest generic anime that was not afraid for what it was. It knows its production was constrained. It knows its plot and characters took “inspiration” from previous works with few tweaks here and there, and most importantly, it knows its target audience. With this, once the show solved its pacing issues, it quickly flew from arc to arc with hype moments after hype moments, and all I did was to turn off my brain and enjoy the shit show. To provide some examples, after the dungeon expedition arc, Asta, Noelle, Yuno, and some other magic knight squad members were summoned for recognition medals. In that banquet, the show introduced more of its supporting casts. It demonstrated its power system, characters’ abilities, showcased some of its societal structure and prejudices, and then jumped straight to the Clover Kingdom’s invasion. Throughout this invasion arc, it entertained me by never letting go of its accelerator. All the Magic Knight captains that were introduced previously got their moments to show off. Whether be their magic or personality, it showed all of it. The show then exploits each of its newly introduced characters to the limit by having them interact and fight alongside each other. The dynamics between characters such as Fuegoleon and Nozel, Asta, Yuno, and Noelle, Yami and Jack, provided the fun. It’s cheap, it’s lazy, but it worked so well for a braindead like me. The other aspect of Black Clover’s storytelling is the seamless transition from an arc to another. If some terrorists brutally wounded a beloved character, the most logical route is for the main casts to go after them. And they do. If the vice-captain of the Golden Dawn is acting out of character, the most logical thinking is to seek out the true identity. And they do. How do they do it? They do it by the classic shounen way: Tournament arc--my favorite aspect of mindless battle shounen. But along the way, the show plants some seeds of suspicion--there’s something more sophisticated with the adversaries that the Clover Kingdom were up against. It’s these careful hints here and there that made the grand finale of Black Clover’s first saga a memorable one. And it is in my humble opinion that the first saga of Black Clover is one of the best of modern shounen. The finale wrapped up every plot point presented up to then, it concluded characters’ development until that point, and it answered every question along the way. Not to mention, the final plot twist was a phenomenon to be held. Yuki Tabata’s writing isn’t anything revolutionary. He takes inspiration and does his own twists. He utilizes whatever skills he has got at his disposal and tells his own story within the Shounen genre’s confinement. And I enjoyed every second of it. I have no regrets. As I aforementioned, Black Clover’s production was severely constrained. From the start, the anime lacked staffing--specifically, key animators and animation directors--and had an unsustainable schedule. Before the first episode of Black Clover even premiered, the Black Clover anime production team was given only 5 months of pre-production, for a long-running battle shounen. To put it into perspective, a 12 episode regular anime usually takes a year of pre-production. Thus, it’s no surprise that the animation in Black Clover declined significantly soon after it began airing. As that happened, it’s also reported that some of the staff working on the anime had gone through physical and mental exhaustion, which they eventually fell ill. Now, why does it matter? Well, it doesn’t--at least from a show’s quality standpoint. But then I don’t want to clown on Black Clover’s animation either because of this information. I know the animation and art are inconsistent; the consensus is that Black Clover’s animation is inconsistent. It can be mindblowing for a single episode, and then for the next 10 to 20 episodes can range from unbearable to mediocracy. I can list every single flaw of Black Clover’s art and animation, but then that would be repetitive since I’m sure those aspects have been talked about over the years. Lastly, I’m fine with it. I’m okay with its inconsistency in art and animation because I love this series. I grew up with it, I enjoyed it, and I’m willing to forgive its flaws. If you have read this far, I just want to thank you for taking your time. Score: 5/10

Black Clover ブラッククローバー

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Black Clover ブラッククローバー

North American Anime & Manga Releases for January

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Manga 'Black Clover' Receives Anime Movie

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Spring 2020 Anime Postponements Due to COVID-19 Outbreak [Update 1/14]

North American Anime & Manga Releases for March

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TV Anime 'Black Clover' Adds Voice Cast Members [Update 9/4]

TV Anime 'Black Clover' Reveals Additional Cast Members

TV Anime 'Black Clover' Announces Lead Cast for Fall 2017 Broadcast

'Black Clover (TV)' Staff Members Announced

Manga 'Black Clover' Gets TV Anime Adaptation for 2017