English Dub Review: Dies Irae “Golden Beast”

A preview fight against the final boss, and it may be game over already.

Overview (Spoilers)

As the battle between Kei, Wilhelm, Ren, and Shirou kicks off, We get a little aside explaining why Shirou thinks he’s so fresh. His entire life, whenever he is put into life-threatening situations, he experiences deja vu. When he does, he knows for a fact that he can’t lose. He’s spent his whole life looking for something that might break through this deja vu and show him a future totally unexpected. That has given him the skills necessary to take on the Nazi-come-latelies that are terrorizing the town. Wilhelm chooses to be his opponent, and Shirou handily dodges all of his weaker attacks. None of the boy’s attacks get through either, as the monster merely catches the bullets and throws them back. When Wilhelm starts getting serious, he lands a hit, knocking Shirou’s arm out of its socket. Still, Shirou is able to dodge it enough to keep it from being a critical hit. He pops the arm back into place and jumps on board his motorcycle to take this show on the road. After Wilhelm launches cars in every direction in an attempt to catch up to Shirou, the punk shoots out the tires of a passing tanker truck, forcing Wilhelm to hit it out of his way. This ruptures the tank, dumping liquid nitrogen all over the Nazi. Shirou comes back around to drive over the kraut-sicle and into the sunset. Despite having his skin shattered, Wilhelm is still able to get up and admire that the Dies Irae has begun, and all the little humans are about to crap their pants.

Courtesy: Funimation

Back with Ren and Kei, the two do battle at high speed, until they run through the underside of the bay bridge. Ren knocks Kei off into the water, then goes after her. From there, the two fight while running atop the water’s surface until a sudden presence shocks and frightens Ren. Hallucinations of golden eyes gleamed at him. Valeria arrives and ends the fight with a single, well-timed strike. Does he introduce himself as Christof Lohengrin, a whole bunch of other stuff, and finally, Ren’s father? No time to wonder about this. The Nazi leader is arriving, or at least, he has projected his presence onto the bridge. The force of Reinhard’s presence is enough to hold Ren and Kei against the ground. Marie, talking to Ren through his blade arm. She’s actually scared of Reinhard, but the two of them resolve together to fight. More blades manifest out of his back as Ren launches a new attack, primal and enraged. To respond, Reinhard summons a giant, multiarmed skeleton, an army of Nazi skeletons, an ancient German navy, and the Luftwaffe. None of this seems to phase berserker Ren. Not even massive, golden Kamehameha blasts from its six arms and single mouth will stop him. He lands a strike right on Reinhard’s throat and… it does nothing. Worse yet, it shatters his blade arm, forcing Marie out of Ren. As the two tumble into the ocean, Reinhard’s projection stabs Marie through with his own weapon. All while he mutters about his deja vu.

Our Take

No seriously, folks. Would you mind slowing down a bit to tell us what is going on? Valeria’s dialogue made absolutely no sense, and his revelation that he is Ren’s father only goes to make things more confusing. So, is he Karl Kraft, aka Cagliostro, aka Mercurius? Why does each of these people have three or four names? Are they reincarnations of the original baddies? Where did the heck that giant skeleton come from? Is that the city that we’ve seen floating in the sky? I have no clue, and I don’t like it. To make matters worse, the fans of the game have noted that the fight against Reinhard went completely different here. That means that things are no longer following the game, so we have no way of knowing if other stuff has been changed, and nothing will make sense again.

Well, at least the action wasn’t horrible. The art and animation throughout the episode was high impact and loaded with great angles. Watching the combat was like DBZ on crack, with very little in the way of energy blasts. Just dashing everywhere with paths of light to mark the paths of their swords. If it weren’t for their running on water, I’d think I was back to watching Rorouni Kenshin back in the old days. I didn’t see any errors, but most of the shots were pretty static despite their good angles. They didn’t pan or move the camera at all. Still, high-quality animation around these parts.

Voice acting still has those fake German, chubby-bunny-playing accents that have made this show so unpleasant. Thankfully, however, the main offenders don’t have a massive number of lines. Since those lines are often buried within the action, I wasn’t as bothered by the accents as I normally am. Hats off to Brandon McInnis, though. I liked how he voiced berserk Ren. He laced the lines into an angry, feral growl that made him seem bestial. Other than that, however, I’m not very thrilled with the voice acting in this episode. It only managed to not bug me because there was more action than talking.

Score

Summary

So, if you want to just look at the action and animation, this was a good episode. from every other perspective, however, it definitely needs work to become a good entry. This show needs better writers, and an ADR director that understands that accents don't always make a character feel foreign. I give this episode five giant skeletons of doom out of ten.

5.0/10