English Dub Review: A Certain Scientific Railgun “Joining the Battle”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

With Misaka slowly growing her Level 6 abilities, Mitori Kouzaku uses Exterior to make her strike Aleister Crowley’s building directly with her powers, but even with a giant lightning strike, it seems she’s only at 2% of her full strength at the moment and it doesn’t do any damage. Toma sees the attack and rushes near it, so Misaki uses her ability to fill him in on what’s going on and to tell him to use his right hand to try and undo her transformation. She then goes to recuse Keitz and 10032 but is attacked by Mitori, only to be rescued by Kuroko, who transports everyone except Mitori into the Exterior building. Misaki sends all the exposition into Kuroko’s mind directly so she knows to go after Mitori’s real body directly.

The intense electrical storms brought on by Level 6 Misaka start making civilians head inside, but draws Gunha Sogiita, the seventh ranked Level 5, to the battle and to help Toma. His own power, which seems to be some super strength punches that he gives really goofy names, pushes rubble out of the way to give Toma the opening touch her with his hand, but that only seems to affect her for a second. Meanwhile, Misaki tracks down Gensei Kihara to go in for the attack.

OUR TAKE

Woah, things are starting to get pretty intense here. We’ve got three major fights either started or about to start in this episode, with Kuroko going after Mitori, Misaki about to face off against Gensei, and Toma and Sogiita trying to stop Level 6 Misaka and turn her back to normal. And I love me a good fight scene, especially if they can be used well as character pieces and be creative and interesting as well. The Gensei fight starts properly next week so there’s not a lot to go into with it here, but it’s meaningful in that it is Misaki basically going up against the product of Gensei’s experimentation on her, much like if Misaka had to fight her clones. Only this will be a battle of minds, not just because one of the tools in play is a giant brain that can be used to control people, but also about who is manipulating who and who is aware enough to counteract it. Then there’s Kuroko versus Mitori, which will essentially be a cat and mouse came to find Mitori’s real body but while fighting off the guard dog that is Mitori’s gooey double.

Though probably the coolest looking and most interesting for lore outside of this spin-off series would be Toma and Sogiita versus Level 6 Misaka. Even though he’s the protagonist of the main series, Toma doesn’t feel like an intruder here since he was already naturally introduced (and that this is playing off an existing arc from the main story anyway), so it feels more like a crossover than anything. It’s also cool to see his kinda sorta friendship with Misaka played around with, for what little that’s worth here. We also get to see another lesser seen (at least in the anime) Level 5 show off. While he’s ostensibly the weakest (he’s the seventh ranked out of the seven Level-5s so I guess that’s what that means), Sogiita is still among their ranks and seeing more of them in the fray is always cool to see. Apparently his Esper powers are an enigma of sorts, but surely the animators have some idea of what they are since they had to animate them without giving too much away. And of course we’re seeing Misaka slowly become the thing that Accelerator was set up to become by killing her clones, so that adds another layer of interesting to all of this. But where will it all go as we close in on the climax of the arc? We’ll find out whenever Funimation puts out Episode 12.