“Blood Blockade Battlefront” (2015, produced by studio Bones) is an anime series filled with fantasy, action, and raunchy humor.

The story’s plot is about a photojournalist, named Leonardo (voiced by Aaron Dismuke), in New York who gets mistaken for a dead man. As such he is recruited in a secretive organization called Libra, whose mission is to preserve balance between earth and a separate world called the Alter World.

There’s a lot in this show that’s of high quality, like the environment really making the audience feel like they’re in an urban city. For instance, in some scenes while the main characters discuss plot, there are people casually eating their sandwiches across the street.

The utilization of background music to emphasize the story beats really sets this show apart from anime in the genre. With it cutting abruptly to a scene in order to focus on another beat is well done and always keeps the audience wanting to watch.

The English dub of this show is worthwhile, the voice actors fit their roles perfectly. Like Leo’s voice actor, his vocal range is insane, playing not only Alphonse Elrich from “Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood” to Miyuki Shirogane in “Love is War”.

For all the ups of the show there are a couple of downs.

The pacing of the show is very aggressive, say when a character is chasing after something and it gets cut off by something else. Within the first episode alone it has enough of those scenes that the viewer struggles to understand what is going on.

For as good as the English voice actors are there are moments where they flop, going from a really tense scene and sounding overly confident or rather bubbly. To the audience it feels rather jarring, just like with the pacing, it’s all over the place.

If an audience can enjoy a fantasy action anime and can get past the few flaws, they’ll have a good time. If not then this would be an anime worth passing by.