English Dub Review: Tokyo Ghoul: Re “PresS: Night of Scattering”

Ambition and overconfidence are lethal bedfellows.

Overview (Spoilers)

Mutsuki is still on the run from Shu’s henchwoman, and has been stopped in his trachs when she throws a rose into her path. I mean, I’d stop if just to figure out how she got it to stick into the ground like that. Soft stem sticking into tile floors? That’s impressive. Tuxedo Mask aside, Mutsuki is also weak and exhausted from his injuries and the horror of the auction. Fortunately, Sasaki and the team arrive in time to save him.

Problem is, they aren’t the only ones in the fight. Shu has another henchwoman, and she introduces a whole new ability we haven’t seen before: detachable kagune. She can generate a bunch of thorny branches and leave them behind. They can’t follow after the pair, but they get another assignment instead. Another strike team ran across Nutcracker, and has been mostly wiped out. Since Mutsuki is exhausted, He is evacuated, with Urie as escort. Urie isn’t all that happy about it, since he’s looking for a way to step out from the pack.

Since he needs a good kill to get in good with the brass, Urie misleads Mutsuki into running right into the hiding place of all the ghouls. Quickly manipulating the situation, Mutsuki unites with Juuzou to wipe out the ghouls. When he goes to take on Big Madam, though, he quickly finds himself out of his depth. And into hers. Mutsuki comes over to help and finds Urie halfway in Big Madam’s mouth. Well, that’s bad.

Meanwhile, in the courtyard, Akira Mado takes on some of the Aogiri fighters, who call out Seidou Takizawa. Seidou intercepts the rest of the team as they go to take down Nutcracker. Sasaki and Seidou duke it out, and quickly we find that Seidou is ranked “SS”. The rest of the squad is commanded to run while Sasaki takes him on alone.

Our Take

Well, after a bit of a hiatus, we’re back to Tokyo Ghoul. There was a bit of hurt feels about the hiatus, since they were releasing subtitled episodes on time. Personally, I don’t care. I come from an era where you could only get anime subtitled. Or shredded apart when they were dubbed by DIC. Seriously, just be honest and add the K.

This episode was good fun. Despite the linearity of my overview, we were constantly bouncing back and forth between scenes. This kept up a solid pace throughout, without threatening to go too far over the top. On the downside, there was a lot that I just couldn’t keep track of. There were five different fights going on at the same time, with two of them seemingly unimportant to see. Character names were thrown around, but there is so many of them that I’m still having to rely on the wiki to keep them all straight. Fortunately, many of them are now dead. I don’t have to remember them anymore.

As predicted, Urie just can’t handle what he’s done to himself by opening that other gate. He’s more powerful, but he’s also overly aggressive, shortsighted, and pumped full of a buttload of hubris. For those of you unfamiliar, a buttload is a real measure equal to 384 gallons. Wow, your friends with that potpourri. Anyways, Urie was already a bit reckless and uncaring about his teammates. Now, he’s put Mutsuki into the lion’s den. Let’s discuss a minute that Mutsuki is not only exhausted, traumatized, and freshly regenerated from his injury but is unable to utilize his kagune. Urie is putting that teammate into the thick of things for the specific purpose of furthering his own career. Worse yet, the brass in control of this operation KNEW he would do this, and orchestrated things so he would. Not nice people.

The action was great, even if the animation wasn’t always the best. There were many scenes with minor errors in what was on screen, and some that had a fat dose of lazy. Most of these were unimportant scenes that you weren’t likely to be paying attention to anyway. When there was action, though, and real action, that animation was pretty alright.

They put a whole lot of effort into the fight scene with Nutcracker (I wonder why), including her jiggle physics (that’s why). There were a few points where her jiggle was not quite believable. Not in that they jiggled too much, but that they moved in ways that didn’t seem right with her momentum. Still, she’s extremely agile, and the fight is well done, even if it is against mooks. That’s one of the good things about these fights. They don’t just make the ghouls instantly shred the mook investigators. It gives you a second to wonder if these investigators, who have names, by the way, could be bigger characters later. Then, they die before we really know them. Oh, well.

Voice acting felt natural all around, and that’s praise. Nowhere did I feel that they were just reading lines. Urie (Adam Gibbs) was believably shady, Seidou (Micah Solusod) was creepy as all get-out. We could tell he was nuts, but his obsession with certain words and concepts bordered on humorous… until he killed someone demanding they give him that sweet jam. That’s a bit less funny. The whole scene where he confronted the two frightened investigators was prime work.