English Dub Review: Knight’s & Magic “Hit & Away”

Enemy inventors take stock of each other’s work.

Overview (Spoilers)

Cristobal, the second prince of Zaloudek, leads an assault against the castle where the Princess is holed up with the Silver Phoenix at Missilier. Attempting to attack under cover of night and out of the range of the Resvant Vido, the Zaloudek forces keep in their airships, and just below the clouds. This plan is thrown in the garbage when Ernesti launches flash-bang flares, showing their exact locations. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the Tzendribbles are now outfitted with launchers for the new weapons system: the Missile Javelin. These are large javelins, primed with a magic thruster spell and guided with silver nerves. Though they don’t explode on contact, they do rip through the enemy airships, and the enemy is routed. During the battle, Ernie lands the Ikaruga on Cristobal’s ship, and spanks him in one-on-one mecha combat. Cristobal offers Ernie the chance to switch sides and have a noble title, land, and everything he could ever want. Thanks, but no thanks. Already got everything he needs. Rather than surrender, though, the prince goes down with the ship, destroying his mecha in the process. One step after another, the Phoenix and the Kusperchans drive back the Zaloudek. What Ernie doesn’t know is that the enemy inventor who created the airships was present at the battle of Missilier, and has learned from Ikaruga’s magic thrusters. After a long time of Kusperchan victory taking back their lands, the enemy reveals a new, more terrifying Silhouette Knight: the Vyver, a giant, dragon-shaped mecha that flies with the same speed as the Ikaruga!

Other than the main plot, this episode has two portions of interest. One being a conversation with the Kusperchan leadership about Ernie loaning out the salvage. He agrees easily, since his team would not be able to utilize all of the chasis available. However, he immediately presents an amendment to the terms of the agreement. Since the Kusperchan forces would be using mecha built from parts loaned by the Silver Phoenix, all the enemy units the Kusperchans down would belong to the Silver Phoenix as well. This thought terrifies everyone in the room. If this plan is followed, the order of the Silver Phoenix would end up assimilating the entirety of the Zaloudek army. Ernie quickly backpedals this as a joke, but in the novel series, he backs off because Emrys tells him to stop bullying the nobles. Besides, the idea would put too much of a burden on his forces, so he agrees that the contract will just be renegotiated later on.

Second, we get a look that the guts of the Zaloudek units. Though they have Ether Reactors, same as Fremavilla, they also have an additional unit called an Ether Supplier. Rather than drawing ether out of the air and turning it into mana, Ether Suppliers utilize a substance called Etherite. It is a green rock made up of solid ether, and when used in the Supplier, it acts like nitro. This causes stress on the reactor, and parts of the supplier have to be replaced after use anyways, so it is only useful for emergency boost of power. This explains how they are able to keep the Tyrants working despite their power consumption. The Etherite is also used to make the airships float. The Etheric Levitators store the concentrated Etherite, which makes the Levitator lighter than air, causing the airship to fly.

Our Take

With as much happening in this episode, I would have thought it to feel more exciting. We beat the enemy leader, routed them back to the borders of their lands, and learned a ton about their technology. So, why does this episode not feel like a rousing battle occurred? Perhaps because the battle didn’t include much in the way of actual fighting. Other than the (incredibly brief) fight between Christobal and Ernesti, the rest of the episode’s fights were just salvos of missiles and a giant energy blast from the Goldleo. Tactically, this was a smartly won fight, but it didn’t feel like this was the third to last episode. Further, by making the second half of the episode primarily talking, it made the episode slow down even further, until the Vyver shows up. What this episode needed was for the second half to be inserted in chunks through earlier episodes, spreading the discovery of how the Zaloudek Tech works over two or three episodes. That would allow this episode to focus on a first fight between the Vyver and the Ikaruga. In the novels, they have two completely separate fights, but it seems like the anime may be condensing the plot a bit. There was considerable use of narration throughout the episode, but for once, this narration was completely necessary. So much would happen between scenes, it couldn’t be covered effectively by montage.

The animation present in this episode was of a respectable quality, but the vast majority of it was done with CG. Once you’ve got the models made, it doesn’t take a huge amount to animate a battle sequence. Still, the movements were smooth, and had definite mass to them, which is sometimes lost in traditional animation. The rest was talky-talky, and didn’t need much in the way of animation. Still, the traditional style used during the negotiations portion was rather good. The characters were expressive, though I would have liked Kid to have actually blushed a bit when the nobles commented on how red he had gotten.

The voice acting wasn’t horrible. Most of the characters performed at the baseline that the series has been operating at for a while. Cristobal and his sister Catalina were stand outs, however. Cristobal as a character gave a good performance in attempting to recruit Ernesti, and the voice actor portrayed it well. After his death, Catalina had a single line, but it had so much balled up grief in it, you could cut it with a knife. The enemy inventor, Horatio, also has a solid voice actor behind him. He’s given the character a lot of mad scientist, creepy villain, and manipulator vibes, and it makes the character interesting to watch, primarily because you can’t trust anything he says.