English Dub Season Review: Knight’s & Magic Season One

It’s a great warm up for a Maker Fair.

Overview (Spoiler)

Kurata is a computer programming genius. What he does with code is the stuff of legends. He’s also a bit of a mecha otaku. And he’s dead in the first two minutes. Fortunately for the plotline, he finds himself reborn as Ernesti Echevalier. This is a world of magic, which uses mana to animate humanoid robots called Silhouette Knights for the purposes of monster hunting and warfare. Magic, as it turns out, isn’t all that different from writing subroutines in object oriented programming. In short, he’s in heaven. Using his knowledge of modern technology and mecha concepts from fiction, he single-handedly revolutionizes the design of Silhouette Knights. Rival developers want his designs, enemy kingdoms try to steal his mecha, and his best friend’s sister wants to cuddle him until his head pops. Still, he doesn’t let any of this get him down. Empowered by nothing more than his fanatical love of mecha, he pushes the envelope and doesn’t afraid of anybody.

Okay, a bit of a complication here. One of his mecha did get stolen by an enemy kingdom, and they used it to propel their own weapons design forward by quite the leap. Using their new units and some airships, the kingdom of Zaloudek conquers their neighbors in Kuspercha. Ernesti and his friends are sent to rescue the crown princess of Kusperchia and liberate Kusperchia. Using his newly designed Ikaruga Silhouette Knight, he cuts a swath through the enemy, leading a war of attrition against Zaloudek and their weapons designer, Horatio Cojal. Cojal is the creator of the airships, but he isn’t done innovating there!

So, I’m a bit of a fan of mecha myself. This anime was right up my alley, and I watched Ernesti’s every development with glee. The story combines a heavy dose of magical treknobabble with its heavy artillery, but it’s a complete enough universe that your suspension of disbelief is only tested a little bit. Magic has its limits, and these arcane automata feel grounded enough that the concept of magic doesn’t change them all that much from their purely technological equivalents in shows such as Gundam. Ernesti uses real-world solutions to their problems and thinks with his own set of aesthetics. Until now, all the Silhouette Knights were completely humanoid in design. Very rapidly, he changes this by adding an extra set of arms to the mecha. This allows them to continue in melee combat, fire ranged shots, and never switch weapons. It also allows the back arms to act as turrets, shooting in directions the mecha isn’t facing. It opens up their tactical possibilities considerably. Out of all of his designs, my favorite is still the Tzendribble, a centaur-like Knight that wields a lance and is later equipped with an anti-air artillery option called the Missile Javelin. It’s fast enough on the ground that it can function as a blockade runner, but can also make attack runs on the enemy. Out of combat, it can be used to haul loads and transport other Silhouette Knights long distances rather quickly. I would have just preferred it to have gotten the Flexible Cloak shield option instead of the Missile Javelin, but that’s me.

Our Take

This series is a ton of fun for mecha nerds. Primarily because we get to live vicariously through Ernie. The first half of the series is centered primarily on him inventing stuff. While this is all well and good, it leaves a bit to be desired in the plot and excitement department. There is no character development in this show, and when the first half has little in the way of goings on, the formula gets monotonous. Finish the action from the last episode, invent crap, show it off, set up for a bit of action and maybe show a couple minutes. Rinse, repeat. This all changes in the second half of the series, where the war effort keeps most of the episode firmly cemented in action. Sure, there still isn’t much character development (except for Ernie’s friend Archid), but at least you are never bored. Along with that, the series is very liberal with its time skips. The series covers the entire adolescence of Ernesti, and some episodes will happily bounce over the events of several months as if they never happened. This makes logical sense since it takes time to build these complicated machines, but it doesn’t feel like time passes. Since so little plot is covered in the early episodes, and so much time is jumped over, it feels like it’s just a couple of weeks. Personally, I would have liked a bit more political intrigue and character development to take the stage and to have extended the first half of the season into a season in its own right. This would have given us another season for the war efforts. I feel like this would have made for a more compelling story, and would make Ernie feel less like a Marty Stu.

The series utilizes two different forms of animation. For all of its mecha and monsters, it used CG. This allowed them to animate these moving bits with more smoothness and fidelity than traditional animation would easily allow. Restricting the CG to these functions also allowed them to hide the lifelessness that CG animation tends to have. You are looking at robots or monsters. Of course they move stiffly. Not content to leave it there, the animators do put some effort into this CG, giving the mechas’ movements a sense of weight and solidity. In the meantime, everything outside of the mecha is done using traditional animation. For the most part, this is mainstream in its style, and rarely has much worthwhile detail in the character animation. The exception to this rule is Ernie’s eyes, which have so many levels of color to it, they look dazzling whenever he gets a closeup. The background art is beautiful, and the scenery is imaginative. The elven city was rather inspired, I feel, and the capital of Fremevilla is lovely as well.

As a show that focuses on action and nerding out, the voice acting doesn’t have much behind it. Sure, Justin Briner really gets across Ernesti’s excitement when he talks about mecha and inventing, but most of the other characters are one-note throughout the series. Addie is always a peppy girl begging for Ernie’s attention. The kid is always living in Ernie’s shadow… until he isn’t. Kid’s story takes an interesting turn during the war arch of the story, giving Stephen Fu a bit more to work with. Still, I don’t remember a massive amount of depth in the character’s voice acting. None of these characters are unbelievable in how their lines are performed, and I find none of them to be annoying or painful to hear. It just isn’t an anime about characters. It’s about robots.