English Dub Review: Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction “Episode 0”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Nobuo Koyama finds his life as he knows it over when a giant alien spaceship kicks off a seeming invasion. He awakens four years later, finding out an alien has apparently taken over his body for all that time, but all he can think about now is getting back to his daughter.

OUR TAKE

Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction is a name I’ve seen floating around the past year or so, but to my surprise it is not a Kirby spin-off focusing on his main antagonist, King Dedede. The few glimpses at promotional art also gave me no real idea, as it only focused on a couple high school aged girls, which really does not narrow down the subject matter when it comes to anime. Apparently it started out as a manga that completed after twelve volumes, which was then adapted into two feature length movies…which really does not seem like nearly enough runtime to adapt twelve volumes. Those two movies have now been chopped into eighteen episodes, as is the recent trend of repackaging anime movies as full anime like they did with the Demon Slayer movie and Sand Land movie. An odd release strategy in this case, but if those other two examples are anything to go by, it could at least mean the animation will look great. Except they have also mentioned adding new material, which I suppose includes this new Episode 0 that we’re covering first. Whether that’s included as part of the eighteen episodes is unclear, but I guess we’ll see.

Based on what I can find describing the general premise of the series, the story focuses on two seemingly regular high school girls who are living out relatively normal lives despite their world having been irreparably changed by the arrival of aliens. It’s then a bit of a surprise when this Episode 0 is actually about the father of one of the girls, who apparently literally dies from the initial encounter and has had an alien possessing his body for years. That’s already a pretty intriguing sci-fi story on its own, but, as the numbering implies, this seems to just be a prequel side story to hint at things that will probably be among several mysteries and plotlines that will be floating around in the main story. And if the goal of this zeroth episode was to get me interested in what’s going to happen in said main story, I can definitely say it succeeded at that. I am a bit bummed that we probably won’t be following Nobuo again for at least a little while, but this episode definitely sets the tone for something special. So, now that the prequel episode is out of the way, let’s see where the story’s proper beginning takes us. Though I think my first question is gonna be about what the hell “Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction” means exactly, and what the hell it has to do with aliens that can apparently possess dead bodies. Hopefully get that one out of the way soon.