English Dub Review: Dances With The Dragons “Bad Omen”

Demon brains are popping up all over, a company negotiates for the return of kidnapped genius, and Jiv demonstrates why she’s way too good to be with Gaiyus.

Overview (Spoilers)

Gaiyus comes home to a surprise! He’s under arrest! By his girlfriend, Jiv! No. She’s not actually a police officer. That’s okay, anything I say about that tiny outfit can and will be used against me in a court of law. The two of them are engaging in a bit of roleplay to keep the bedroom caliente. Those handcuffs may not be fuzzy, but Gigina is a bit fuzzy on the concept of timing. He calls up as things are getting interesting: The police have a job for them. Hostages are in need of freeing, and the boys in blue need some help. Yeah, they already called in their first choice. Largokin the Loner already bailed for another job.

Gaiyus and Gigina head in, finding the corpses of firefighters and policemen were strewn about. All of them died in different ways, but all in horror and pain. When they find the culprit, their pants turn brown. It’s a Magatsushiki: something so bad that literally, every adventurer handbooks tells you to just pack up and go home. It looks like a giant brain, but all the juicy insides are people-PEOPLE! Yeah, you ain’t coming back from that. The pair escapes to the roof to get away from its poison gas attack, and team up to cut it in half. Too bad that doesn’t kill these things. Largokin pops up out of nowhere to save our heroes from sudden tentacles and helps them take out all of its remaining hearts and brains. Fun. As it dies, it says that the Evening Party has already begun. That’s ominous.

The next day, Gaiyus comes into the office to talk to a new client. Gigina is building more furniture. The two engage in playful banter, and it rapidly spins out of control. Somehow, Gaiyus breaks one of Gigina’s chairs, the two start fighting, death is imminent, Jiv jumps in and stares Gigina down… She’s the only that scares him. Anyways, the client is the Razo Company. Their main genius, who made most of their tech, was kidnapped about two years ago by a terrorist organization. Rather than contact the authorities, Razo is going to swap their genius for 8 billion yen and a doctor. G&G are going to act as bodyguards during the exchange.

One last chunk before we move along with our night. Gaiyus gets called in to deliver the mission report for the Magatsushiki mission in person. This is a bit of a ruse, however. He is asked to work together with Largokin on a bigger threat. That monster only appears when summoned, and there have been fifteen others in the last month. Someone is up to unkindness, and G&G Company is gonna be pulling double shifts this week!

Our Take

Finally realized why that horribly dated OP song sounded familiar! It’s fripSide, makers of the song “Clockwork Planet” for the crap show Clockwork Planet. Yeah, sure, they’ve got credits in a bunch of other stuff like A Certain Scientific Railgun and Hyperdimension Neptunia. They won an award for “Only My Railgun”. I still can’t get Clockwork Planet unseen, so that’s what they get associated with for me.

Gonna be honest, there was one good thing in this episode: Jiv. She is a girlfriend so awesome, you wonder what predicament she found herself in that led her to settle for a bland protagonist like Gaiyus. Take off those glasses immediately, young man. You don’t deserve them, you are not evil genius enough. Both he and Gigina are flat-as-board characters, propped up with nothing more than tropes and a prayer. Doesn’t help that their voice actors only have one mode. When your pillow-talk voice sounds the same as your banter-in-the-middle-of-combat voice, you are doing one of those two actions wrong.

On the other hand, Jiv has shown that as much as she has a libido, she is easily embarrassed by kink… and does it anyway. She’s also bold enough to walk in front of a moving buster sword to utterly crush its owner’s self esteem with a glance. Megan Shipman gives her breadth of character that the male characters lack. I just wish we got to know more of her story. I don’t care about G&G. Not at all. Give Jiv.

Also, let’s get into the animation, which is degrading rapidly in quality. In the dirty cop scene, they are about to kiss. They pause for a good second… THEN the phone rings. This wasn’t a pause for sexual tension, which could have been portrayed by zooming in close to show they were bare millimeters away. No, this was a pause because the animator(s) screwed up the timing, the director got too rushed, and put it in anyways.

Lastly, evil clowns? I know that IT is big right again, but why are there so many evil clowns showing up these days?