English Dub Review: Black Clover “Yami and Vangeance”

Guess we’re doing this again.

Overview

Yami and Vangeance are summoned to meet with Novachrono for another mission. They’re sent into the countryside to deal with more bandits, who are apparently running wild in the country with some fancy magical equipment to aid in their robbing. The two of them accept and head out to do their duty.

They use the map of recent bandit attacks to find a good place to ambush the brigands. The two split up and, sure enough, Yami is the first to come across the bandits. He deals with them easily, even the leader, who’s the same bandit leader from the last episode. Yet, the bandit is able to take a hostage, which distracts Yami long enough to be ambushed from behind.

The masterminds reveal themselves, two members of the Magic Knights who are supplying these bandits with magical items. They’ve been doing this to inflate their own standing in the eyes of Novachrono. Things look bad for Yami, who’s captured by the mages, but Vangeance comes out of nowhere and frees Yami from his bonds. The two of them together use their powers to great effect and defeat the traitorous knights.

Soon, Novachrono arrives to the scene to clean things up. He then rewards Vangeance and Yami with their captain positions, making them the leaders of the Black Bulls and the Golden Dawn.

Our Take:

What’s the only thing worse than a filler episode? Two filler episodes! I know that’s not exactly a fair criticism of this episode because, as it turns out, this story is actually completely canonical, but it feels as much like filler as any other garbage episode I’ve seen. In fact, I would say that this reveals an even deeper failure of the source material to tell an interesting story if it’s 100% canonical plot threads are this boring to watch. I’m obviously not a fan, as I haven’t been since I started watching this joke of an anime week after week, but there should at least be some kind of standard for this garbage to follow to make it entertaining. As it stands, though, this episode is entirely a waste of time, even for people who like the show.

The show makes an “attempt” at delivering some kind of adventure for Yami and Vangeance to take part int, but it’s completely lacking in anything enjoyable. It’s ugly visuals and weak fight-setups only serve to undermine the already pointless plot. Bandits do not make for great villains.

The purpose of a background story is to try and reveal to the audience something about characters that we didn’t previously know which might be relevant to what’s going on now. It’s pretty common for shows to have a big backstory sequence right before they get into a big battle with a new character or to give context to a fight scene. However, Black Clover is using flashback episodes to fill time. There’s nothing in this episode about Yami and Vangeance that we didn’t already know from the last episode, except that they went on a brief excursion to do a little bandit control: the anime equivalent of hunting rats. For these insanely powerful characters to do battle with such pointless villains is a complete waste. Yami and Vangeance are almost entirely the same as they are in the present save for some minor differences in appearance. There’s no growth to enjoy, no intrigue or conflict to get into, just a sad 22 minutes that is sure to put you to sleep.