English Dub Review: Dies Irae “Promise”

Disco of Doom… DOOOOM!

Overview (Spoilers)

Ren has been released from the clutches of the enemy, resolved to defeat them wherever they arise so as to prevent the wholesale slaughter of the populace and to face Heinrich when he pops back into our dimension. He comes back to find a note: Honjou (Shirou’s right-hand woman) has kidnapped Kasumi… for safe-keeping. While they have Ren on the line, Honjou goes over everything they know so as to give Ren his best chance at the plan. She and her ancestors figured out where each of the swastikas would be. They’re all at major population centers, and so spread out, it’s impossible to cover all of them at once. Ren decides to head to the school with Marie. No sign of Rusalka or Sakurai, but the students all behave like zombies. With things generally peaceful, though, they take some time for Ren to put his head on her lap and talk about his closest friends. Again. For hours, apparently. At Shirou’s club, The Bottomless Pit, a woman with red hair cavorts and fornicates with men on the dance floor. Once things get risque enough for her, everyone but her gets bloody noses. In most anime, that would mean they’re thinking dirty things. No, their heads just explode. She transforms into Rusalka, and absorbs all the souls in attendance. Shirou and Honjou attack with a hailstorm of bullets, and she counters by creating constructs from the blood. The pair of fighters get trapped in a maw of death created by Rusalka, but they seem oddly calm. Even confident. And Shirou’s getting deja vu.

Courtesy: Funimation

Oh, and Valeria decided to follow another dude around and reveals that he’s got his own reasons for doing all this, but I didn’t really understand a word of it.

Our Take

Okay, we have now gotten into the plot of the show. Yeesh, only took nine episodes of blathering, carnage, and bad accents. I don’t mind the carnage, but that accent they’re attempting… man. There is one scene in this episode where Valeria gives them their orders in a big ol’ pep talk. The entire order of Neon Nazis responds, but for the life of me, I can’t make out what they’re saying. Schlagnagaugut, or something like that. Seriously, the multiplayer chubby bunny is never good for conversation.

Not long after that, I nearly broke out into uncontrollable laughter. Not because of a good joke or a well-placed physical gag. No, I laughed at the thought processes of the writers. The conversation between Ren and Honjou is a lengthy one, and contains very little that would be meaningful to look at. The writers had no clue what to do with the camera during this time so… FANSERVICE! Right? If we have nearly naked girls and upskirt shots, nobody is going to notice that we really didn’t think this scene through. I wish I could say that they’re at least subtle about it, but no can do, Bob. For a couple of the shots, the only thing you can see is Honjou’s panties. Other times, we see Marie changing clothes in the same room as Ren, and when the door opens accidentally, she doesn’t look at Ren in embarrassment. She looks at us. It’s just plain dumb. Fanservice has its place, and can be done tastefully while still being titillating (see what I did there?). This is just a blatant attempt to shut off the viewers’ brains so that they can get away with not having real content there.

Which brings me to another issue with this episode. There is a ton of time wasted on Ren talking about his relationship with Shirou, Kasumi, and Rea. Yes, they technically did not ever tell how he met Rea, but when you’ve recapped your feelings for these people almost every episode, I cease caring. This is the longest Dattebayo ever. Bring this together with the fact that the plot made no sense until an episode or two ago, and didn’t really develop because we couldn’t tell what was going on, then we’ve got some pacing issues that are going to cause problems in the next three episodes. Six fights packed into three episodes. That’s packing it in.

I am also not a massive fan of the animation here. There was one shot that had us really close to Ren’s face to see a tear roll down. The camera zooms out to show his whole face. The line art is thick, faded, and blurry while zoomed in, but fine when at a distance. This is because they drew (more like recycled) the shot at the zoomed out resolution, zoomed in, then zoomed out. Rusalka’s dancing later in the episode was nothing more than a few frames in a loop. A choppy and obvious loop. Were the animators really trying, or was the budget blown on the magic German writing floating around her.

Score

Summary

Bad animation, not so good voice acting, bad writing. What was this Kickstarter campaign used to pay for? I give it four bloody noses out of ten.

4.0/10