Season English Dub Review: ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept. Season One

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There’s a bunch of TV and anime that would certainly be better in the annals of entertainment if given this simple idea…”You’re allowed to be shorter”.

What I mean is, sometimes a franchise puts a little too much fluff, and just enough substance to survive, but doesn’t do anything TRULY nuts. As a result, a good recommendation would be to order fewer episodes as you would get a more compelling experience. ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept.’s qualities would prove to be in MUCH better use, had there been fewer episodes ordered for the series.

At its core, ACCA is a dramatic sequence all about a military coup trying to topple its government. Lead character Jean Otis, pretty much draws the short straw in being the rightful heir to a throne that he doesn’t give a shit about. His sister, Lotta, is prancing about eating…all day…every day.

This dichotomy is what brings the franchise down as a whole. For every one cool moment that happens like Jean and Mauve getting into it about the Chiefs or the compelling dialogue that dances around the Chelsea grin of Lilium, we get endless numbers of scenes featuring desserts and pastries and breads and dubious amounts of cig smoking. The last part I can deal with, but Jesus, the amount of food we had to watch people eat in this series. I actually called this “food porn”, but really it isn’t because if it was food porn there would be a bit more variety with the producers throwing in like a steak or maybe some fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Nope, we got egregious amounts of TOAST. The most exciting of all the foods!

The art direction of the series is fabulous, definitely showcasing a gritty world with almost Crow-like denseness in backgrounds and aesthetic. As a matter of fact, the dichotomy I spoke of earlier really could split this series like night and day…literally. During the day, ACCA is boring as hell, but at night time, that’s when this series REALLY begins to shine and exasperate a lot of the features I like about the show like the twists and turns of a tale that includes near abductions, back stabbing and attempted murders.

The English voice acting was just fine, Austin Tindle’s take on “Jean” featured a brooding, down-trodden character hardly every excited that certainly matched the art direction of the series, almost to perfection. To counteract this, the producers did a good job of getting Damian Mills to be “Prince Schwann”, and really the rest of the Dowa Kingdom as an almost start contrast to the majority of the series in terms of brevity, even though the whole setting serves as the antagonist opposite the ACCA organization.

Turn ACCA into a quarter-hour a week experience with just the meat and potatoes of the plot shining through, you could have one of the better animes around. Unfortunately, the nonsense causes this current iteration to be so saturated in happenstance that the weight is too much for the main plot to bare, and somewhat falters.