English Dub Review: Full Metal Panic Invisible Victory “One-Man Force”

Kill Kurama Vol. 8

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Sosuke lies in wait as Kurama holds Nami and gunpoint and starts a countdown. Saving her will take everything Sosuke’s got, and a man of Kurama’s skills isn’t just going to let her g-

OR JUST KILL HER I GUESS. OH YEAH, AND SHOW IT TO US AGAIN TWO SECONDS LATER IN CASE WE FORGOT. YES, GO AHEAD AND EMPTY THE CLIP PLEASE.

GOD DAMN. So, um…yeah, Nami’s dead, and Kurama admits he did it just to piss Sosuke off, going on to say he’ll be doing the same to Kaname very soon since he knows where he’s being hidden. Before Sosuke can absorb all of this, Lemon’s group intervenes, killing most of the goons there while the police chief and Kurama escape. Sosuke deduces Lemon works for the Directorate-General for External Security, who want Kurama alive, but Sosuke wants him dead. Nami’s team (no, I didn’t learn their names, shut up) help him fix up the Savage, but leave to let him get killed.

Kurama and the chief gather up the other mech fighters to ambush Sosuke under the guise of stopping a rampaging drug addict terrorist, although honestly, these guys don’t seem like they need the moral justification. Not that it helps either way, as Sosuke plows through them in a blaze of action hero glory, though at the cost of completely wrecking his Savage. Man, two mechs totaled within five episodes? Dude’s insurance is going to be radioactive.

Sosuke goes to confront Kurama in a firefight, which leads them throughout the stadium, but Kurama eventually lands a mortal blow. Luckily, Sosuke manages to use this to his advantage and trick him into being gunned down. Kurama’s able to give some possible locations Kaname may be at, but dies before he can say anything else. Soon enough, Sosuke passes out from his injuries, thinking of Kaname.

In an unknown location, Wraith meets with an associate with salvaged Mithril equipment, while the associate brings a truck carrying an incomplete Arm Slave. While it doesn’t have an official name, he guesses what it’s designated number might be: The ARX-8.

OUR TAKE

While I hope Kurama enjoys the next eternity burning in hell for everything he’s done, I will miss him as the excellent villain he was. In addition to being a total snarkmaster, I appreciated his direct and frank approach to his ruthlessness, compared to the total hams of varying threat levels we had in the previous two main villains. His gears were always turning, allowing him to get the drop on many of his targets, cementing as a real force to be reckoned. And even though we never got much in the way of a backstory or motivations, there were small quirks about him that managed to flesh out his character beyond badass bad guy, such as his recent quitting of smoking or his matter of fact way of stating his goals and thought process. It kind of gave the sense that he was actually not super pleased with the fact that he’s clearly the antagonist, but he knew he was good at it, so obviously he’s going to do what he does best. I’m kinda disappointed he didn’t get his own mech to fight Sosuke with, but the fact he’s made it this far without needing one really sets him apart from every other villain in this show. Obviously, he miscalculated in the end, but I guess he had to go out sometime. I was really expecting him to last until the end of the season, and yet I couldn’t imagine a better way for him to die.

The fights are definitely up to par with last week if not more so, as Sosuke tears up the Namsac city streets and very nearly makes up for how boring all of the stadium fights were, and actually puts a lot of recent action movies to shame, even though that’s probably because all action scenes can be exponentially made better with more giant robots. Even the final showdown with Kurama is brief but nail-biting if a bit schmaltzy at the end. For all the anime getting live-action adaptations, it still stumps me that Full Metal Panic has never been floated around.

But unfortunately, while this episode was very good or even great, it brings itself down with the senseless loss of Nami. Again, I know that adding another girl to Sosuke’s harem would be redundant, but then why introduce someone as useful as her? Why the hinting at her possibly being a Whispered? Wouldn’t that have at least gotten Kurama to NOT kill her? The high and rapid energy of this episode came pretty much entirely from Sosuke’s drive to kill Kurama for killing her, but there had to be another way. The only thing this death served was motivating Sosuke to take action when she could’ve become so much more, and the loss of that potential for such a cheap reason is a giant mark against an otherwise exceptional twenty minutes of television. I guess if they had given it to us last week, we could subtract from that score, but it’s here now.

Still, as much as Nami’s death soured things, it’s not nearly as bad as next week. But you may be in luck if you bash your head and lose your memories of the last four episodes because it’s time for…

ANOTHER

GOD DAMN

RECAP EPISOOOOOOOODE.