English Dub Review: Radiant “The Young Sorcerer -Seth-“

Omelette du Fromage.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

We learn from the narration that this world has an energy called “Fantasia” and that humans are plagued by mysterious attacks from beings known as “Nemesis”. Additionally, humans who survive those attacks are “cursed”, but also gain the ability to fight these beings and become Sorcerers.

One such Sorcerer named Seth (Christopher Llewyn Ramirez) is apprentice training under his short fuse teacher Alma (Monica Rial), but for now, he’s just showing off to his friend Tommy by stealing some of Alma’s secret Grimoires. The show goes a bit too far as what little skill Seth has ended up destroying a farm nearby and sending its cattle stampeding after him. Alma soon finds out about his scheme and gets everything under control with her own magic, but we see that the world is none too kind to Sorcerers good or bad, believing them to be just as bad as the Nemeses they fight. Seth doesn’t get why they get treated so unfairly and Alma isn’t a fan of it either, but she understands that it’s hard for regular humans to not associate them with the monsters since one shows up just as much as the other.

What Seth takes away from this conversation is that he needs to get rid of all of the Nemesis and then Sorcerers will finally be seen as the good guys, so he learns upon as much as he can from Alma’s books. The next day, a Nemesis egg falls on the town, but Alma is away on other business. So, Seth tries to handle it himself but is naturally unprepared. Even the angry villagers would rather have Alma, who they were throwing rocks at just yesterday, to take care of this. The egg hatches soon enough and Seth finds out quickly how outmatched he really is. He’s able to keep Tommy from being crushed, but is very close to being crushed himself; desperate and pleading to have a chance to show people how good Sorcerers are.

Luckily, help arrives in the form of a bearded superhero looking guy commending him for his selflessness.

OUR TAKE

We’ve never really had a shortage of ongoing anime of the shonen genre, even with the recent ending of industry titans Naruto and Bleach. There’s a formula to it that fans of it will have seen coming a mile away with each new spawn of spunky teenage boys who want to be King of the Ninja Wizards or what not. Radiant has one bit of uniqueness in its favor, however: it is based on a comic from the cheese-eating surrender monkeys over in France! But what’s odd about that you probably couldn’t tell from a first glance. At face value, it just seems like another derivative Shonen clone, but knowing someone from a country other than Japan managed to make their work seem so close to the real thing that a Japanese studio was willing to make it its own show, unlike another certain anime-esque property that started again recently.

Having grown up with shows like DBZ, Naruto, Bleach, and many other Shonen icons, I’m actually quite a fan of the mold, even when it is derivative, as long as it manages to be done at least competently. Luckily, I think Radiant makes a good enough impression on its first outing. We establish a conflict between the Sorcerers and Nemesis that will likely be the fuel for the many magical fights we’ll see, develop that by shedding some light on how the public is impacted and views this conflict from their perspective, and see how those views impact our main character, which will, in turn, drive his motivations for at least the first arc or two. Like any story, it’s gotta do the work from the start to give the audience reason to be interested in where the characters go both physically and emotionally, and this did that work.

This series has an uncommon number of episodes at 21, so it seems like the story’s going to be paced out a little differently than your typical 24-26 shows. Hopefully, that means something good and not rushing to the finish once we get there. In the meantime, while the OP and ED show a colorful cast of heroes and villains (some of whom I honestly can’t tell which is which because of how used to twists of allegiance in these types of shows) that we have a pretty by the numbers Shonen in store for us, I look forward to the charm of that winning me over.

Score
7/10