Manga adaptation of Aoi Sekai no Chuushin de by 5th Avenue
Simulcast on Crunchyroll

Premise: Over 90% of the land of Consume is dominated by the Ninteldo Kingdom. A new hero emerges from Kingdom of Segua to challenge them as well as avenge his best friend’s death. Basically, it’s a fantasy world re-telling of the Nintendo vs. Sega console wars. Yes, you heard me correctly.

Jel’s Verdict: 20 Years Too Late

This series has the type of crazy premise that could be either amazing or terrible, no in-between. Sadly, it falls in the latter category. For one, the Sega versus Nintendo debate hasn’t been an issue for a LONG time, pretty much since Playstation came on the scene and stomped them both. Sure I love the idea of harkening to the days when the Console Wars were hilariously nasty, but it’s not exactly the most timely subject.

But the most disappointing thing about Blue World is the interpretation of the characters. If one of the kingdoms wasn’t named “Ninteldo” I don’t think I would have any clue that this was a parody or allegory or whatever you want to call it. Aside from some minor visual cues, the characters have nothing to do with their inspirations. For example, I must admit Mario looks amazing as “Marcus”, but other than his mustache and riding some kind of green dinosaur, there’s no connection to Mario whatsoever. And Opa Opa is just another hot girl with exploding clothes that just happens to have wings behind her ears, there’s really no other connection to the game that I’m aware of.

I’m not going to say I had high expectations for this series, but I was hoping there was some chance of this being a fun, wacky nostalgia trip. Instead we got little more than a mediocre action/ecchi show that would have no discerning features if you changed a few names. Something like this might have been cool 20 years ago when this round of the Console Wars was actually happening, but now it’s just not worth your time.

Timmy’s verdict: Worse then the Super Mario Bros movie

The main thing this show had going for it was the connection to Sega and Nintendo, and they ruined that by making a good portion of the characters for the most part unrecognizable to their gaming counterparts. In the end you are left with a horribly generic shell of a show that seems to have any potential sucked out of it. The best character so far is probably tetris despite the fact most of his jokes are quite lame and a little creepy. I was hoping this one would be at least fun but I find myself quite disappointed.

If you want to watch something this loosely related to gaming go watch the SMB movie. The references may suck but at least the movie is watchable. Hell, after all these years I actually enjoy it.