English Dub Season Review: Plunderer Season One

Overview (Spoilers Below):

In Alcia, everyone has a number engraved on their body called a “count”. This count determines a persons’s social status and power, and if it reaches zero, the person is sent to the Abyss. A traveller named Hina does her best to live in this world.

Before she died, Hina’s mother gave her something precious: an original ballot. This ballot has the potential power to change the entire world, but Hina can’t use it alone. She has to find a legendary Ace, one of the guardians of Alcia and protectors of the world. But everything is not what it seems, and Hina can’t trust just anyone.

She finds Licht Bacht, a famed Ace who almost single handedly won the Waste War and brought the floating country of Alcia into being. Nana joins them as well, along with a number of new friends along the way. Together, the group journeys to find the truth about their world and the Aces. They fight helicopters, travel back in time, and gain new powers. But in the end, it comes down to Licht accepting his own past and Hina’s future affections.

Our Take:

Plunderer is pretty much exactly what I think of when someone says the word “anime”. For me, that’s not necessarily a good thing. Filled with magical battles and inexplicable plot lines, this is the type of series made for entertainment, not critical thinking. There are hints of deeper emotional storylines throughout, but for the most part, the anime adaptation of Plunderer plays it safe by being more bewildering than thought provoking.

The main character of the series is arguably Licht Bacht. Aka Rihito, aka Mr. Pudding, aka the Legendary Ace, general of the army that does not kill. He’s an entitled asshole who treats his female comrades like playthings and is utterly overconfident. So of course, everyone loves him and thinks he’s a lovable rascal in the world of Plunderer. Luckily, most of the other characters are much less dumb.

Highlights include Hina, the orphan girl who slowly grows her confidence over the course of the show, Jail, the straight laced rule enforcer who starts out an enemy and ends up a friend, and Nana, the crazy party girl who hides a more tragic life underneath it all. On the whole, they’re an enjoyable bunch of characters to watch when they’re not being used for excessive fan service and exposition spouting narrators.

The plot is wacky but somehow pretty bland at the same time? There are some interesting ideas contained within it, like the PTSD that Licht ends up suffering on behalf of his friends, or the way that Nana takes to heavy drinking because of her experiences as an Ace. But for the most part, Plunderer is content to roll around in the usual splattering of anime tropes involving time travel, high school, and going to the beach for a fun class trip. Toward the end, it does have something to say about wealth and social inequality, but it never quite finishes the thought before wrapping the show up in a way that doesn’t settle much in the grand scheme of things.

In the end, Plunderer is a series that never amounted to more than an average adventure show. There’s some good stuff here, especially for fans of the genre, but this is not going to be a show that wins any awards for taking risks. And it was overly long, too, barely doing the minimum to wrap up its plot points despite being 24 episodes long. And trust me, you probably don’t want to sit through all 24 of those.