English Dub Review: The Duke of Death and His Maid “The Duke and the Meteor Shower During the Full Moon”

Overview:

Alice challenges the Duke to a game of pool. Whoever wins gets to ask the other to do whatever they want. When Alice wins she asks the Duke to join her in going to a festival. The Duke wears a costume that is so thick it keeps anyone bumping into him safe. The Duke wants to genuinely express his feelings to Alice and not just offhandedly say them. He takes her out on a boat but things don’t go according to plan.

Our Take:

One refreshing thing about this show is that we the audience know they have feelings for each other. But the Duke and Alice do a pretty good job of making it known as well. None of this “just confess already!” stuff we see in a lot of romance anime. Alice said she loved him and during this episode, the Duke does the same thing. He is concerned that with him blurting out his feelings that they will be taken as “insincere” but Alice is pretty intuitive so I think she knows.

When Alice suggested going somewhere that might be crowded I was wondering how the Duke would get by. I guess that if he has enough layers everything will be okay. Alice mentioned something about steel but I didn’t see anything like that with his costume but maybe it was there the whole time. I am sure the story is going to eventually go in a way where he gets the curse lifted but with this suit, it seems like there could be some sort of workaround to it all.

Couple of things to mention from their visit to the town. The negative one is the animation was a bit weird. There was a lot of 2D mixed in which a lot of 3D anime do. It wasn’t good though, it looked drawn rather roughly and just clashed with the main characters and pulled me out of the episode a bit. The cool part though was when the Duke sat down and played the piano. The tune he played was really good and it attracted the townspeople so it was a really defining character moment I think.

The Duke of Death and His Maid is really fun and a breath of fresh air for the genre. I am sure we won’t actually see them together for a LONG time like with most romcoms. But them being honest with their feelings is definitely nice and I hope to see their relationship grow in the coming episodes.