English Dub Season Review: Million Arthur Season Two

 

Remember how everyone’s been wanting more video game shows? Well, neither do we. Million Arthur is a fantasy anime based on the Million Arthur game series by Square Enix — first established in 2012. While the success of the free-to-play online card game spurred a VR game, arcade game, and MMORPG, the translation from game to anime wasn’t guaranteed to be successful — much like all video game based shows.

Million Arthur follows Dancho, Tekken, Renkin, Kakka, Yamaneko, and Ruro (all characters featured in the MMORPG) and their quest to defeat those who have managed to take the legendary power of Excalibur for their own agendas. In order to stop these individuals from changing the world, the gang must time travel in order to face off with these foes and make sure history stays on track.

While the MMORPG was relatively successful, could the same be said for the anime? Should video games just stay video games? Did this really need a second season?

Let’s review.

Animation/Art Style

Nearly every single female character in this show has titties that theoretically should have broken their spines upon being drawn to live. Dancho, in particular, is hard to look at because of this, but it could explain why her brain doesn’t work. 90% of her blood circulation is being sucked away from her brain, in favor of — what scholars may refer to as — her honkin’ huge bodonkers.

Aside from the visual hyper-sexualization of nearly all the female characters, the animation quality itself feels cheap. There’s nothing noteworthy — it’s just characters flapping their mouths. There’s never a notably high frame rate — the most work put in appears to be during the fight scenes, which are repetitive in the first place.

In every area where it matters, it’s just generic and/or trashy.

Plot

Season 2 places a lot of focus on Pharsalia as a threat, Dancho as a leader, and, of course, defeating the other Arthurs. When it comes to anime shows that are basically “collect-a-thons,” things can get extremely monotonous and repetitive if handled incorrectly. A perfect example of a “collect-a-thon” anime would be Pokemon; it’s a show where nearly every other episode is designated toward defeating/catching a new Pokemon (with the exception of things like tournament arcs, of course.) Dancho and the crew try in nearly every episode to defeat an Arthur and rid them of their Excalibur. We’re met with a variety of villains — from those who are dealt with in a pacifistic way (such as the Chef Arthur) and those who must be fought. In most episodes, though, the formula is the same. The gang goes somewhere + the gang notices bad things + the gang finds an Arthur = The Gang Faces Off with the Arthur. The episode that stands out the most would have to be “Altered History,” where things are less about the Arthur and more about ethics (something the show doesn’t seem to care very much about, considering the protagonist is a rapist.)

Even the episodes that begin to feature Fairy Combine are formulaic and predictable. There are no “gotcha” moments in this show, and it’s hard to care about anything when the characters are so stale in the first place. The show constantly ruins any semblance of plot it has to offer by adding sexual scenes that are always weird and never funny. As a wise critic once said about Kingdom Hearts 3, the real story being told here is nothing more than “anime characters hitting each other.” Kinda seems like Square Enix just has a thing for that, doesn’t it?

Characters

As stated, Dancho is a sexual predator and it’s played up for laughs. She’s a joke of a leader and the show highlights this with the other characters constantly berating her as such, even though they continue to follow her mindlessly and nothing is ever really done about her incompetence (despite the first episodes being all about Dancho’s inability to lead and garner respect from her allies.)

Renkin is the only character who would be a suitable leader — in fact, it seems like the cast follows her orders more nobly than Dancho’s. She’s the only one who can most accurately analyze a situation, and she’s always the sensible one when it comes to planning and battle tactics. She isn’t simply the best leader — she’s the best character on the show. Kakka takes second place with his ethical struggles. It’s pretty weird how the children characters are the ones who seem to be the more logical and tactile ones.

Rurou and Yama got some lore this season, but otherwise, they didn’t really have too many notable moments. Yama basically just served as tsundere eye-candy for Dancho, while Rurou played the Dad role for everyone.

The fairies are a lot like Pokemon: there’s some personality there, but if we took their ability to speak away and only gave them Pokemon sounds to make, we’d still be able to distinguish their characters. They’re very one-note and exist solely to serve their masters.

Speaking of fairies, we haven’t even covered Pharsalia — who, undoubtedly, seems to be the most tonally confused character in the series. Majorly, she appears to be a force of chaos, who plays by her own rules and leaves the fate of history to decide for herself — but at the same time, she winds up condemning the gang for being too powerful. There’s a weird sense of hypocrisy because she herself changed history in “Altered History” — yet she feels threatened by what others might do? She was better as a trickster, not a robotic time cop.

Sound Design

The OP/ending themes are generic and skippable — which, would normally be something to complain about, however, generic music for a generic show seems rather fitting, at the very least.

Voice-acting wise, there really weren’t any special performances, either. It’s hard to tell if this was because of the stale dialogue, or just how bad the show is in general — in any case, those factors didn’t help any VA shine. Everything from toe-to-tip was (once again) generic. It’d be easy to harp on Renkin’s childlike voice, but it’s actually deserving of some praise. (They finally gave a baby voice to a child character and not an adult woman! Hooray! The bar cannot possibly be any lower!)

Did it do its genre justice?

Do video game based shows have any justice?

It seems that Million Arthur’s fate was sealed at conception — nothing more than a cheap cash grab, meant to attract fans of the game series and nothing more. Despite its heritage as a video game anime, though, it did have the potential to be decent — it just managed to do every horrible anime-related trope in the book.

Million Arthur is incoherent and bland, with a dash of sexism and sexual assault jokes, all mixed into one entree that’s hard to swallow. It would be one thing if this show was laughably bad because then there’s at least a comedy factor to enjoy. Instead, it’s repetitive, predictable, and generic — which is the worst kind of bad to be, because there’s no fun to be had at all.