English Dub Review: Assassin’s Pride, “No Guidance Above nor Below,” “The Last Testament of a Certain Skeleton,” “An Eternal Pact”

 

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Rosetti ropes Kufa into pretending to be her fiancee to deceive her father. Along with Melida, they all go on a field trip to Rosetti’s hometown, which soon goes south. 

Our Take

These three episodes encompass a somewhat exciting field trip.

Right off the bat, before the trip begins, Rosetti approaches Kufa to act as her fiancee to appease her father who wants her to marry somebody else. Melida, despite the fact that this is merely a ruse, is still very upset about another woman taking Kufa. 

The field trip itself is to Rosetti’s hometown, with Rosetti’s father, Marquis Prickett, as the tour guide.  The trip quickly goes from a standard outing to a sordid affair. Some students and many townsfolk are attacked across several days, including some innocent orphans. The Marquis takes it upon himself to solve this mystery, revealing that the culprit has blue mana. This, along with the bite marks on the victims’ necks, clearly points to the half-vampire Kufa as the perpetrator. Melida is quick to start trying to clear Kufa’s name when she is accosted by a mysterious voice that seems to know about these incidents before they happen.

What we have here is a mostly standard murder mystery in a creepy village. This would be fine if most of the secrets that are trying to be kept weren’t incredibly obvious.

From the moment the class enters the village, you can instantly tell the Marquis is very suspicious. When a man is suffering in pain from a disease, he is quick to kill him mercifully in front of the class and shoo them away from the scene. His constant haste and attempts to throw incidents under the rug are clearly not the actions of an innocent man. 

Also, amidst Melida’s investigation, she discovers “mystery spots” that the Marquis has forbidden the villagers from approaching. These are also obvious red flags, and fortunately, Melida immediately intuits this as well. Within one of these spots, she discovers several dead townsfolk, killed as the result of experiments trying to turn them into lycanthropes. 

From here, events become a little convoluted. Rosetti is attacked next and appears to be dead. Shortly after, she comes back to life as a vampire and attacks Melida under the thrall of the mysterious lycanthrope that has been haunting Melida’s thoughts. 

It is then revealed that Rosetti had been a vampire all along because Kufa had turned her into one when she was a child to save her life. But she never knew she was a vampire because Kufa wiped her memories. Apparently, if you don’t remember turning into a vampire you won’t have to drink blood or anything like that, which is remarkably convenient. 

Kufa turns into a vampire himself steps in to save Melida from Rosetti. He then proceeds to wipe Melida’s memories so that she can forget he ever was a vampire. However, Melida stops him because she doesn’t want to forget anything about him and will accept him for who he is. This is supposed to be an intimate moment between them, as it’s even sealed with a kiss. But once again, the chemistry is lackluster because the two of them barely have any screen time together. It feels like Melida is just horribly infatuated with Kufa and he is simply going along with it. 

Everyone eventually gets on the same page and they all team up to stop the Marquis and Nakua, the mysterious spider lycanthrope who has been the cause of all this death. Nakua is killed, the Marquis surrenders himself to atone for his crimes and all’s well that ends well. Except perhaps for the fact that Kufa wipes Rosetti’s memories of being a vampire once again, meaning Kufa and Melida are the only ones who know the truth about all this. Because of that, in the end, it’s actually more like this entire thing never even happened. 

Unlike the previous episodes of this anime, these episodes ended up being somewhat competent. There’s a lot of exposition and backstory contained within this arc which is told very judiciously and doesn’t bog down the pace of the story. We learned a lot more about Rosetti, who we knew very little about until now. It turns out she and Kufa were adopted siblings in the Marquis’ orphanage, so a relationship between the two of them is firmly established, even if Rosetti never remembers it. Furthermore, this means we also learned a little more about Kufa himself. He was as equitable and straightforward a person as a little boy too, though we still don’t know quite how he ended up this way.  Though there’s still an air of delusional grandeur around the underworld of lycanthropes, what we learned here has demystified them a little bit. 

Our intrepid heroine, Melida, has shaped up a bit as well. Though her origins and motivations may still be shaky, seeing her in action and taking the initiative speaks well of her. There several moments where a lesser heroine would’ve gotten tripped up by all of the macabre, but she didn’t back away from any of it. 

On the whole, while this arc was full of cliches and missteps, it’s still an improvement from before. Actual care and effort are being put in establishing and developing the characters. However, it’s too little too late at this point and Melida received none of it. This next step will be the last and hopefully, it will be another step upward.