English Dub Review: Black Clover “Temple Battle Royale”

What are we doing here, again?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The Black Bulls find themselves in a water temple “Battle Royal”, where they face off against a series of aquatic-creature-faced mages. In rare form, the Black Bulls dispatch them with ease and proceed one by one further into the temple while the old man and Yami watch them through some magic TV screens.

The Black Bulls win victory after victory until Asta and Noelle come across a couple of familiar faces in their way. While the two of them take on some tough opponents, some new challengers arrive to interrupt the fight Luck and Magna is having. It’s none other than the Eye of the Midnight Sun, here to join the party and bring their pain to town.

Our Take:

Another week rolls by and another episode of Black Clover arrives to darken my door. Following last week, we get an episode that is negligibly better than the shenanigans we were forced to endure last time. This episode drags on and on, goes almost nowhere and fails to capture tension at every one of its failed opportunities for success.

The main focus of this episode is the many small battles that the Black bulls go through in this underwater crucible. Of course, all this does is reduce potentially interesting fights into minuscule and boring ones. The Black Bulls plow through their foes without any real difficulty. While I’ve seen this sort of thing happen in other anime to cool effect, in Black Clover it just feels like filler, because there’s been no buildup to our characters having actually become stronger, save for Asta.

The battle between Asta and his opponent halfway through the episode could not be more forced. Gotta love it when a fighter is introduced with a two-minute long exposition sequence about how important dreams are to him. It’s almost as if the show is trying to force a conflict that isn’t really necessary in order to create some fake drama.

The same problem is in Noelle’s fight, too. The reasons for these two fighting each other feel arbitrary and just pointless. In fact, this whole random “Battle Royale” arc feels like a straight up filler. It’s not like I’m even involved in the main plot of Black Clover anyways, but the breakneck speed at which the show introduces these weird side arcs makes these episodes just terrible. These things are very clearly made for quantity over quality, to pump out as many episodes of this wretched show as possible to maximize its profit before it eventually gets canceled and forgotten. This would explain why Black Clover keeps churning out episodes every week nonstop, while other shounen anime take breaks in-between seasons to make episodes of higher quality. The showrunners want to establish consistent viewership even if the show sucks by putting out more episodes than their competition.

It’s a decent business strategy, I guess, but it’s downright horrible, just like this episode. The fights are boring, the animation is ugly, the writing is stupid and ineffectual, the list just goes on and on and on. Avoid this episode at all costs.