English Dub Review: Knight’s & Magic “Secret & Quest”

Mythril… a little dab’ll do ya!

Overview (Spoilers)

A hive of Hardcase demon beasts recently birthed a new queen. As most critters of their like do, the hive split and found new areas to live in. It just so happens that this new hive is headed straight for Alfheim, the portion of the kingdom that develops and builds ether reactors. The Silver Phoenix is sent to clear the monsters out before they can do much damage. Utilizing the full mana generation capabilities of two single-seat centaur Tzendrinble and the Toybox, Ernesti is able to take down the queen and end the invasion. This only further highlights his contribution to the kingdom, and the former king decides to make good on his earlier promise. With the guidance of Ambrosius, a member of the Silhouette Knight Lab who was secretly an Elf, Ernesti is taken into Alfheim to learn the secrets of Ether Reactor construction. Though nobody expects him to figure it all out during his lifetime, he does so in a few months. Now that he can construct his own high-performance unit with the catalyst crystals from the Behemoth and Hardshell Queen. Watch out for… Ikaruga!

This episode started strong with a good showing from the Silver Phoenix. I enjoyed watching them put the Tzendrinble units into the field, especially with their trailers. The Toybox trailer was equipped with a pair of specially built magic rifles, which would draw power from the Toybox’s two reactors for some truly powerful blasts. When it became clear that even that wasn’t enough to pierce the Queens hide, he simply returned to his same old method of electrocuting it in the eye. This brings up an important question: why not build an artillery weapon designed to punch through the critter’s eye and electrocute it? With the amount of power necessary to do that, you could easily take out lesser monsters. Since you have the shot on a cable to transmit power, you can use it as an electrified hook shot, too. Seeing the Goldleo’s internalized magic cannons was a shoutout to all the classic mecha anime, and impressive. Having the cloak-like bits on his back extend out as recoil stabilizers is a nice touch to the design. Earldiradcumber is the next upgrade of the Earlcumber, using two of the Flexible Cloaks on their own arms so as not to limit the attack capabilities of the unit. It also extends the area the shield protects, making it even better in formation. A line of Earlradcumbers with Telestale’s behind them, armed with nothing but rods, would make for a rather imposing force.

I was almost as excited as Ernie to hear the secrets of these reactors. I looked it up further from summaries of the Light Novel the series is based on. There is a special spell script which is extremely long and advanced. This Life Script absorbs ether from the air and passes it into the Catalyst Crystal. The crystal does what it did for the demon beast, and converts it into mana. An alchemic substance carries that mana out to be used, which is why we see those fluid-filled meters in the cockpit. This is the easy part. Unfortunately, the script is so long, that carving it in normal metal requires a surface area so large it isn’t usable. Elves use their magic to mold the otherwise immutable mythril into the reactor, carving the script into it on a microscopic level. Humans aren’t able to use magic without something else to convert their ether into mana, so they couldn’t build the reactors. Ernesti, on the other hand, uses his Silhouette Gear to do the work as if he were an elf. Perfect workaround. The size of the crystal and the power of the original beast determines the output ability of the ether reactor. Unfortunately, it also increases the number of adjustments needed to the life song. Otherwise, it gets unstable. Most of the time, a Silhouette Knight only uses ether reactors based around much smaller, Duel-class demon beasts.

The Ikaruga is an important name choice for Ernesti’s personal mech. The name is in Japanese, and not the local language for Kremavia. It means spotted dove but refers to the Japanese Grosbeak. The grosbeak symbolizes the moment one rises to their destiny and the primal satisfaction and boldness that comes with that. Naming this Silhouette Knight Ikaruga is Ernesti saying that he has fulfilled his life-purpose, and everything from here on out is icing on the cake. This name is also a reference to a video game. For those that aren’t gamers, Ikaruga is a top-down shoot ’em up that focuses on a mechanic of switching between black and white shot types. There are some elements in this mecha’s design that are reminiscent of the ship from the game. I’m interested to see if that will come into play with this mecha’s abilities.

Our Take

After reaching this point in the story, I feel like the former king’s promise to Ernie was… oddly written. Either the creator hadn’t thought up the origins of the ether reactor back then, or the former king was a bit duplicitous in his promise. Given that Ernie needed to impress Ambrosius and the queen elf before he got the chance to study, the king couldn’t honestly say that Ernie would get that chance. I am also having a bit of difficulty with Ernie always succeeding at everything he does. True, he didn’t technically win the mock battle with the SKL, but there is no challenge presented to Ernesti personally that he doesn’t succeed at by sheer force of enthusiasm. Partly, this is a result of the show’s liberal use of time skips. According to the novels, the time that has passed since the beginning of episode one is…

Are you sitting down?

Sixteen years. He’s in his late teens. Even though he’s a prodigy, there had to have been many times over his teenage years that he failed and was defeated at something. Awkward puberty things and girl issues. We just haven’t seen it because the show is devoted to tearing through the story at a breakneck pace. Normally, I’m all for getting right to things, but when we’ve only gotten snippets of these characters over a period of sixteen years, they aren’t fully realized or emotionally deep. I get it. This is a show for mecha and fantasy enthusiasts, who are all about action, but that doesn’t mean the writing has to sacrifice character building on that altar. All these time skips make the series feel like it played out over a year or so because we don’t have sixteen years of content. Also, in all that time, none of the characters have physically changed. They all look how they did when he was eleven. I get him staying the same since it’s been a big deal that he’s tiny, but Kid and Addie should have grown up a bit.

Otherwise, the art on this episode was beautiful. Alfheim has an interesting aesthetic to it, with homes that resemble giant fruit hanging from fossilized tree buildings. In general, I like how this show has a different way of approaching the elves as a race. They are the same general concept as other elf representations, but they are just off enough that they are unique. One thing that bothered me a bit was the scene of the monster queen’s egg sac getting cut off. Though she was CG, the animation of the falling sack and flood of blood and eggs was made traditionally, with her CG legs in front. It wasn’t poorly animated at all, but it was an odd juxtaposition of those two styles. The rest of the episode, however, uses CG and traditional animation separately from each other.

Ernesti was, as one could imagine, the main attraction in this episode. It was all about him finally achieving his dream. Justin Brenner has gotten good at portraying the many moods of the boy and is pulling extra emotion out of him with each passing episode. He isn’t getting melodramatic or overdone though. This doesn’t just apply to his excited modality. Even his sulking, hardworking mood has a bit more to it than it used to. I like that Brenner is doing this since the series isn’t giving us much character development to work with here.

So, while the action and animation were good, and the art was beautiful, an oddly composited scene and a few mounting issues with the writing gets me down. I adore this series. I actually wish I lived in this world. I just hope we aren’t going to time skip our way out of a story. Until then, I give this episode eight explodin’ queen egg sacks out of ten. That’s gotta hurt.