English Dub Review: Tokyo Ghoul Re “VOLT: White Darkness”

Monster vs monster.

Overview:

The prison breakout leads to absolute chaos.

Our Take:

This may sound repetitive of what I said last week, but once again, I know it’s impossible to mimic Ishida’s art style in the anime (although, what I wouldn’t give to actually see an anime in Ishida’s art style), so I’m not really expecting that. However, the anime quality is abysmal in comparison to the manga art, yes in being very generic, but also in visual composition.

I haven’t reread the Kaneki/Haise vs Arima fight in a very long time, but I remember a couple things about it: that it was very long, and it was very dynamic. Whether you buy into the emotional arc of it all or not, there’s no question that when reading about the fight, you can tell how strenuous it was. It felt like this very, very long fight. That it wasn’t something that was easy, handwaved fight, but it was a harsh fight between two monsters.

That’s it, monsters. Arima has been built up over the course of the series to be an absolute monster, a complete force of nature. He is the strongest fighter in all of the CCG, and even from the very first season, he is an absolute force to be reckoned with. We’ve seen him fight minor ghouls, and even more powerful ghouls, but rarely has he had a fight that lasted this long, and also meant something. Because overall, Arima is an extremely muted character; we’ve had to guess a lot of things about him because he doesn’t expose his emotions overall. However, he took in Haise, and trained him up to be a protege of some sort, the same person that he is then fighting with. This fight, at least to Arima, has quite a bit of meaning, even if he doesn’t vocally express what they are. This comes back to haunt him because it ends very surprisingly- I know I was surprised when I first got to that part! Arima commits suicide. He doesn’t allow anyone to kill him, but instead, after seeing that Kaneki’s willpower doesn’t waver, allows himself to die. He could have continued fighting, and it’s implied that he could have won. This is a supremely shocking moment and comes as even more of a surprise after this strenuous, hard fight.

What we get is a very generic and blatant fight, with hardly any of the emotion behind it. The emotional beats are still there, but it doesn’t have the same raw power that the manga did, because the anime doesn’t put enough effort into visualizing the fight as something hard. Instead, it feels like any old fight, not one of the climactic moments in all of Re:, against one of the most feared characters in the series. It’s weak, and the laziness of the animation and how the fight felt only detracts from it. Disappointing.