English Dub Review: AZUR LANE “ECHOES – Crimson Memories, Bleached”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Enterprise keeps having nightmares and struggling with her inner demons while the rest of Azur Lane tries to figure out the Black Mental Cube. Meanwhile, Nagato decides it is best to seal away Project Orochi, despite Kaga’s protests. Kaga dreams that Akagi is reunited with Amagi, and she realizes she will never have the relationship they had. Despite this, she vows to carry out Akagi’s wishes. It’s also revealed that the Black Mental Cube can create “anything,” and can even bring back the dead.

Orochi speaks to Enterprise in her nightmares, and Belfast continues to try to calm her. Suddenly, a siren infiltrates the base and steals the Black Mental Cube. Kaga then activates Orochi to bend to her will, betraying the Sakura Empire’s orders in order to get Akagi back.

Our Take

Do they make it purposefully difficult to understand what’s going on? Is this all just a sick game in the writers’ room? “Let’s just throw some more convoluted sh*t in there, that’ll get people interested.” How on earth was a siren able to infiltrate Azur Lane? They had tons of members keeping watch on the Black Mental Cube specifically because it was acting strange. In addition to that, this seems to be the first time we’ve actually seen a siren up and active (aside from Orochi.) We still know barely anything about their motivations or their origins. It’s understandable that all the ship-girl factions look like humans since they were designed by humans, but why do the sirens look like humans? What is the reasoning? It all just seems like they’re bending backwards to make more humanized sex robots.

The voice acting in this episode seemed a little weaker than usual. Orochi’s first appearance in Enterprise’s dreams seemed to take on a very “mature” voice for the character drawn. Granted, Orochi can take any form, but it never seemed to fit the face. This is probably due to the fact that anime has a huge thing for drawing extremely young faces on supposedly “mature” characters, but at this point, that’s just one of the show’s many flaws.

On another note, Belfast and Enterprise keep being framed as “a thing” — one of the girls even refers to their fights as a “lovers’ quarrel.” This is probably just more queer baiting, but if they actually went ahead and let the ship sail (ha ha ha) it would be better than other romances they teased — like, the sister ships, for example. Eugh. The bar is low.