English Dub Review: Dies Irae “A Mother’s Sins”

That was disturbing and… I still have no clue what is going on.

Overview (Spoilers)

Okay, last we left off, Shirou and Eiri got eaten up by Rusalka’s magic. They got their feeling of deja vu, promising that they’d win the battle but… well, we don’t know what happened. The police come in to find a giant blood stain and a very confused Kasumi. Ren visits her in the hospital, getting visions of… some dude… fighting alongside Reinhard. Waking up from his dream, he heads up to the roof to meet with Marie, who talks about how much she wants to join Ren’s group of friends. Given that the swastika got opened at Shirou’s club, he doubts that those two survived. Marie, however, believes strongly that they did.

That’s when Riza shows up, wearing the uniform of the Longinus order. Yeesh, is there anyone in this town NOT tied to this whole thing? He leaps down to prevent her from going any further. After all, the hospital is also a swastika, and her going on a murder spree inside would open it up. Just as she is about to reach him, Kei jumps in as a distraction for the boy. Initially, she wields fire like a sword. However, she reveals her next level of her Relic: she transforms to be made of fire, and holds a very physical sword that… is… also made of fire? It passes through his sword arm just as easily as if it weren’t there. As that battle rages on, Riza continues through the hospital, but is confronted by Valeria. He’s got a beef with her because she chose one son to live, and the other to be sacrificed. Apparently, the one she chose to have killed sprang from her womb and immediately grew to adulthood. He looked just like Heinrich. Why Valeria is so angered by this doesn’t fully come through, but perhaps he is one of those discarded children. Outside, Ren realizes that if he can’t beat Kei in combat, he’ll have to tug on her heartstrings instead. He brings up her reasons for killing a boatload of people. She reveals that she intends to get Heinrich to bring her parents back to life. Becasue that’s what you do. When it becomes clear that she is emotionally compromised, a new figure arrives on the scene, commanding a giant soldier made of angry souls.

Our Take

No, really. I’m super lost. This show obviously has a whole bunch of plot, and there’s a total reason why Valeria, who seems to be the earthly leader of the baddies, is meeting up with them in secret and killing them. It has something to do with his parentage, but wow, there is so much that goes unexplained or is hinted at with trippy, incoherent scenes, that there is no hope of figuring it out. Unless you played the game, in which case, this all makes sense. Really, the writers don’t give a crap that we’ve gone ten episodes and none of these character relationships are intelligible. Main plot? Sure. Kill the bad guys before they kill thousands of people, either way, final boss pops out to fight. Simple plot. Everything else? Like reading a paper on thermodynamics after dropping acid in response to falling out of a tree and hitting every branch on the way down. It’s possible you’d understand, but good luck. Unlike the other show I review based on a visual novel, this one fails not because it doesn’t try hard, but because it tries TOO hard. The writing crew lacks the chops to accomplish what it’s doing.

The animation we see isn’t all that bad, really. There was a bit of action in the fight with Kei. Problem was, the scene was shot with almost all straightforward shots. The cinematography saved all of the dynamic shots for the conversation between Riza and Valeria, trying to amp up the tension there. They worked pretty hard to make sure there weren’t any errors in the animation, but when you aren’t pushing yourself all that much to build a compelling composition, it doesn’t take much to make sure you don’t screw stuff up. This would normally be the part of the review where I would talk about the voice acting, but you’ve heard my complaints since episode one, so I’ll sum it up:

Your fake accents suck.