English Dub Review: The Water Magician “Beyond the Gate”
They delved too greedily and too deep.
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Ryo continues his investigations into Akuma and Tidal Bores, but Abel and his party are diving further into the Tidal Bore in the dungeon and finding other formidable dangers.
OUR TAKE
The Water Magician continues…to have minimal involvement with the titular Water Magician. I mean, Ryo is in a fair amount of this episode’s runtime, though he’s out of the action for the most part, having been looking into stuff with the Akuma with little in the way of results, and I can’t say that watching him dilly dally with nothing to show with it is all that entertaining or gripping. So, the actual combat once again falls to Abel and his party, as they continue to explore the dungeon, this time escorting some field team that wants to investigate it to the best of their ability. Naturally, the end result of exploring a dungeon known for generating horrible monsters that kill people is that you find even stronger horrible monsters that can kill people way faster. Oddly enough, we also learn from Ryo’s investigations that Tidal Bores only occur during Solar Eclipses, just like the one that also brought the Akuma. Perhaps there is a connection there? Like maybe the sun is considered holy so covering it with the moon, for even a small instance, makes it easier for unholy monsters to ascend to the human world? Or maybe I’m overthinking things when there aren’t any good explanations, either one is possible I suppose.
While Abel’s team do run into some serious threats, and the higher power monster they find, a Demon Prince, both has a unique and creepy design and some intimidating lore about how much stronger he could become, the actual fight itself is, once again, very underwhelming and even just looks BAD sometimes. I understand that this is meant to show that Abel is outmatched by this powerful demon, but it’s supposed to be hard to watch because it’s dangerous, not hard to watch because it feels like PNGs being dragged around the screen. Though it turns out that Abel isn’t going to need to fight it off after all, as Ryo finally arrives to lend a hand and vows to end the battle quickly. The fact that this happens at the end of the episode (and the fact Ryo is quite cocky about facing it) almost makes me think that he may be walking into a fight he won’t be able to win, at least not right away. Abel seems like about an average warrior, so his outcome is to be expected, but Ryo is still quite OP…until he ISN’T, and we’ll see if things go that way next time.
