English Dub Review: The Demon Sword Master of Excalibur Academy “The Demon Lord Returns”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In the last days of his reign, Leonis Death Magnus is cornered by his enemies and betrayed allies, and so decides to seal himself away for one thousand years to take his revenge. One thousand years later, two school girls from Excalibur Academy named Riselia and Regina investigate the abandoned castle, with Riselia uncovering Leonis’ tomb and freeing him. Much to his shock, he has reverted to the body of a child, but plays dumb with Riselia until he can learn more about how the world is now. On their way out, Riselia is attacked by a “Void”, a magical monster that Leonis has no knowledge of, and is mortally wounded. Leonis kills it, but can’t heal Riselia, and so uses a high level Undead spell to revive her. The two exit the castle and meet up with Regina, making their way back to Excalibur Academy.

OUR TAKE

Well, this one ain’t winning any originality contests, that’s for sure. It’s not an Isekai at least, so it has that going for it, but that’s a low bar. We’ve got another magical sci fi high school show where a former demon lord reincarnates into a student and has to learn to adapt to the modern times he finds himself in, which is unfortunately almost a genre in and of itself. As with any first episode, this is about introducing the world and setting up the plots that will be followed. In this case, how the world changed so much between the time Leonis died and when he woke up. If the voids only showed up in the last few decades then it seems whatever brought them to this world was relatively recent. Unfortunately they’re not very easy to look at, being overdesigned to hell with so much multicolored crap all over them, so I’m not looking forward to seeing them be the main bad guys going forward. Though having seen a few episodes ahead, they are thankfully not that big a focus for at least the first third of the series…but it’s mainly school drama, so not exactly a great trade off.

Man, that was sure a lot of “nots” I tied myself in. Anyway, the other thing that’s going to be front and center is the growing relationship between Leonis and Riselia, the latter being now a member of the undead and not knowing it for the moment. This definitely will not lead to them having a weird master and slave power dynamic between a younger looking boy and an older looking girl which will then also CERTAINLY NOT blossom into a romance down the road, no sir. And I’m sure a story as dignified as this one absolutely wouldn’t resort to having her other female friends become part of a harem of some sort, along with Leonis’s own cute maid girl and maybe the talking dog because this is anime after all. If it’s not clear by now, I’m not really expecting much more from this show than the typical derivative light novel cliches. That’s not to say that those can’t be fun or entertaining in their own right, but there is a limit to how much blood you can get from a stone such as that. But whatever, just eleven more episodes left of this to get through, I suppose.