English Dub Review: Dies Irae “Spider”

We are getting closer to understanding what is going on here.

Overview (Spoilers)

Ever since Kasumi got sucked into this whole thing with the killings and the weirdos, Ren has avoided her. Maybe if the two stay far enough apart, she won’t sleepwalk-murder people anymore. As he dodges her, Kei shows up to intimidate him. If he wants to survive this war, he’s going to have to get stronger. In the interests of making the war worthwhile, she has been sent to show him the ropes and train him up to be a strong opponent. The bad guys are all Nazis who, empowered by a ritual long ago, are planning to cause a great war in order to have their wishes granted. The target of this war is one man, Ren himself. Each of these psychos, including Ren, has a weapon called a relic. It will absorb the souls of those the wielder kills, and turn them into power. After learning to activate the relic’s power (as he’s already shown with his regeneration and invisible blades), he must learn to materialize the relic to gain mastery of it. After that, there are two more stages, but we’ll get to that later. Kasumi finally manages to track Ren down and asks him what is going on. Needing a good fib, he claims that he’s been dating Kei, and that gets her off his back. It also gets him pinched by Kei, but who cares? Later, Ren gets a call from Kasumi’s phone. She’s been kidnapped by one of the baddies! This guy, Rote Spinne, uses spider web as his relic and has a whole bunch of naked girls tied up. Including a little brunette. Is that Kasumi? He says that he is there to force Ren into accepting his powers. In effect, Kei provides the lectures, and Rote gives the practical exams. After binding Ren up, he tries to encourage Ren to let his relic free by killing the brunette close enough to have her blood spray all over the boy.This works, a little too well. Ren rips himself free from the bindings, dismembering himself in the process. He regenerates the damage, but black blades form over whatever area he intends to strike with. With his newfound power, he proceeds to take down Rote. He returns home to find Kasumi rummaging through his room, looking for her phone. He hugs her and tells her how glad he is to see her.

Our Take

After working my way through this episode, and looking back on a few others, I finally figured out why this show is so confusing. The writers and directors suck. Apparently, this show is the result of a Kickstarter campaign, and it hired on a mediocre studio that has had some modicum of success in the past. They animated the original Kino’s Journey. Unfortunately, even though this is ACGT’s relaunch into the world of animation, it hasn’t gotten any better. This episode is horribly directed, obfuscating rather important details by simply ignoring them. How was Kasumi suddenly home after being horrifically murdered in front of Ren’s eyes? Oh, she had never been kidnapped in the first place. Rote simply killed a body double. I had honestly been hoping the confusion was intentional. That it was some sort of attempt to put us in Ren’s shoes. That would be good confusion, as it would help us empathize with him. However, I saw comments on previous episodes and realized that it was actually because the writers and directors simply didn’t put very important information where it was supposed to go. This is the bad kind of confusion, as it is frustrating and obnoxious.

What else have we missed? The guillotine was a relic that attached itself to Ren, but because he was afraid of blades, he gave that power to Kasumi. Every time he had the dream about the girl with the scar on her neck, Kasumi went out and killed in order to charge up the relic. Once he confronted her, he reabsorbed the power of the invisible blades, removing it from Kasumi and making her normal again. While all of that information was kinda in the last episode, the way it was presented didn’t actually explain it that way. It made it seem like Kasumi was just another psycho, one that was killing in Ren’s name. This is just terrible storytelling. Further, they keep wasting our time with pointless scenes of the bad guys being ominous. Stop it. We get it, they’re evil. Could you use more of that screen time to explain what is happening?

Oh, and don’t give us instructional-video-level exposition here. Kei’s explanation is so dry and forced, it feels like I’m sitting at work watching training videos about why I need to smile at customers. Brittany Lauda must be exhausted from her time as Liones on Hina Logic, because Kei just sounds artificial. Speaking of artificial, those German accents that almost everyone has in this show. That is rapidly getting more and more on my nerves. The voice actors are inconsistent with their portrayal of the accents, dropping them on words they said in the accent moments before. Because of that, and the fact that all the sounds come out as if the cast is talking with a mouth full of marshmallows, it gets difficult to understand what they are saying. The accents are unnecessary and only detract from the dialogue. The animation… meh. It happened. There were some understandable flaws, such as errors in the eyes at range, but it didn’t seem like much effort went into making this a great series. It just seems like ACGT was out to get some cash and get back in the game. I don’t know if this show was the one to do that with.