English Dub Review: Juni Taisen “In Like a Dragon, Out Like a Snake (Part 2)”

Rob from the rich, give for the lulz.

Overview (Spoilers)

As he watches his brother’s corpse take on two warriors simultaneously, Dragon remembers a recent incident where the two of them were on trial for misconduct as warriors of one of the twelve zodiac houses. The incident was one where the two brothers, as a team worked for separate, and opposing, clients. One was a big pharma company, who tested their drugs on orphans to see their side effects. The other was a group that ran children’s clinics, and would be the gateway for human trafficking. They would supply all the orphans for the testing, and the pharma would pay beaucoup bucks. However, with the drug near the final stages, Atari Pharmaceuticals wants to break off with the kidnappers. Of course, people who do illegal things hate it when they lose a revenue stream, and often take it poorly. They hire Snake as backup at the next meeting, and when the Atari rep says that it’s over, the hothead comes to bear. As a counter, the pharma creeps call out their big gun… Dragon. The two proceed exactly as their contract states. They kill the other side’s people. However, the leaders of the two sides end up in the same elevator, fleeing the carnage together. The building ignites on fire from Snake’s gun, and the two head for cover in the Atari company safe. After they open the biometric locks, Dragon freezes the doors open. The twins kill the two crooks, and take all the money in the safe. The prosecution at their trial claims that the murder of their clients broke the contracts, but Dragon (acting as the defense lawyer for both him and Snake, who didn’t even show up to the trial) counters that they only killed their own targets. It just happened the two targets were in the same room. One of the judges at the tribunal brings up what they do with their money after stealing it from bad people. Each heist we saw them pull in the previous episode was given out to benefit the people wronged by those the brothers scammed. In his own head, however, Dragon recounts how each time they gave, some other greedy person ruined their gifts and made the situation worse. In this incident, they gave money out to those harmed by the clinical trials, including one boy stricken blind. The two were then hired to erase any evidence of Atari Pharma’s wrongdoings. As Snake burns the place to the ground, he is unaware that the (now ex) blind boy and his brother are in the building. While the now healed boy escapes the wreckage, his brother does not. The serpentine siblings give him a thick stack of cash afterwards as way of apology. As the prosecution tries to portray this as damaging to the reputations of the houses. Dragon instead argues that the tribunal is attempting to hold them to a moral standard even the outside world doesn’t share. In the end, the tribunal not only acquits them, but inspires the houses to choose the brothers as their entrants for the Juni Taisen.

In the modern day, Dragon watches as Ox and Tiger struggle against his dead brother’s arms. Once those arms are scorched, they stop moving. Fire is inimical to Rabbit’s animation technique. Dragon begins to hatch a plan to use his brother’s corpse to his advantage against the two fighters.

Our Take

This episode was the opposite of the other shows I’ve watched this week. It doesn’t push the plot along much at all, but the story deepens the characters a considerable chunk. It also gives us a bit of lore into the zodiac houses. We now discover that the houses are public knowledge, and operate outside of the law. This either means that they have enough money to ignore the law entirely, or are their own countries. The legal ramification of their existences is either devastating or proof this is not supposed to be our earth. I enjoyed the second story of the brothers, as this brought the two of them into focus. The last episode showed them as a pair of reckless thieves with a penchant for wanton destruction. Now we get to see a few other aspects of their personalities. We now see them as Robin Hood-like characters, but not out of a sense of justice or altruism, but for the fun. They have a sense of right and wrong, and try to make up for the wrong they do, but every positive action they take is hollow and temporary. They know this and continue anyway, showing that under their heroic exteriors, they just don’t care. They know good from evil, they just don’t care. This interplay makes the two of them interesting to me, and it also explains why Dragon is not distraught about his bro’s death. To them, even the other sibling is just a thing. In a way, we can see that same mentality in Snake, as he eats the rare lizard that he had gone to the effort of getting in the previous episode. It died, so he cooked and ate it without reservation.

Snake and Dragon have a pair of voice actors that have done a great job of working together. The two sound very much alike, but have completely different ways of approaching certain situations. Matt Shipman gave Snake a tinge of the feral berserker and a strange glee that is only present while he burns things. Clifford Chapin has Dragon being high pitched and slightly effeminate, but also more controlled and calculated. Since this episode showed how different they are, it makes sense that this is where their voice actors would branch out from each other to make their characters unique.

My big sticking point with this episode is the animation and art. There are plenty of effects which look beautiful and have plenty of detail. However, just about any time, a face appears on screen, it gets mauled. So many details in the episode are surrounded by animation errors. The CG effects were the best thing about the graphics here, and even they are subtle. The traditional animation has irregular, thin outlines all over the place. At one point, Snake throws Dragon the invitation to the Juni Taisen, and it is such a poor job animating, that it didn’t look right at all.