English Dub Review: Fire Force “Incarnation of Flame”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Company 8 splits up, with Shinra and Joker going after Obi directly and facing Captain Burns, while the rest face off against another White Clad named Gold.

OUR TAKE

The Obi Rescue arc continues cooking with gas and does so this week by paying off a big fight that’s been set up since the first season! In the second Openings for both previous seasons, we’ve seen Shinra ready to face Captain Burns in battle. Based on how things went in the first season, it seemed like that was a fake out since while the two of them do end up fighting, it’s more of a low stakes skirmish that was about Burns testing if Shinra had grown strong enough to handle learning some rather unfortunate truths about his mother and the day she seemingly died. What I didn’t know was that this was, in fact, a DOUBLE fake out, as we now have the two of them doing a real fire fight as foes in this very episode. I do still have my suspicions about where Burns’ loyalties truly lie, regardless of what he says out loud, but for the moment he is Shinra’s enemy. And considering Shinra has grown much stronger across the last two seasons and is facing down the full force of the Fire Force institution, Captain Burns is the perfect obstacle to prove just how far he’s come.

As for the rest of Company 8, they have their own boss rush to deal with as they’re up against three different White Clad members who are all courteous enough to wait in line for them to be defeated one at a time. But really, the only one actually worth mentioning is the one they’re facing first, a woman with a golden arm and inexplicably her whole tummy sticking out, Gold. Like everyone with powers in this show, she has flame and heat powers, and we’ve gotten so far into this series, you would think they would’ve run out of ideas of how to keep making increasingly specific fire powers. But as you’ll find out in the next episode, it’ll become clear that they do indeed have more ideas in the tank on that. Though as for the fight itself, like Shinra facing Burns, this part of the team fighting Gold is a major checkpoint test for them and how they function together. They’ve all faced gimmicky White Clad members together by this point, and there are certainly more to come after this, but this is their big team moment, to show how far they’ve come, and we’ll see how that culminates next week.