English Dub Season Review: Dies Irae Season One

Death, insanity, confusion, and really bad German accents.

Overview

Ren Fuuji is a school student, who lives with his childhood friends in a small apartment complex. Well, at least he did. The other dude in the group, Shirou, got in a random fight with him. They ended up in the hospital, and when Ren got out, his buddy was already gone for parts unknown. Ren joins the girl of the group, Kasumi, at the museum for a sword exhibit, but has a series of strange hallucinations in front of an authentic French Revolution guillotine. That marks the end of his normal life. At night, he (and sometimes Kasumi) begin to go on murder sprees in their sleep. But why? Well, it turns out the guillotine is a Relic, an ancient murder weapon that grants its master superpowers using energy from the absorbed souls of the people they’ve killed. Ren isn’t the only one with a Relic, though. A whole bunch of neo (and classical) nazis are on the attack, hoping to murder enough people in certain spots that they can open a portal, and allow their boss out of his inter-dimensional prison to begin his own genocide spree. Ren getting this Relic wasn’t an accident either. He was genetically engineered to become the ultimate warrior, so that when the nazi boss shows up, he has a worthy opponent. While all this is going down, there is also a bunch of intrigue between the nazis, and tons of infighting, as they each have their own desires and reasons for summoning Heinrich. But, none of them are completely sane, so their motivations are a bit hard to figure out.

Dies Irae is based on a popular visual novel and is a direct adaptation. Since there are multiple, branching paths, each providing you with different details as to what is going on. This anime focuses primarily on the “Marie” path, being about the spirit of the guillotine. It is worth noting that there is a second, half-season planned, which would bring this up to eighteen episodes, and will wrap up the story. The adaptation was funded by a Kickstarter campaign and may have been influenced by the backers a bit.

Our Take

Right from the get-go, this show plays its hand. Average animation, sometimes good cinematography. That is all the good things I have to say about this show. Strap in kiddies, I’m about to unload.

Let’s begin with the biggest problem of them all. Pardon my french, but this anime makes NO GODDAMN SENSE. Your first clue is the episode numbering. You see, this is officially an 11 episode season, with a single prequel episode tacked on to the front labeled episode zero. What does that mean? They really have a 12 episode season, but the first episode happened a long time ago, and they wanted to sound artsy. We haven’t even gotten into the show yet.

That episode zero throws a bunch of characters at us but does so almost as if there was a whole show we haven’t seen. Like we should already know who these people are, and are just getting their prequel story. Now, that might have been fine, but the rest of the series does nothing to make these characters more than just a confusing bundle of murder and nazi. The voice acting does nothing to help this, but we’ll be getting to that in a while. This prequel episode doesn’t really add anything to the story, or to the understanding of who these characters are. It just demonstrates that they were all Nazis in World War II. As we continue on, the plot gets murkier and murkier, and even after finishing the season, there are still plenty of things I have no clue about. Others, I only understand because some kind viewer who played the game explained it in the video’s comments.

Effectively, the writer assumes that we have played the game, already know all these characters, and probably have beaten one of the paths. As such, it doesn’t bother with completely explaining its plot points. We have an entire episode where we find out Kasumi is also killing people in her sleep, and Ren has to fight her to take the power out of her so she’ll stop killing. What we don’t get is why she’s doing it. Apparently, she’s secretly his adopted sister and a daughter of the reincarnation of the woman who is the spirit of Ren’s Relic, so she’s tied to it. Since he didn’t want to kill for power, she started doing it for him using borrowed power to continue fueling the guillotine. Yeah, that whole chunk isn’t actually explained anywhere in the series. Nor is Valeria’s whole reasoning behind killing his comrades in the background. Even though it explains what the deal is with Shirou’s quasi-invulnerability, it is done in such a roundabout way (with bad voice acting, again) that the explanation is still lost on me.

So, I’ve referenced the voice acting twice now. What could possibly be so bad about it? Do you know that game you play with friends: Chubby Bunny? It’s where you shove a bunch of marshmallows in your mouth and try to say “chubby bunny” without losing any of the mallows. It’s funny because your words slur and get all slobbery. This show seems to believe that a German accent should sound like someone playing Chubby Bunny. That means that anyone with a German accent is not only incredibly difficult to understand but vaguely annoying. Okay, that’s bad, but it can’t be that bad, right? Thirteen of the nineteen characters in this show are Nazis. One character is French, so she’s only half as bad. This problem is entirely on the head of the translation crew, as they made the choice to have all the characters with these accents, despite most of them being old enough to have trained away those accents.

The animation is pretty average most of the time. It occasionally dips into great territory with its battle scenes, but that’ rather rare. The drawback to the animation is the CG. In and of itself, it isn’t so bad. However, they are using it for very specific things: CG animated red skulls to show someone is evil, CG animated giant skeletons, and CG animated golden city made of skulls and skeletons. See a pattern? The look of this CG is so radically different from the traditional animation used throughout, that it is extremely jarring.

How To Watch

I would not recommend watching this anime, especially not until the rest of it comes out. If you decide you want to here’s my advice: Watch it all at once. Just binge it in one sitting. Grab a bunch of strong alcohol, some snacks, and a Rammstein CD. Be prepared to be so overloaded with testosterone that your whole body will sprout thick, curly hair, and your Adam’s Apple swells to the size of an Adam’s Watermelon.