English Dub Review: Helck “Phase 2”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The human assault continues, with Azudra facing off against human spellcaster Mikaros, whom he has a surprising past with.

OUR TAKE

Nope, turns out this episode is NOT inexplicably about the specific section of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies from 2013 to 2015 that consisted of Iron Man 3 to Ant-Man. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what the Phase 2 in the episode title is referring to, other than possibly that the human forces plan to continue to attack demon castles and possibly encite a full blown war!…which I honestly thought they were already in the middle of, but I guess we’re only doing a few small battles here and there. Usually wars are kicked off by a major inciting move by the attacking or invading forces, not getting hammered so much that it EVENTUALLY becomes war. But then again, I also get not immediately escalating to full blown war if one can avoid it. Still though, this really feels like they’ve been at war for awhile, but alright, we’re not OFFICIALLY at war quite yet. And I guess we’re never going to be since there’s only three episodes left, though that’s probably for the best because these battles are getting rather repetitive and involving characters who I am realizing I only have very little familiarity with, mainly because this story decided to spend so much time on Helck and Vermilio’s travels that most other characters got only scraps of development.

Case in point, the main event of this episode is the battle between Mikaros and Azudra, two majorly powerful individuals on either side. And while Azudra is a character that’s been present since the first episode, I feel like I know next to nothing about him other than he’s a nice, maybe a little eccentric, dude who’s just fighting to defend his demon people. That’s a fine start to building a character, but it’s not quite enough to make them all that interesting. Likewise, or maybe even to a greater degree, Mikaros is someone we met in Helck’s flashbacks as being involved in the first few Awakenings and has been shown to be a creepy motherfucker, and now we know he was in a battle where a young Azudra slaughtered everyone and he had to play dead to make it out. But I just…don’t care, about either of them to be frank, so this doesn’t mean much to me. Ah well, just a handful of episodes left to this and I’ll be done, hopefully they make use of them to accomplish some major story resolution.