English Dub Review: Conception “Give Birth to My Child!”

Just don’t ask me to cut the cord.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

As Itsuki, Alfie, Mana, and the Star Children enter the thirteenth chamber to defeat the Thirteenth Phantom, Mahiru and the other Star Maidens learn of the plan to sacrifice him. Only Itsuki isn’t going along with that so easily, choosing to fight with all his remaining strength. The Phantom soon emerges in front of him, being so hideous that the animators haven’t even given it a proper design yet! Naturally, the final boss is not easy to defeat, but before he can even attempt more damage, Itsuki is stopped by the sacrificial ritual. Only Mahiru can’t bring herself to do it and begs to find another way to stop the phantom.

Since the plan to sacrifice Itsuki was found in ancient and vague documents, the only way to find a solution WITHOUT sacrificing him is to find even OLDER and vaguer documents that say that! At least, that seems to be the logic here, as Mirei (she’s the one with the glasses) finds such a document that finds an alternate ritual that will work as long as Itsuki has truly bonded with each of the Maidens. And seeing how this is the final episode, we can assume he’s gone through 100% completion and earned the Secret Bonus True Ending where he gets to live. So all the Maidens head to the final labyrinth and use their powers to turn the twelve Star Children into three giant robots.

Not even going to question it.

Only one of the stray blasts from the phantom gets past and almost hits Itsuki! That is until Alfie jumps in front of him and takes it head on, dying tragically and turning to dust in a way that means she will never ever return, but this death gives everyone the motivation to turn the three robots into one even BIGGER robot that Itsuki can pilot!

Nothing out of the ordinary here.

This strips away the shell to see the phantom’s true form which is…sufficiently menacing. But with one last great big anime speech, Itsuki unlocks Alfie’s Star Child as a lance for the robot to finish it off! With that, he’s allowed to return to Earth with Mahiru. Only the rest of the Maidens aren’t ready to say goodbye and jump into the portal with them!…along with a suddenly resurrected Alfie, all of the Star Children, and Mana, who is now human.

Wait, what the-

OUR TAKE

And so we come to Conception’s end, which I guess in this case amounts to a pile of afterbirth that will be swiftly thrown away by the attending physician. True to my predictions, this was pretty crazy, even for this show, but luckily not like last week which made me seriously consider ending my own life. It definitely checked off a lot of boxes for the expected anime final battle. Power of friendship/love saving the day? Check. Villain making a grand speech about he was actually a part of our hero the whole time? Double check. Crazy out of nowhere last-minute power-ups? Check, check, and check. Even without knowing this is based on a video game, this really did feel like the end game cutscene after the player has completed all of the side stories, collected all the bugs or balls or what have you to get 100% in order to unlock the real ending to the game that they probably would’ve just looked up on Youtube if they didn’t get it on their own.

That said, action scenes have always been so minimal in this show (apparently a big break away from the game it’s based on) that seeing an episode dedicated to it felt pretty jarring. Given the studio in charge of this series, I can understand why they wouldn’t put too much thought into it, but I feel like if we’d gotten more of that, it might not have been so reviled. It definitely would’ve ended up reviled, but not AS MUCH. Instead, we got the skeevy and downright disturbing “romance” parts to focus on which given this the critical evisceration that it got, and I’ve been stuck talking about it week after week, so…c’est la vie?

And we gotta talk about that ending, I suppose. Outside of what I’ve already mentioned, we’ve got Alfie returning from the dead (apparently she didn’t lose the immortality that we didn’t know she had until she said she didn’t have it) so that sacrifice meant nothing, Mana is now a human (maybe because of the purification she mentioned she got from Shangri-La?), and all the girls and their kids are now in Itsuki’s world living in their house and society. We are only given brief glimpses into how their lives continue, including a wedding scene between all of them (along with brief cameos from the protagonists of Conception’s sequel game that I will do everything in my power to make sure never gets animated). However any of that works, I haven’t a clue, and I have already spent more time making sense of it than anyone who worked on this show, so I will just leave that for the questions of life we will never truly understand. See you in a week (or more) for the Season Review, where we put this newborn baby to sleep once and for all. Yes, you read that right. It’ll be quick and painless.