English Dub Review: Dances With The Dragons “Endgame of Sand”

Did I say “100”? Why are you punishing me?

Overview (Spoilers)

Gaiyus, Gigina, Jivenya, and three side characters I thought were dead get together for a drinking party. Since, for some unknown reason, mages in this world just can’t get along, Gaiyus introduces a drinking game to keep them from just getting drunk and killing each other. Each person says one to three numbers in sequence, moving turns clockwise around the table. Whoever says 100 has to go through a punishment chosen by the person before you. Sounds like fun? Not with this group. Gaiyus counted on punishments getting more extreme as the night wore on, so he engineered getting an early punishment. What did he get? One of them is now going to cut him open to expose his guts. They aren’t even drunk yet, and it’s getting a little murder-y in here. Good thing Jiv puts the kibosh on that punishment.

Afterwards, G&G get a ride on their way home from a limo sent by the queen. She’s suddenly very forthcoming with information. For no reason except her own entertainment, she spills STATE SECRETS about how the Alliance and Dragon Empire are totally in bed with the evil dictator Docheta. His tyranny is what inspired Remedias to become Zulu and try to kill everyone on Razel Island… Of course, when you put that sentence together, you see how the logic doesn’t follow. Anyways, the queen reveals that she had initially created Aurora Front to meddle in Docheta’s government in Ourmand. When Remedias took over and made it into Aurora Hammer, it was now a liability. Especially since she now has an alliance with Docheta for mining rights. So, she tried to have it destroyed.

At the same time, the queen and her cousin, Cardinal Muldine, are meeting publicly with Docheta with a parade of pomp and pageantry. As his motorcade pulls through the stadium, a pair of little girls run up with flowers. Sigils appear in their eyes, and they explode with enough power to kill everyone sitting in the stadium arena. Docheta, however, taunts his assassins from behind his shield. Too bad for him, a massive sigil appears over the arena: the curse that nearly killed Razel Island! The explosion wasn’t meant to kill him, but to kill enough others as to act as a catalyst for the spell! The entire chess game of the last few episodes was a front for Zulu to move his armament into place so he could kill Docheta, the Queen, and Muldine in one fell swoop!

Our Take

What. Is. This. Garbage.

The first half of the episode was a salad of overblown insanity tossed with a dressing of bad writing. Didn’t that one guy lose his arm and die of blood loss in the previous episode? Here he is, in what feels like the next day, right as rain and drinking with a passion. Somehow, Jiv worked with the nutso chick from the Largonkin company, who is related to the even-more-nutso doctor. Putting all this crazy into a room and calling it comedy doesn’t do it for me. It’s just a series of over-the-top sadism.

I never liked the writing or voice acting for the nutso jushikist, and seeing the crazy doctor cut loose in this scene just showed that the two were cut from the same cloth. Then, seeing Jiv act just like them? It’s like the writers wanted to make this an outrageous scene, and steamrolled the characters into behaving how they wanted them to. It’s bad writing, and it isn’t funny.

The second half had a mass of exposition and one that should never have been made in the first place. This is the bad guys of the show explaining how their evil plots are all coming together, while Bond has a laser drifting up between his legs. Except, they tell the good guys, and have no intention to finish them off. This means that the queen sat there and admitted to a bunch of stuff that no head of state would admit to. Things that would likely get them a beat-down from every other country. I didn’t put it in the overview, but Zulu shows up, revealing his end of things. Both of these villains reveal everything for no reason. They gain nothing from the revelations, and it’s darn boring to just watch them talk.

Making things worse, the animation of these characters is horrible. Mouths are obviously animated separately from the rest of the character. I can tell because how frequently the queen’s beauty mark would exit her face when she opened her mouth. Coupled with how bad the voice acting is, and it’s just a painful episode to watch.