English Dub Review: Dies irae “Emanation Level”

My impatience is reaching high emanation levels, I tell ya what…

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kraft recalls a conversation with Heydrich regarding the four levels and how the highest, Emanation, removes the limitations of the lower three and brings one closest to being God, or even a replacement for the current God. In the present, Kraft thinks about his potential successor, Marie.

Ren tucks in the unconscious Kasumi and takes a walk with Valerian, who fills him in on the craziness he didn’t know about. Among that is the fact that Lisa once worked in a eugenics program that tried mutating children into superweapons, and so she wished to bring back the children that died. Also that her son Isaak’s soul fused with Heydrich, and he’s Rea’s grandfather, and Heydrich needs another like him to pull of in Japan what they couldn’t in Berlin, which will probably be Rea. So, it would be easiest to kill her to prevent this, but obviously, Ren’s not going to do that, so they’ll need some help from Kei to stop all of this.

Kei herself awakens from a sweet dream and runs into Shirou as Ren and Valerian arrive. They try beginning to negotiate, but Lisa’s command on Tubal Cain to attack him kicks in again until Kei calls out to him, revealing he’s her brother Kai, as well as the fact that Valerian himself is the “grail” needed to complete the swastika (my mind is melting trying to type this out). With things somewhat calmed down Valerian plans for the four of them to defeat the remaining battalion leaders and teach Ren Emanation magic, which knocks him out for some reason.

Ren wakes up in Marie’s world, where the two talks about their insecurities and how much meeting each other has changed them both so much, so they’ll break the cycle of Eternal Recurrence and make up for their mistakes from before.

OUR TAKE

Catching up with the last “season” of this was a TRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP. Not only were there SO many erroneous and nonsensical characters and concepts to try to understand (not that understanding them was made any easier by all the horrible German accents half the cast insists on having), they were served up on some of the most textbook and standard Visual Novel clichés of the past decade. But here we are, with the last six episodes of this Kickstarter funded adaptation. Japan got all of these at once in July, but I guess Funimation is giving them to us one at a time. How nice of them…

Though credit where it’s due, this certainly does feel like the beginning of a new season. The previous episode was more of the anime jambalaya I had come to know and completely tune out, but this at least has characters coming together and reflecting on previous developments before heading out into the final battle. This was very light on action compared to the last few, mainly to reacquaint us with the concepts, themes, and plot-relevant details necessary to put together once the ball gets rolling (maybe) next week. Ren’s gotta learn the last level of magic, Kraft wants Marie to take over the whole God business for him, and Heydrich is just insane in the membrane, as are the rest of these magic Nazis who I cannot recall any names for if I had a GUN TO MY HEAD. Though I guess I’ll be learning them pretty quick if we have five more weeks of this to go.

I suppose I should mention the new details we got from this episode specifically, though so much of it is thrown at us in laundry heap of exposition that you really have to strain yourself for ANY of it to really register. The lone exception to this is the reveal that Tubal Cain is actually Kei’s brother Kai, who I guess became this way after his girlfriend died. You know, it’s not that I don’t appreciate giving a villain group their own fleshed out backstories and motivations (in fact, I encourage it whenever possible), and I am almost entirely certain this is 500% more interesting in the Visual Novel, but the version we are given here is just such a waste of resources that this has only added to my confusion and apathy. Maybe if this had been a 24-26 episode series, we would have more room for every character to get the spotlight and make this feel like an ensemble instead of a rainbow pile-up of anime tropes