English Dub Review: ēlDLIVE Season 1

Loaded with potential, but falls flat from too much quirk and not enough substance.

Spoilers Below

Chuuta Kokonose is a high school kid with self-esteem issues and a lack of confidence. This is made worse by the fact that he has a voice in his head. Despite this, his home-ec skills are unparalleled. He gets abducted by aliens, but not for a probing. They recruit him as a member of the Space Police Force ēlDLIVE. He quickly finds that the voice is not a figment of his imagination, but an alien symbiont that grants him incredible powers. Chuuta proves his worth time and again, defeating petty crooks, insidious mind-controlling treasure hunters, and agents of the criminal organization Daymill. This garners the attention of Daymill itself, who levy a number of schemes to capture Chuuta and the symbiont, named Dolough.

ēlDLIVE was created by mangaka Akira Amano, who is best known for Reborn!, a shonen series that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump for over eight years. Amano has also done character design work for the compelling psychological crime anime Psycho-PassēlDLIVE itself has run for seven volumes and is still in production. The anime covers most of the content from the first four volumes, but heavily alters the story. These alterations remove many of the more subtle plots of the manga but leave things open to bring them up in the second season.

To begin, I’d like to talk about what I enjoyed in this series. Space police is a fun subject for an anime. The wide variety of characters, pseudo-sciences, and sociopolitical eccentricities allow for an infinite reservoir of content. The expression of Chuuta’s powers through Dolough was interesting, like a blend of Venom and Green Lantern.

Courtesy: Funimation

The sad part is, that is where my enjoyment ended. Akira Amano’s strength is in her character designs, specifically for human characters. The art style she presents in the manga is unique and interesting. Unfortunately, the anime makes changes to this in order to make it easier to animate and bring the designs closer to the mainstream. This results in the humanoid characters looking rather bland, and the alien characters looking like rejects from some 90’s fanfiction for Sonic the Hedgehog. Perhaps this was intended as a parody of tokusatsu tropes, but it felt more like lack of imagination in the development of the alien cultures. I further have an issue with the idea that the female humanoid characters have transformations to utilize their powers, but those transformations are the stuff of magical girl anime and are blatant plays to sexualize those characters. The male characters have no such transformations and just use their powers straight out.

Courtesy: Funimation

As I mentioned before, the plot is altered to remove some of the more subtle plots, such as planets that don’t want to submit to the galactic ruling body. These plot elements form most of the intrigue of the series, which would make the otherwise predictable cases more palatable. With the exception of one, every plot point can be predicted as soon as the arc begins. Furthermore, the last two episode are completely original to the anime and are indicative of the issues in removing the manga stories. In the manga, the heroes are stunned when Daymill is suddenly destroyed by another, mysterious organization. Here, Daymill ends up surrendering in disgrace after a sudden confrontation where ēlDLIVE intentionally puts civilians in the line of fire instead of CALLING FOR BACKUP. Literally, every character introduced in these two episodes are new to the anime, and most are ripoffs of characters from other anime. One of Daymill Junior’s head lackeys looks almost identical to Dodoria from Dragon Ball Z. It all comes across as flat, cliched, and unoriginal, and far too much play towards the mainstream. This is what happens when anime studios make their own filler content.

The English dub is not really any point of complaint, but it isn’t a point where it shines either. None of the characters were even written deep enough to allow the actors to dig into those characters and portray anything with dimension. There were some points where the writing of the original script left the dub team with some bad spots that would only make the English look forced and unnatural.

All in all, I felt that this anime could have gone anywhere, and instead goes straight for what is either outlandish or hackneyed. Personally, I would like to blame Studio Pierrot for most of this, but a few of the designs for the characters also fell on Amano. The English dub team did the best with what they had, to be honest. I give this series five out of ten, with hopes that if the series continues, it will shake things up and live up to its potential.

SCORE
6.5/10