English Dub Review: Tokyo Ghoul Re “FACE: Effulgence”

Terror grips the CCG.

Overview:

Everyone left behind at the CCG copes with Haise’s loss.

Our Take:

The Clowns (see: Furuta) hatch a major plan: to mobilize a terrorist attack on the CCG. They do succeed in this respect, dispatching suicide bombers to each ward to cause massive chaos. They don’t really have as much of a goal as much as they want to cause massive panic, and most importantly, draw the CCG away from their main headquarters. Apparently, they had done this before in the past, but things have changed: Arima is dead now. The tide is turned in the ghoul’s favor and truthfully incredibly so since we the audience know Furuta’s true nature.

It turns out there’s something even more sinister at play, with half the clowns not even being deliberately harmful: they’re humans who have had their mouths stitched shut, and are being coerced into being suicide bombers. Not only does this impart guilt onto the CCG members, but it also is a PR disaster, and gives Furuta more of an incentive to have the CCG more extreme.

Urie also gets his moment, where we see that all his time berated his father was because his father died in battle, and him never coming home is why Urie internalized his disdain for his father over time. By surviving, he will surpass his father, and not be a failure by his own standards. However, after being beaten up by Priest, he snaps. Urie so far has been absolutely intent on piling more and more responsibilities upon himself to look great and come out on top, but now we see he’s not entirely satisfied with that. He wants praise, he wants to be comforted and assured by a parental figure- and his most recent parental figure who is Kaneki/Haise, has abandoned him. As someone who keeps his emotions suppressed, this explodes in the most violent manner possible.

The experience watching this was more tolerable this time, but the ever-present action sequences are still something this animation team doesn’t seem to be too good at. The still shots are fine, but I believe that an episode largely composed of still shots would be much better than them trying to animate action sequences. They’re no Studio Deen, so this could largely be because of animation crunch that plagues the industry, but it’s still a major detractor. I want to see Suzuya actually looking cool instead of just… what we get.