Name(s): Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail
Format: Original video animation [OVA] (5 33-minute episodes)
Studio(s): Madhouse
Related: Black Lagoon

I feel that this OVA suffers greatly from having to adapt too much manga material in too little time. There were four years between this and the anime’s second season, but only a few months between the first and second seasons. If you convert runtimes, Roberta’s Blood Trail would only be about half the length of one of the seasons with roughly 7.5 episodes. Crunch the numbers there. Madhouse certainly did a lot of their own crunching with this adaptation.

There are so many revelations and character developments happening so fast that a lot of it didn’t feel properly justified, and/or the actions of certain characters didn’t make much sense to me. I feel like there’s enough great source material in Roberta’s Blood Trail; it’s just the execution that I think was botched. I ended up having a completely mixed reaction to what had the pieces and gusto to create an epic climax for the Black Lagoon saga, but tripped while rushing to it.