English Dub Review: Helck “Invasion”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Vermillio and Helck get to bond more while they look for help and get to directed to meet with a mage who may be able to send them back. Meanwhile, Azudra and the other contestants face off against a new fleet of awakened winged humans.

OUR TAKE

So, faithful reader, do you remember a few weeks ago when this show began and I immediately showed a dislike for the dynamic for Helck and Vermillio, with it being pretty easy to boil down to Helck being a solid dude who could do no wrong while Vermillio just sat in the corner and seethed while waiting for him to turn out to be bad? Well, that continues to be the crux of the character work in this episode, with it continuing to be repetitive and annoying, partly due to Vermillio’s English voice actress, digging into the recesses of my soul with just how annoying her character can be. Not that I think she’s a bad voice actor, I’ve heard her do fine in other shows, it’s just this one that seems to not work for me. And heck, the simplicity of this feels so core to this show’s plot that I could probably copy this entire paragraph into every future review and it would probably fit just as well as in this one. Might as well if this is going to be an issue for me every single episode. But I would never resort to something so lazy, no sir.

Anyway, at least this time we get a little bit more of a hint at Helck’s reasoning for wanting to destroy all humans, with him saying things like they need to be wiped out or can’t exist. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from the last Planet of the Apes trilogy, it’s that, yeah, humans do kinda need to be wiped out. But for the purposes of the story, we also learn a tiny bit more about what’s happening with these “awakened” humans, as this is apparently a form that they cannot revert from and turns them into essentially living weapons, at least according to people in this episode. I guess we’ll learn more about it in the weeks to come, though for now the task at hand is getting Vermillio and Helck off the island and Azudra leading a bunch of demons against some awakened humans. And I gotta say, I’m glad we’re getting some fights without Helck around, since it’ll give these characters a chance to actually show off and see how the power-scaling goes against these Awakeneds. I actually think I’m starting to warm up to this show, which is good since we’ve still got three quarters to go.