English Dub Review: Beast Tamer “Comrades”

Overview:

Rein returns to the Adventurers Guild with Kanade in hand, ecstatic to receive his Adventurers license. When caught in a fight with another rowdy adventurer, Rein manages to effortlessly knock him out with a single blow. Curious at his newfound strength, he begins to discover the true ramifications behind his contract with Kanade.

Our take:

Remember that thing about Rein being worthless in combat? That thing that the first episode repeated nonstop? Well, that goes out the window in this episode, even faster than I expected. One of the rules of being a beast tamer is that, upon taming a spirit like Kanade, Rein will also copy their powers for himself. Kanade has super strength and agility, so now Rein has them too. I find this to be supremely disappointing and anticlimactic and it completely goes against what I expected this show’s overall arc to be.

I was expecting the point of this series to be that, since Rein is useless in combat, he’d have to use his brains and creative use of his tamer powers to get out of sticky situations. And as the series would go on (and as his harem would grow) he would slowly build up his strength and skills to become a true legendary hero in his own right. I wanted this show to have the wimpy protagonist with low self-esteem eventually manage to believe in himself and prove those snobby elite heroes wrong. I’d have thought that would have been a pretty decent idea. But they didn’t go for it.

Only two episodes in and Rein has already done a complete 180 in terms of combat ability. He goes from struggling to take down trash mobs like goblins to being able to take down giant lizardmen unarmed without even a scratch on him. You can’t have an underdog story where your protagonist has godlike abilities and can pull new powers out of nowhere as the story demands it.

Kanade was already a character I wasn’t fond of for her endless cat puns, but she’s even worse here because she’s kinda clingy. She tends to get upset whenever Rein tames other creatures, something which I think is creepy and off-putting. Lord knows this will only get worse when Rein inevitably manages to add a second girl to his roster.

In the immortal words of Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle “I expect nothing, and I’m still let down”. “Comrades” manages to erase whatever promise this show might have had, nuking it from orbit with it’s inability to resist making Rein a godlike man with the personality of burnt toast for the audience to project themselves onto. I’ll admit that I’m actually somewhat angry here. They took something that could have been interesting to watch and they took the laziest way out. It could have been something more meaningful. But it’s not. And that makes me sad.