English Dub Review: Golden Kamuy “Complication”

Hunting people.

Overview: 

The wolf hunt comes to a conclusion.

Our Take:

The clash with Nihei finishes, and he dies a hunter until the end. He wasn’t hunting for the money, and he wasn’t hunting for the sense of violence, either. He has very specific views of how he interacts with nature, and finds the thrill of the hunt to be the most appealing. Of course, why he wants to hunt Retar is still selfish: the wants to be the last hunter to hunt down a Hokkaido wolf. However, he isn’t interested in the reward, and is just fulfilling his role as a hunter and gambles down to the last second. It’s a clash of man vs. nature, and in the end, nature wins out.

Retar is shown to have survived out there– found a mate and made a family. What called him back to the wild for good was his mate, and not just because he abandoned Asirpa. While the manga leaves this off with a bittersweet note, that the Hokkaido wolves do end up going extinct regardless, this leaves off on a happy ending.

Tanigaki ends up being somewhat of an ally. Asirpa ends up taking pity on him after he was stabbed with a wolfsbane arrow, and wants him to heal up. She could have easily just let him die, but she’s kind under her capabilities. Tanigaki ends up going back with them to Asirpa’s village and ends up giving them information about the Seventh Division.

Despite being really out there, Tsurumi does have noble intentions. He and his men received no recognition or compensation after the war and were merely left to be forgotten. Abandoned by the government that they fought for, he wants to use the gold to make his own country for his men, so they can finally get the peace that they deserve. At the same time, he’s clearly a ruthless antagonist, but his intentions are honorable. The fact that the gold is enough to compensate an entire division already raises the stakes even more.

It’s a few episodes in now, and it seems to be strangely formatted, in a way. Instead of an arc or a storyline being contained into one episode, it spans more like an episode and a half. Sometimes it’s half and half between episodes. That makes the pacing a little off- we leave off on one episode in the middle and continue onto the next one to leave that one off halfway through. This is likely done to pace the episodes properly, but it’s still a little jarring overall.