Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond

血界戦線 & BEYOND (Kekkai Sensen & Beyond)

7.8(214,746)

MAL Score

Ranked #1248

Popularity #554

Action
Fantasy
Super Power
Urban Fantasy
Vampire

Episodes: 12
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Oct 8, 2017 to Dec 24, 2017
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Three years after a rift to the Beyond tore open in New York City, the metropolis was sealed inside an unbreakable barrier, leaving humans and extradimensional beings to coexist in the rebuilt chaos now called Hellsalem’s Lot. Leonardo Watch, a young photographer, arrives seeking answers about the “All-seeing Eyes of the Gods”—a power he gained at the cost of his sister’s eyesight.

His search pulls him into Libra, a covert group of supernaturally gifted agents working to keep some measure of order amid the city’s everyday madness of monsters and magic. With otherworldly threats never far away, Leonardo presses forward, determined to unravel the truth behind his eyes and find a way to return what his sister lost.

Otaku Consensus

Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond is widely received as the stronger, cleaner expression of Kekkai Sensen’s appeal: Bones’ kinetic urban chaos, Masato Takayanagi’s brisk case-by-case direction, and Yasuhiro Nightow’s comic-book power logic make the season feel more like a sharp ensemble showcase than a conventional shounen quest. Its biggest recurring criticism is the same quality that gives it personality: the dense, episodic storytelling can feel fragmented or emotionally weightless to viewers who want a tightly escalating central plot.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond if you want urban fantasy that treats supernatural disaster like a normal Tuesday, with punchlines, gore, vampires, aliens, and superpowers all sharing the same street corner. It scratches a similar itch to Bungo Stray Dogs’ powered-agency battles and Durarara!!’s city-as-character energy, but with Yasuhiro Nightow’s louder, stranger comic sensibility. This season is especially good for viewers who prefer compact, high-concept episodes over long tournament structures or exposition-heavy lore arcs. Bones gives the city a crowded visual rhythm, while the ensemble format lets different Libra members take the spotlight without flattening the show into one hero’s power climb. If you want stylish chaos without losing the joke, this is the franchise at its most watchable.

Key Characters

L
Leonardo Watch
Leonardo works because he is not the strongest person in the room; fans respond to how his observational role lets the show turn overwhelming supernatural battles into something readable and human-scaled.
K
Klaus Von Reinherz
Klaus is the franchise’s gentleman bruiser archetype, memorable for pairing absurd physical authority with a formal, almost old-world sense of responsibility.
Z
Zapp Renfro
Zapp supplies the show’s most abrasive comic voltage, a reckless fighter whose personality is deliberately less polished than his combat technique.
C
Chain Sumeragi
Chain stands out in the ensemble as a cool, dry-witted counterweight to Libra’s louder personalities, with an ability set that fits the series’ love of stylish tactical weirdness.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
This sequel season is structurally very episodic, matching AniList’s 90% Episodic tag: it functions less like a single chase toward an ending and more like a rotating cabinet of Hellsalem’s Lot incidents.
2
Studio Bones handles the adaptation, which matters because the series depends on fast shifts between comedy timing, monster spectacle, hand-to-hand impact, and crowded city layouts rather than just clean character animation.
3
The staff list includes dedicated prop design by Noriyuki Jinguuji and creature design by Kouji Sugiura, a production split that reflects how much of the show’s identity comes from objects, weapons, monsters, and extradimensional background detail.
4
Masato Takayanagi directs this season with Yasuko Kamo on series composition, giving Beyond a more chapter-driven rhythm than viewers who only know the first season’s anime-original dramatic throughline might expect.
5
Its genre blend is unusually specific even by shounen standards: the research tags place it at the intersection of Urban Fantasy, Aliens, Super Power, Vampire, Dystopian atmosphere, Cosmic Horror, and Gore rather than a single battle-anime lane.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Blood Blockade Battlefront comes from Yasuhiro Nightow, the original creator of Trigun, which explains the shared appetite for eccentric gunplay, moral pressure, slapstick, and oversized personalities.
Fun fact 2: The title has a notable naming quirk among English-language reviewers: Anime UK News pointed out that many fans still use the Japanese title Kekkai Sensen because it flows more naturally than the literal English title Blood Blockade Battlefront.
Fun fact 3: The season aired as a complete 12-episode run from October 8, 2017 to December 24, 2017, placing its finale directly on Christmas Eve in Japan’s 2017 fall season.
Fun fact 4: Its audience scores are strikingly consistent across major anime databases: the research lists 7.77/10 on MyAnimeList from 214,746 votes and 77/100 on AniList, with 1,995 AniList favourites.
Fun fact 5: Several web reactions highlight the same divide: fans praise the hilarious dialogue, strong dub performances, cool powers, openings and endings, while harsher criticism targets the story as too loose, complex, or even pointless if the viewer needs a more linear payoff.