English Dub Review: Platinum End: “Hero of Justice”

Overview: Mirai (Alejandro Saab) learns more about the angel ranking system as well as more about how his powers affect his life when a new potential threat in that of a God candidate rears its ugly head. 

Our Take: Mirai not wanting to be the all-powerful God almighty himself, abuse his abilities, and most importantly, kill himself makes him a sensible, all-around decent guy to root for as he navigates the reality of Gods and angels. It’s even more logical and smart in how it quickly addresses the rationality behind the rationality of believing something as crazy as those concepts with the simple yet poignant fact of what Mirai has witnessed up to this point with Nasse and the powers she bestowed upon him. Mirai’s desire for a good life with admirable ideals shows a proper path forward into the life and death competition, acting as a compelling motivation for him as he will be dead should he not accept it and therefore the angelic abilities. The writing is starting to wear on me with how overly contrived and artificially sentimental it’s been with incessant ranting of happiness from Mirai’s backstory with his family, notably his mother. 

It’s great to see the positive choices Mirai makes are not with their own negative consequences with his eventual conflict with other God candidates. One of which is choosing to not close himself off from the world and go into hiding because of Metropoliman who fights by his own brutal brand of justice, with powers of a special rank angel, but truly just wants to be hailed as a God by mankind. He runs the risk of being a generic, arrogant antagonist but his code keeps him just interesting enough, for now at least, with how his ideology will dictate who he chooses to kill or not. Besides outward fame and plain normalcy from Metropoliman and Mirai, restrictively, it’s both intriguing and exciting how the series showcases all the ways the angel powers can be used like through that of a comedian’s insatiable lust and vary based upon an angel’s rank with it constantly changing and therefore keeping the power dynamic of the landscape ever evolving. And things heat up even more when Mirai is discovered by an angel at his school with those fierce battles probably not far away, but, thankfully, in this episode’s case coming off of the first one, the lack of quality seems to be in the rearview mirror.