English Dub Review: Black Clover “The Pointlessly Direct Fireball and the Wild Lightning”

More like “The pointlessly long title for the pointless anime.”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The water temple games have been interrupted by The Eye of the Midnight Sun, who have ambushed the Black Bulls at the temple. This means its time for another bunch of fight scenes. Captain Yami can’t help because of some dimension magic that puts him and the water temple elder in a different dimension, so the young Black Bulls are on their own here.

The main focus here is on the fight Luck and Magna has with Vetto the Beast Mage. Their fight shows off their cooperation and is sparsed out with some flashbacks into their past about how they became friends, which I didn’t actually realize they were until just now. Of course, I don’t really understand how any of the Black Bulls can stand each other since I don’t like any of them, but what are ya gonna do.

The fight continues but doesn’t finish by the end of the episode, though it does seem like Magna and Luck are able to hold their ground against Vetto, who’s much more powerful than they are.

Our Take:

Black Clover has some attention deficit problems, without a doubt. We spend an episode and a half getting into this water temple business and suddenly we’re back to fighting the Eye of the Midnight Sun like we haven’t even changed arcs. I don’t know how Black Clover expects anyone to take its plot seriously if it can’t remain focused for more than an episode before it gets bored and decides to do something else.

I hear often that the manga actually gets interesting later on, but unfortunately, I don’t think the medium of anime will be nearly as forgiving as the medium of manga. With comics, you can space things out because the medium is so dense. One can read through a chapter of Black Clover in three minutes, but when we’re watching the anime, its extended out to a grueling 22 minutes filled with terrible dialogue and filler. Oh, not to mention plenty of wonderful slapstick for you to cringe at while you bash your head into the nearest hard object in a desperate attempt to self-lobotomize yourself away from this garbage.

Can someone explain to me why we’re in this weird water temple situation in the first place? This “Game magic” doesn’t make much sense to me, and I don’t know why Captain Yami is just sitting back watching everyone fight when the magic knights came here on an important mission. It seems like “Game magic” basically allows you to do whatever you want as long as you wrap it up in the context of a game. I’ve seen weird shounen powers before, but Jesus Christ, they usually exist in some frame of logic.

This episode uses a lot of them same tropey storytelling that a lot of anime does, even superb ones like My Hero Academia that everyone seems to be in love with. Flashbacks, wordy exposition, overly long explanations of special abilities, this show’s got ’em all, but the difference between this and other, better shows is what other shows do to make these things more palatable. Gorgeous art, creative fight scenes, musical direction, voice acting; these are all tools creatives can use to draw an audience. This is why Black Clover is so frustrating to watch week after week; it doesn’t use any of these tools effectively, and so the show stinks of laziness.