English Dub Review: Assassin’s Pride “Mercy of an Assassin,” “When The Girl’s World Changes,” “Going Beyond the Limit”

 

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Assassin Kufa’s next assignment is to end the life of a girl believed to be the bastard child of a noble family. When he gets there, his interactions with her alter the course of his mission.

Our Take

The first episode opens up with a fantastic battle sequence. The action and movement of the characters are quick and deliberate, giving an air of finesse. What’s even better is how the visual effects are tied to the action. All of the attacks are swathed in magical energy, leaving vibrant lines of motion behind them. As the battle heats up, these lines of motion are generated faster, catching up to the motions that created them and eventually become the motion themselves. This further sells the high-speed pace of the battles. Though the movements themselves become duller and less polished after the first episode, the effects are still done well.

Another cool visual touch is that when the characters use magic, the color of their outlines changes from black to whatever color their magic is associated with. This isn’t super innovative, but it fits right in and it looks pretty sick. The attention to detail overall is fairly high.

The setting is also visually pleasing. How the city looks like an ominous candelabra in the darkness of the rest of the world is an interesting concept. And all of the setpieces and monsters portray a medieval Halloween town that’s fun to look at. 

Unfortunately, that’s all the good I can say so far. The show wastes all of those cool things on a subpar narrative. 

Right after we see Kufa murder a bunch of people, we see him get off a train and be polite to everyone he walks by. This cordial gentlemanly behavior is a good contrast to the coldblooded assassin and gives a little touch of depth to him. However, that’s all of the depth we get. What follows is mostly akin to melodrama.

Melida is basically a Mary Sue character. She’s the unfortunate scion, a bastard child of a noble who is the only girl at the magic academy that can’t use mana. And then Kufa shows up and gives her some of his powers and now she’s the queen of the world. 

I’d expound more on her character, but the paragraph above is truly the entirety of it. It’s one thing to be a Mary Sue, but even some Mary Sues get decent character development. The first time she’s in trouble, she starts blatantly screaming out how unfortunate she is, basically waiting for Kufa to show up and save the day. He does so and then takes her under his wing. 

Let’s even cut a little slack here; this is how a lot of weak protagonists turned strong protagonist stories start. Now that Melida can use magic for the first time in her life, she has to learn the basics and get better. This is where a training segment would begin, even a montage at best. 

However, there is absolutely none of that. We never see them talk about magic after that and we jump straight into a tournament a week later. In the tournament battle, Melida walks right up to the girl who bullied and abused her for having no magical talent and starts a fight. After only a week of being able to use magic she executes everything perfectly, the bully gets stomped and shown up, and it’s a big cathartic moment for Melida. 

This is the basic outline of the second episode, and it gets copy/pasted onto the third episode. Melida gets trapped in a museum full of monsters with no weapons and magic to use.  She miraculously MacGyvers her way out of it with the skills Kufa taught her in only two days, which we never even see. 

Zero character development, little expository dialogue, just moving from one emotional character moment to the next without a care in the world. Thus far, this is a plot with a lot of big beats and nothing to support them. And to boot, after just about what seems to be a month together, Melida decides that she just wants to be with Kufa forever. We have a Shakespearean love at first sight moment, but the characters in question have had relatively little screen time together. 

The plot with Melida and Kufa wears very thin very quickly. Quite frankly the side characters, Elise, Rosetti, even the bully Nerva, are more compelling to watch. They have had just about as much development as the main characters have, and yet somehow their characters come off as even just slightly more complex. This is probably because when we do see them we see more of their actual character traits, and not a bunch of old romantic tropes scaffolding them. 

Visually this show and setting are fun to watch, which is a shame because the people living in it are very boring. The show’s probably going to introduce more characters before the action picks up again. Here’s hoping they put more effort into it.