English Dub Review: Ensemble Stars “Judgement”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

People are buzzing around the school due to the return of Leo Tsukinaga, the leader of Knights. He is a genius composer who designed all the music for Knights, which was one of the original “three powers” of the school. However, due to the events of the DDD and Tsukinaga’s behavior, the group nearly disbanded, causing Tsukinaga to walk away from it. At long last, though, their hiatus has ended — and with the return of their leader, the group performs (along with “Mama” of MaM) in front of the school. Yet this performance is full of too many errors in Tsukinaga’s opinion, and he criticizes them all, telling Tsukasa specifically that he’s holding the rest of the group back. Tsukinaga challenges the rest of the group to a duel: if he wins, then Knights must disband as part of an “internal purge.” Tsukinaga forms a temporary group called “Knight Killers,” which features Kiryu of AKATSUKI, Nazuna of Ra*bits, and even Eichi of fine.

As each of the teams go up against each other in a stage battle, the rest of Knights comforts Tsukasa before they go onstage. Finally, when Tsukasa goes against Tsukinaga, they speak aloud to each other onstage. Tsukinaga apologizes for his past behavior and reflects on his actions as a leader, confessing his guilt for leaving them. He states that Knights has proved they’re still the stellar group they’ve always been.

Our Take

What was the point of all that?

Tsukinaga comes in after ruling from afar, and tries to control Knights even more? What is he, Great Britain? Anyway, it wasn’t even just about the fact that he’s been absent. It’s the fact that the first thing he does upon his return is try to disband his own group. It seems as though he feels no sentimental value toward anyone in the group, so it seems that the Knights members have sort of an unquestioning loyalty to him despite this…much like actual knights serving a king. While fitting, his songs don’t even seem to be as great as any other group’s, so what’s stopping them from throwing a coup?

The other weird thing in this episode is the audience. Rather, this is a consistent motif throughout the past few episodes. There seems to be little to no audio of the audience’s reaction to things happening onstage, whether the groups are performing or not. For instance, there’s no audio when Tsukinaga is announcing Judgement Day. There’s also no reactions to Tsukinaga and Tsukasa’s emotionally charged exchange.

Come to think of it, it’s hard to tell when exactly the performers are interacting aloud, or if it’s all just inner-monologuing. This was an issue in last episode, when the performers seemed to be having entire conversations, aloud, in the middle of their performance, but nothing was thought about it. There was also nothing to indicate that it was aloud in the first place. Tsukinaga and Tsukasa’s exchange in this episode at least had a microphone echo added to their words so that viewers knew it was happening in real time.

Hopefully, their final duel won’t be as confusing.