English Dub Review: Black Clover “The Ultimate Natural Enemy”

(Possible Spoilers Below)

As Asta and Yuno are saved by Noelle’s brother Nozel who wants revenge against Patoli for injuring Fuegoleon’s arm. Nozel easily uses the reflective surface of his mercury to deflect Patoli’s light magic and traps him. Nozel informs Asta he plans on becoming his rival to become Wizard King. Rhya almost dies until he is saved by Mimosa, though this only annoys him. Nozel plans to execute Patoli until Yuno points out Patoli is possessing Captain Vangeance’s human body.

It’s here when things take a more interesting direction as Asta tries to perform his exorcism powers to remove the Elf soul from the body, but is instead sucked into Patoli’s memories, where he learns about the death of the Wizard King. Asta reaches the real Patoli, and despite hating him for killing the Wizard King, he goes into an intense speech berating him for giving up on himself, even though Asta hasn’t yet given up on the elves.

Patoli then realizes that in some respects, Asta is just like Lemiel and calms himself down, turning from a dark elf into his normal self, promising to let Asta perform his exorcism on him after the Demon is defeated. As the Demon tries to escape he is confronted by the Elf ruler Licht with his Demon Dweller sword, but Licht is overwhelmed and is saved by Charla, possessing Captain Charlotte, While Yami arrives and teams up with them to fight the Demon who is surprised that a human can so easily cooperate with elves. In a post-credits scene, Finral is woken up by Asta’s weird bird pet Nero which reveals something about itself that warrants a spit-take to anyone who’s followed the show for years…

Our Take

Just when I thought the previous two episodes caught me off guard with the big twist of that Demon thing causing all the elf problems for hundreds of years, this new one manages to top itself in spades. New intro, New ending, possible foreshadowing character moments and random imagery about a mysterious young girl with tiny devil horns who keeps showing up in the intro and ending indicating a level of prominence about her.

Overall this episode, was pretty good in terms of build-up. We still got some highlights especially an emotional moment with Asta’s inspiration speech of the facts that it Doesn’t matter how pathetic you are to other people you gotta keep going, and nobody knows this better than himself.

As for that big reveal with Nero, I’m curious to see where this is going next episode but even I was caught off guard with that one.