English Dub Review: Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! “In Season: Battered and Deep-Fried Monster Fish”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Melphie and Aristide work with the guards to fish for monster fish, and preparing them in unexpectedly tasty ways.

OUR TAKE

We come to the halfway point of the season, and possibly series, as well as the end of the brief excursion at Fort Ritterd, and onto Aristide’s homeland of Galbraith. Though not before trying to cook up a different kind of monster with totally different preparation methods! We’ve done quite a few land animals, so now let’s mix it up by seeing how the monstrous sealife is as a dish. In this case, a Zanas fish monster, which Melphie, Aristide, and the legion with them all work together to kill and drain of toxic magic, which it apparently has a lot more of than previous subjects of cooking. And it’s certainly neat to see more of this process, as well as how the dish is enhanced with local fruit that adds to the world building, but it also inadvertently highlights that this episode is rather minimal on character development. Now, don’t get me wrong, having episodes like this that reaffirm Melphie and Aristide becoming a better team and couple are important, but it’s also not anything I haven’t already seen in the five episodes prior, and so that leaves me at a bit of a loss for what to talk about without sounding like a broken record.

I suppose you could argue that this episode gives more time to establish and highlight supporting characters such as Ambry and Zeth, two of the knights that are part of Melphie and Aristide’s party on this journey, though so far they haven’t really shown to have much in the way of distinct designs or personalities, just that they’re nice and helpful and one is a bit more cool headed while the other is younger and more enthusiastic. I mean I’m not exactly expecting super nuanced or complex characters here, but it does leave me at a bit of a loss as to what to discuss about them. Either way, the food preparation is interesting, we see more of Melphie coming into her own using her mother’s techniques, including her hair glowing because of so much magic, so that’s nice. Again, this episode mainly seems there to just reaffirm that everyone makes a good team and that handling different types of monsters (and by extension animals) requires different kinds of preparation. But next week brings us to Aristide’s homeland, the land of Galbraith, so hopefully we’ll have more interesting characters and terrains to deal with than we have been, because they are definitely starting to blur together.