English Dub Review: Fire Force “The Great Kaiju Battlefront”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Great Cataclysm commences with the arrival of the first (literal) pillar and a monster sized Infernal. Members of Companies 2 and 4, as well as Kurono from Haijima, attempt to take it down.

OUR TAKE

Second to last episode of this half of the final season, and it’s a mostly Company 8-less and Sho-less one, despite them being pretty big parts of last week. Instead, it’s actually a chance for us to see some of the less used Companies like 2 and 4 show off their characters, some of which we haven’t seen in awhile. Among them are the new captain of Company 4 Pan Ko Paat, taking over for the late great Soichiro Hague who died at the end of last season. I stand corrected on my previous comment saying that we probably would never see a replacement captain after Captain Burns died. I’m still gonna say that we likely won’t see HIS replacement though, at least until right at the end of the show, if ever. But yeah, this is pretty much just an episode where we see some minor supporting characters get to show their stuff when they mostly don’t know what the hell is going on like Company 8 or the White Clad do. Shinra does show up briefly, but to stop one soldier’s attack and then is knocked out, so it’s unclear exactly what his intention was for now, though we’ll probably know next week. Would be kinda weird to leave that hanging for six months.

With the Great Cataclysm officially underway, it seems this giant Infernal is the first harbinger of things to come. There are still like half a dozen arcs left to cover, which I guess they’ll just have to cram into the dozen or so episodes we have left in the second half of the season, though lord knows if that’s going to affect the pacing or not. But the point is that we are officially in the final act of the story, where things will pretty much only escalate as we ride the roller coaster to the top of the hill and wait for the big plunge. This episode in particular is giving us an outside view of that as the chaos kicks off, but I imagine we’ll be seeing a more personal view of it as Company 8 deals with it directly. I was kind of hoping that Sho would try to find Shinra so they could have their last moment of peace before things began, but they may be saving that for next time, or simply for later in the story. Regardless, we’re down to one more episode for this year, the mid season finale, which hopefully won’t leave us on TOO bad of a cliffhanger.