English Dub Review: Black Clover “What Happened on a Certain day in the Castle Town”

What a mouthful of a title.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Our intrepid trio has returned to the home base of the Black Bulls to report back to Sukehiro. He congratulates them on doing a good job on their mission. Sukehiro presents them with a gold star, which is apparently an honor bestowed upon them by the Wizard King, much to Asta’s delight. As it turns out, the number of stars the magic knights have determines their rank among the other divisions of knights. Our Black Bulls, with their latest star, hilariously have negative thirty. Captain Sukehiro then presents our heroes with their pay for the month, and thus Asta and friends are enticed to spend their newfound riches in Castle Town. After Asta sends some money back to Sister Lily at home, of course.

Asta and Noelle ride into town with the flirtatious witch, Vanessa Enoteca. Asta is awestruck by the big city and gushes at all its sights and sounds while we see the other Black Bulls explore the town and get into their own little shenanigans on their furlough day. Vanessa offers to show Asta and Noelle a real place of interest and shuffles them through a magically concealed entrance (Similar to Harry Potter’s famous platform 9 and 3/4 entrance) into the black market. There, they run into Magna, who’s more than eager to gamble his hard earned money away.

Meanwhile, Noelle and Vanessa do some shopping for magical items and run into Sekke, the chump from the magic knight entrance exam who got into the Praying Mantis’ after being trounced by Asta during the exam. Naturally, he’s not too happy to see Asta, and less happy to see him hanging around with such beautiful women. But his misery is interrupted when a thief steals some gold from an old lady, and Asta jumps into action, right before we’re treated to the end credits.

Our Take:

Its bizarre to me that an anime like Black Clover, which only has a 12 episode run set for it, decides to waste time on an episode like this. While it’s not offensively bad, it’s just something of a nothing episode that is little more than 23 minutes of seeing our cast running some errands in town. While it’s nice to see more of the Black Bull supporting characters doing things, it doesn’t amount to much more than a few gag scenes showing character traits we already knew about them. It’s not terribly funny, though, and I felt as if most of what happens this week could’ve been told in five minutes, and not have taken up a whole episode.