English Dub Review: Lord of Vermillion: The Crimson King “Please Join Our Hands With the Holy Words”

Jun is a mad bad boy.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

This week, questions of loyalty within the organizations of the Holy Church and Chaos abound. Jun is seeking vengeance over the death of his brother, who he blames Chihiro for, (For some reason) while Yuuri shares the sorrowful tale of her past with Chihiro.

Jun stalks Kotetsu and Tsubaki, who are out spending a day together and try to kidnap them in a spur of the moment fight against Chihiro. All the while, Chihiro struggles with the visions he’s been having of his friends dying. His visions nearly become a reality until Yuuri steps in to save Chihiro and Kotetsu. Thankful, Chihiro offers Yuuri to switch sides and join him in his weird blood quest.

Our Take:

Let’s be clear about something before even getting into this episode. This show is ridiculous. It is a series that is so unwieldy, so bizarre and melodramatic that reviewing it on good faith is basically impossible. It’s as if this show just flips open the “Big Book of Anime Cliches”, points to a random page and says, “Let’s do that.” Trying to review this show straight and weighing its successes and failures is the equivalent of looking at a disgusting pile of shit and then saying, “Well, at least it’s not green.”  I am 100% confident that this show will never amount to anything worth watching; seven episodes in, and what I hoped to just be growing pains for the series starting out have been quickly realized as chronic, and fatal problems for the series. Yet, a reviewers job is to put on their gloves and dig into the muck, and so I’ll give you the rundown and the nature of this episode’s particular stink.

Motivations and allegiance are the primary concerns I have with this episode. The forces of Chaos, who originally existed as “The bad guys”, are now being played as the “other side of the conflict.” At the same time, we have certain members of the Holy Church revealing their selfishness as well. It’s sort of like a Jedi/Sith philosophy in the modern sense, where one side isn’t necessarily better than other.

This is the sort of thing that would add complexity, depth, and character to a show; given a different series, this sort of development would probably be well received. However, because Lord of Vermilion has done such a piss-poor job of developing these characters, it doesn’t feel like depth. It feels like awkward character development. It feels confusing. It feels lazy. Again, this stems from the defining issue of this series that it has too many goddamn characters and it keeps introducing more. In an effort, I believe, to try and appeal to the broadest audience possible, the showrunners have adopted a “Machine gun” approach to their cast. Keep shooting out one-note cardboard people and hope some of them stick.

Start to finish, this is an unpleasant, dry affair, wasting the medium of anime on boring scenes and ridiculous melodrama. Get ready for plenty of weak exposition, get ready for a lot of stock locations in Tokyo, and get ready for lots and lots of bad dialogue. Pity the poor souls who have to work on this show, because its going to be a long season.