English Dub Review: 18if “The Witch Wars”

Everyone loves Haruto.

Overview (Spoilers)

While Haruto goes with Lily to confront Eve, Dr. Kats heads to the Succubus Bar to meet up with the Ex-Witches. They have formed an information network, attempting to locate Haruto. They can sense other who have been in the dream world, and know that their hero feels even more different as if he has been asleep longer. Given their rather imprecise method of tracking him down, it takes a while. By chance, one team of the witches stumbles on the hospital where they spent their time as a Sleeping Beauty and goes in to thank the doctor that cared for them. It’s the same yellow-eyed man that Dr. Kats met in the last episode! As they talk to him, a comatose boy is wheeled past them on a gurney. It feels like Haruto, but they can’t confirm it without getting a closer look. That’s when Kayo, the witch of first love appears. A portion of her lived on through the dream world, allowing her to appear as a ghost in the real world. She confirms that it is Haruto, but he is on extensive life support.

In the meantime, Haruto, Lily, and Dr. Kats forge on, tackling the guardian of Eve’s sanctum: Dr. Kats’ sister Yurina! Not only does she have access to various song-based powers, but she has a cliffside covered in artillery! Eve is controlling Yurina, and she doesn’t even recognize her own brother. They are aided by Misaki, the witch of skank, who uses her dominatrix whip to disable the artillery. Unfortunately, she is no match for Yurina, and the domain has begun collapsing! Haruto comes up with an idea. Yurina was chosen for her purity and strength… so he’s gonna take her purity! He dashes at her, kissing her on the lips. No longer pure, Eve releases Yurina, and she returns with Misaki to the real world. The heroes continue on to Eve, but as they do, the censor of water in the Thorn Cross Association’s church explodes into a shower of blood. Eve is awake.

Now that we are finally getting to the end of this series, we get to see all of the characters from the previous episodes join together to aid him. This is a bit of a reference to the mobile game. After beating a Witch, you would obtain her help in not only the story, but as a summon, that would give you a huge leg up. Here, they show up in not only the dream world but in the real world. It’s not an exactly original concept, but it is still gratifying. All of Haruto’s hard work is repaid by a legion of eleven girls lining up to meet him and help him in his hour of need. We only have one episode left, and I’m looking forward to all of the witches combining forces in the dream world. Because let’s be honest, Haruto doesn’t have the power it takes, and we all know it.

Our Take

After an entire season of Twilight Zone-ish one-offs, it feels good to be on a contiguous plot for more than one episode. This is what the series has needed: something to tie it all together. Haruto is an inconsistent main character, whose capricious moods make him difficult to relate with. At one point, he’s a sympathetic softie, who easily sees from the perspectives of others. Move into another episode, and he’s a sadistic jerk who is blind to everything going on around him. All the while, nothing is revealed about him, so he ends up being this nebulous quasi-entity. When you throw that in as your protagonist on such an episodic show, it feels as if you have nobody to relate with. You might as well have a different protagonist in each episode.

This episode worked from a writing perspective, primarily because it balanced the action portion with the search. If these were presented separately, they would have gotten monotonous. The search portions had very little content and instead showed a bunch of the witches repeating each discovery to each other. The action was primarily them reacting to the artillery fire as they tried to get closer. However, alternating between the two broke up the sameness of each sequence to make it feel more like a narrative. It definitely could have had more content in it, instead of all the repetition, but then they’d have to do more intricate animation.

Which was a major problem with this episode. The art and animation were so lazy, it felt like they didn’t even care anymore. There were so many errors, I can’t even recount them all here. The speech was more like open mouths wobbling than forming sounds. Even though the character designs went downhill from the game to the show, I almost couldn’t recognize them when they show up in this episode, from how poorly drawn they were. The exception was Kayo, who looked as adorable and sweet as ever. Why the steep downtick in animation and art quality? Did you waste too much budget on the (rather impressive-looking) CG artillery and explosions? The worst part of this is that the lack of quality in the art seems to extend even to the keyframes, so even the main animators of the show couldn’t draw these over-simplified characters right. What happened?

The voice acting wasn’t much of a problem, honestly. There were far more characters in this episode than in usual ones for this series, and the performance for each of the witches was genuine and believable. The stand out as far as performance is J. Michael Tatum, who portrayed a bunch of different feelings from Dr. Kats in ways we aren’t used to seeing. This episode made plain for me something that I didn’t realize was bothering me. Mr. Tatum appears to have based his idea of how Dr. Kats talks off of his dream world “Catman” self. This character is over the top and bombastic in the dream world, but when he is in the real world, he seems much more subdued in the animation. Yet, Tatum continues to have him speak in a bombastic tone. While it fits during the dream world scenes, it does not fit in the real world.

While I am pleased the show is finally going somewhere, this episode had ups and downs of all kinds. The art and animation were terrible, except for the CG. The acting was good, for the most part. The writing could have put more in there, but at least it kept moving. I