English Dub Review: Darwin’s Game; “Eighth”

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The Eighth clan’s onslaught begins. The siege at the hotel comes to a swift close, and the inevitable clash at Shibuya station arrives sooner than expected. 

Our Take

The previous episode ended with some members of the Eighth clan staging a siege against Hiiragi in the hotel. That thread picks up again at the beginning of this one, and at first, it seemed like a short little send-off to Hiiragi, but instead, it’s a much longer send-off. 

Even before this, it was fairly obvious Hiiragi would be at a tremendous disadvantage because his opponent can engulf himself in flames. Surprisingly though, Hiiragi puts up a good fight and his tactics allow him to survive the one-on-one battle for far longer than expected. However, as soon as another Eighth clan leader shows up, all bets are off and they completely overpower him. Hiiragi is fatally injured with such ease that it sort of makes this entire sequence feel pointless and a little sad. 

Before Hiiragi pulls out his master suicidal plan to end it all, he’s given a short character moment to flashback to his sick daughter. We’ve seen this style of inner reflection before, with the blue tint and the incredibly simple background, when Kaname did something similar. It’s a decent visual representation and it’s good to see it used again and so consistently.  The moment itself, him sharing the language of flowers with his daughter, is appropriate for Hiiragi’s character, but it’s a little too dry. 

Returning to the rest of the cast, this time the Eighth clan is one step ahead of everyone else, as Wang has figured out the rings lead to Shibuya station. Rein tries to sneak in and see what’s up, but the combination of a couple of Eighth clan Sigils ends up with her getting captured by Wang. 

Wang wastes no time interrogating Rein and putting the clamp down on her, breaking her arm the first moment she resists. Wang is by far the deadliest and most conniving antagonist that Kaname’s clan has faced yet, which makes this confrontation with him more thrilling than the last ones. But the thrills are only ever so slightly higher, as Wang as a character isn’t robust. He’s simply just a power-hungry crazy dude who wants to kill people for amusement, so there are zero emotional tribulations to go through like there were with other characters like Sota. He even carries around a jar of fingers with him for no explained reason, to sell how gratuitously villainous he is. 

Kaname and the others show up in time to rescue Rein, and a big battle breaks out. Everyone is bringing out their biggest guns to bear, which results in the most diverse fight thus far. They even let Sota come out to put his ice powers on full display. However, this fight is high-intensity short-interval, and the mayhem doesn’t last very long. 

Wang’s Sigil allows him to teleport, which makes him an ultra-speedy villain that’s hard to keep up with; even Rein cannot track him with her Sigil. Wang also has some sort of slicing sword-like attack, though this isn’t explained. It could be his sharp fingernails, or maybe his chops are just that strong, or maybe it’s related to his Sigil. It just seems a little bit too superhuman for this setting, even for a maniacal villain. 

Ryuji lures out Wang into a one-on-one fight, which turns out to be a bad idea against a guy who can teleport at will, ending with him getting an arm chopped off. Just as Wang is about to add another finger to his gross collection, Kaname shows up with what is obviously a big bluff on his part. We’ll see just how willing to cooperate and observant Wang really is. 

While all of this fighting is happening, Rein escapes and diverts all her efforts into cracking the code on the diamond ring. To do so, she hides and retreats into her mind palace. It’s less of a palace though, and more like an elaborate microbial sea, which is an original idea for a mind palace, if a bit odd. Through this process, she determines that the code is also the date that Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was first published, which may be a little too on the nose, but we’ll see how it plays out. 

One final note: the quality of the character drawings has dropped a little bit with this episode. The characters are all more angular than they used to be, as though the artist drew the outlines and features with small, simple lines and didn’t bother rounding them out or touching them up. Wang seems to be the one most horribly marred by this. His face is already pretty angular, but even all of the little blemishes add up and make him look far uglier than perhaps he is supposed to be. 

This episode has a very similar structure to the previous one. A small character moment or two, accompanied by a battle or two, followed by a small smidge of plot progress crammed in at the very end. In the end, this one sort of breaks even between all of the elements. And some progress is better than no progress, I suppose.