English Dub Review: Hatena Illusion Episode 12

Overview:

Hatena comes to save Makoto.

Our Take:

So this is where the budget from the last episode went!

This episode had the same problem as last episode: introducing villains last-minute doesn’t really help the flow of the story, at all. I still stand by the fact that the fight against Erica (a villain we do not know and were introduced to last-minute) was a bad idea for the penultimate episode, and an even worse idea to have that conflict come into the final episode, and now we’re introduced to the true culprit behind the mother’s vanishing… someone we never knew before. It turns out that the grandmother was behind the whole thing, and she violently attacks both Makoto and Hatena.

Everyone shows up to fight her, and it seems that she is bitter because of a choice that Hatena’s father, her son-in-law made. It would be nice if this grand reunion actually had some stakes, or some significance to it. It’s nice that the kids get their mother back, I suppose. It would have been truly good if there was an emotional weight to things, though. Even though Hatena and the kids get their happy ending, it didn’t really feel earned? It didn’t seem as if anyone really grew over the course of the last few episodes.

If we knew why the grandmother was keeping the mom hostage– if we knew basic things like what the source of the conflict is, what is the grandmother’s goal, what are her feelings towards her grandchildren, what did she need the artifacts for (including an extremely powerful one that can neutralize other artifacts), that would have made things at least passable. Except we didn’t get any of that, except for some flashy fight scenes, and fight scenes don’t make up for the severe lack of story. At the very least, this finale had to be set up across several episodes, and having individual heists doesn’t count as setup. The main antagonist has to be set up, and we didn’t even have that.

If you construct your story so poorly that the final episode is not only rushed, but has little weight, you get this final episode. By the end, I didn’t really feel anything, just mostly glad it was over. While not terrible by any means, this show remained consistently mediocre, and “alright, I guess,” is never a good sentiment to finish a series on.