English Dub Review: HAKYU HOSHIN ENGI “The Juzetsujin Battle”

Leadership skills are clearly not your strongpoint Taiko…

Overview (Possible Spoilers Below)

After 7 episodes, we somewhat delve into Dakki’s backstory. Apparently, Dakki’s true form was a fox-demon who took over the body of a human girl who just happened to share the same name as her and was about to be forced into an arranged marriage. It does establish that Dakki has sisters, yet for some reason, they point out that only Dakki has the ability to jump into other people’s bodies but is quite meticulous about which person to inhabit every hundred years. For me, it fails at trying to give Dakki any kind of pathos or make the audience understand whys she’s such a monster. But I’ll take it as a pre-intro scene over any of the former episodes that infamously spoiled plot-twists & character deaths that haven’t even happened yet.

Youzen’s battle continues after revealing his true form last episode, but instead of that purple formless mass, his appearance is like a cross between something out of Princess Mononoke and Jim Henson’s “The Dark Crystal”. Meanwhile, Taiko after assuming that Youzen failed in turning off Kingo’s shields, resorts to his favorite method of failure, charging at the fucking enemy without a plan. Despite the enemies shield still being active and moving slightly faster while armed and is currently charging with 4 mins to spare. Couldn’t you just, I don’t know… Dodge the next fucking blast?! They never specify if Kingo Mountain’s Death Ray has any sort of aiming speed nor does anyone even offer to dodge it as a solution. Taiko just fucking stands there while the minute’s countdown and nobody else objects to this?

While it does cut between the suspense of Taiko taking command vs Bunchu, we do get a bit of backstory in regards to the vampire looking dude Ohtenkun and Youzen who won against Chotenkun completely off camera. It’s ironically a more interesting backstory and compared to Dakki’s, it actually has some legit pathos. The only downside is that It feels like it was done to simply pad the running time. Ohtenkun decides to psychologically dick with Youzen about turning off the shield knowing that doing so would have devastating consequences on both sides of the battlefield. The end result is a whole lotta nothing at Youzen’s end, except a huge explosion as Konron Mountain completes its collision course under Taiko’s faulty leadership skills. The episode ends on a very intense cliffhanger as the fates of those within Konron Mountain remain uncertain.

Our Take

While the suspense and action scenes were decent, I never liked Idiots in the role of Heroes. There’s a difference between a well-developed character who starts off as unlikable, but you find yourself rooting for them as they mature & develop like Usagi Tsukino from Sailor Moon or Joseph Joestar during his younger years in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Season 1, but the main problem with Taiko is his inability to learn from his mistakes and consistently repeats them without a second thought. Maybe it was also a major mistake on Taiko’s end to blindly trust Youzen with this task, If you’re going to seek out allies to take out a monster like Dakki, maybe he should’ve built a circle of trust with all of them rather than solely rely on somebody he doesn’t really know anything about as a person outside of his ties with Konron Mountain.

Taiko is supposed to be hundreds of years old as a Senin yet has the mindset of a teenager which should’ve come off a charming or identifiable to its target audience, but with age comes wisdom and you’d think he’d resort to a better strategy than that.

I really want to like this show, but each episode is a mixed bag at this point…

Score
7.5/10