English Dub Review: Clevatess “Solsein the Divine Academy; Another World”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
In the wake of Drel’s defeat and the end of the war he caused, the Hylian Queen meets with two other nations to reach an agreement on how to handle Drel’s leftover magic research. In order to find it, Klen and Alicia infiltrate the magic academy Solsein to uncover where Drel left his work.
OUR TAKE
Clevatess is back with a new season, and not even a year after the last one ended, which is either a great sign of how popular the first season was or a concerning sign of how overworked animators in Japan are. Or both! It can always be both! Anywho, two episodes in and it has already distinguished itself from the first season quite a lot, where that was an adventure across the land to give back a magic baby, this season is a hunt for secrets in a magic school. So basically going from the first Ice Age movie to…Monsters University, I guess? Well, that aside, a new setting and practically new genre means we’ve got a lot of new characters to introduce, all of which starting off as the pretty typical tropes of a bunch of high schools. There’s the preppy twins, the mysterious goth girl, the nervous novice, and a normal looking kid who is naturally the first to be the victim of the magical threats lurking within the school. And it’s extra sad because he had feelings for the goth girl despite them only interacting for maybe a few seconds! But yeah, based on this and in media res opening, I think we can expect this season to have a growing body count as it goes on.
As for what I thought about these first two, well…if I remember correctly, my initial issues with the first season were more that it went kind of overboard the violence and gore against its female characters while also often sexualizing them, which was kind of distracting even as I came to appreciate the story around those characters. So far, we haven’t had a ton of the sexualizing, but there’s already an opening salvo of violence, so we’ll see how that goes. At the moment, it’s a perfectly fine start and establishes how this story arc is different, what its goal is, what the stakes are both within the school and outside of it, and how our leads are limited in their abilities while undercover. Also, while it’s expected that Alicia isn’t proficient in magic, the end of last season had Klen requesting to be baby King Luna’s magic teacher, which would be quite difficult since Klen doesn’t know magic. Now with this school, he can kill two birds with one stone and not have to worry about any pesky student loans! Overall, a solid start to the season and I’m eager to see where it goes.
