English Dub Review: Lord of Vermillion: The Crimson King “Today’s Dark Destiny Will Hang Over the Future”

How melodramatic can a title get?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

After fighting against the forces of Chaos, the Lineage Heroes meet to discuss their next move and grapple with the reality of what they have to do to save the future. They reaffirm that they must destroy Tokyo to save the future.

Meanwhile, Chihiro struggles with his past, realizing that his mother is responsible in no small part for what’s been going on in Tokyo. Our hero withdraws into himself, lost and concerned about his role in all this and what he’s going to do.

Our Take:

So now we really get into the meat of what this series is, and, from what I can tell, it seems to be dragging the bottom of the barrel in terms of originality. Now that we’ve got our cast more or less assembled, our plots seem to consist of facing a monster with our crew of magical teenagers, while the spooky sunglasses wearing villains try to do dastardly deeds.

Considering that the Lord of Vermillion game doesn’t have a whole lot going on in terms of story, this is a pretty typical expectation from a show like this. It’s more about animating the special powers and matching fan expectation of the game (Which, of course, I haven’t played) than it is about telling a good story. I’m not really down with that, but what are you going to do; the anime industry is a hot mess and shows like this are built into the very walls of the seasonal anime structure.

As things go on, this show is getting harder and harder to follow, and that’s not a good sign when we’re still this early into things. Character motivations are murky, especially with Chihiro, a character who I barely understand. In fact, that lack of understanding goes for a lot of characters in this show; not only are they not terribly interesting, but I also don’t even know who they really are. There’s a severe lack of character development that’s hampering every attempt at story Lord of Vermillion tries to make. Perhaps the showrunners are following the idea that the characters should be as bland as possible so the viewer can project themselves onto the cast easier, like a silent protagonist in a video game. That might be the case, but it doesn’t make this show any easier to watch.

By the way, these character designs are just downright goofy; the bloody armaments that adorn the characters are so static and unmoving that they look like plastic cosplay props glued onto their skin. Furthermore, some of them function as headbands or sunglasses and look extremely silly. It’s kind of hard to keep tension in an episode of an anime when your characters all look like amateur cosplayers.

Nothing special to report this week, no major changes in the story or direction to note. The only thing to say is that this show is quickly compounded into itself in a death spiral of awkward failure. I don’t imagine anything will come of it, and when it is done it will be soon forgotten to the annals of time.