English Dub Review: Deca Dence “Differential Gear”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

As the Gears, including the Unit 6/Power militia with Kurenai and Natsume, exit Deca Dence in an effort to lift the fog by eliminating Gadoll known as “Alpha”. Unit 6’s assault is initially successful and they enter a huge cavern but encounter the bloody aftermath of many dead Gears by the Gadoll Alpha. Much to the horror of Unit 6, the creature is fast and appears to anticipate their moves, causing more casualties until Kaburagi arrives and saves Natsume. Of course, given what Kaburagi knows things that nobody else does, he attempts to persuade Natsume to leave, but she risks her life to get her team out along with her while Kaburagi recklessly stays to fight the Gadoll, ignoring his boss Minato’s instructions, and goes as far as to bypass his “limiter” to enhance his abilities, and risk changing the existing “storyline” Solid Quake had in place.

As Kaburagi turns out to be successful in killing this seemingly impossible creature, A chain of events within Solid Quake begin to cause some unscripted changes to happen but Natsume and the other Gears realize that their efforts to destroy the Gadoll as a whole were for naught, as they see a slew of endless battles ahead of them. But the episode ends on a foreboding note when Kaburagi’s recent actions against Solid Quake were not without consequences…



Our Take

This was quite an episode. The action didn’t blow me away but it was still well done as it wasn’t the massacre with a bleak & depressing atmosphere I was expecting, as it gave a proper balance to the drama of the situation. If you think about it, These people are suffering and fighting for their lives and the preservation of their race, while the cyborg race who live above the earth and remotely control humanoid avatars are just having fun playing a game and it’s like they don’t even care about the human’s suffering. The juxtaposition of their reactions to situations, especially at the end when the force field dropped and they saw the “real” world, was really interesting. The humans were all terrified while the Gears are going “Hell Yeah, another level!”.

Now that the “game” was breached and the storyline took an unexpected turn behind the scenes, I can’t really imagine where this is going. I am definitely interested in what the remaining Humans and Tankers would do now. And with Kaburagi’s possible fate, what will Natsume do? Hopefully, we’ll find out next episode!