English Dub Review: No Guns Life “Engineer”


OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Cobo takes Mary hostage to lure out the fake Victor, but also brings back Juzo, who activates his true form to regenerate his lost arms. He and the fake Victor stop Cobo, who is arrested, though Tetsuro is still stuck with Spitzbergen, who inform him on his previous affiliation with the group that he doesn’t remember. They also want him to use Harmony to control Juzo, erase his memory so that Juzo is only a weapon, and then using that to defeat Seven, the other Gun Slave.

OUR TAKE
This concludes the first arc of this half of the season, but it lays the groundwork for the bigger conflicts to come. It provides some further explanation into what really happened to Mary’s brother, bringing him into the story proper and showing his previous connection to Juzo, while also diving more into Juzo’s mysterious past as a Gun Slave prior to his time as a resolver in the present day. And in keeping with the momentum set up by previous story arcs, this one has at least a few bombastic finishes to cap things off, as well as setting up bigger fights in the future and showing a clearer picture of the threats on the horizon. With still eight episodes left to go before the season wraps, how does the end of this arc do at setting the tone for things to come?

Well, we seem to get somewhat of a confirmation that we’re not considering this sub-brain Victor the Dismantler as a real part of Victor’s self, which as I said before, feels a bit like cheating. It did come from his mind after all, but it was also a sub-brain that just happened to only turn on and absorb a horribly traumatic event and shape its worldview of Extendeds based on that alone, so in a way it IS Victor…just a single part of him that was given its own body and showing how the technology of this world can go very wrong very quickly. But then again if it didn’t we wouldn’t have a story so…kind of a wash, I guess?

The other thing is something that’s going to be addressed soon…I hope, which is Tetsuro and his apparent former allegiance to Spitzburgen. Like with Victor, I imagine we’re going to learn more about his dark side and how he’s connected to this radical group, as well as how this will play into him helping them manipulate Juzo into a big fight that could cost him what’s left of his humanity, but all that cool stuff is going to have to wait for the next set of episodes to be dubbed. In the meantime, I have to say that what we’ve seen so far of this half of the season has been consistently solid and leaves me with high expectations for the remaining episodes to come down the road. Either that, or I’ll just have to watch them subbed. And no one wants me to do that, right?