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Blend S
Service with More (or Less) Than a Smile
Series in a Sentence
Despite an intimidating smile, Sakuranomiya Maika receives a job at Stile, a café where each employee acts according to a unique character trait.
What I liked
Blend S was a show without any stakes and sometimes that’s important to have when watching a whole swathe of different anime series. Following the lives of a group of people working at a café, the series made me laugh on multiple occasions with the varied humor that each individual brought. This is thanks to the general premise that each character has an assigned role to play, and interactions with unimportant fodder characters really helped this shine through. I was also fond of some of the budding romances in the show, though some take the back seat to more prominent characters. Perhaps the best compliment I can give this show is that it reminded me in a way of the Wagnaria (Working) series in the respect that it was based wholly on character interaction with plot points stemming from the daily activities and requirements of working at a café. Finally, the show did a good job of staggering its humor and by that I mean not every character is introduced at once and not every character is constantly the focus of a scene. Thanks to this, the variety of jokes can be played out over a longer period of time without feeling stale.
What I Didn’t Like
Even though I praised the show for its staggering of jokes, I also disliked the result of that: jokes can feel wholly overplayed. On one hand, introducing a character with a different trait towards the end of the series or only having a certain character show up once every two to three episodes does keep content fresh but, on the other, jokes centering around the more primary cast get tiresome. I found myself, at times, not wanting to watch the show because, despite the promise of a new episode, I knew the payoff was going to be the same. Long story short, expect long periods of stale jokes rather than constant periods of innovation. Sure, the jokes were funny and had me laughing but I could only take so much of one basic idea at a time.
Overall Feelings
Blend S was a fine anime with a typical soft animation style, a typical interaction driven plot, and a premise that has been done before. Though it may sound like I’m criticizing it for this, really these traits mean that you get what you expect and what the show promises: varied laughs based on character traits. Unfortunately, the show’s short form prevents it from delving into longer character arcs like similar shows (the Wagnaria series) were able to do and the jokes get stale over time. Perhaps the best way to enjoy this show, then, is in short bursts. Watch an episode or two at a time, let it sit, and come back to it later in order to prevent that feeling of being tired of the jokes. When service is top-notch, you’ll always want to go back to something but when it’s less than ideal, maybe return in chunks.