English Dub Review: Knight’s & Magic “Force & Justice”

Houston, we have plotline. Repeat. We have plotline.

Overview (Spoilers)

The neighboring kingdom of Kusperchia has been conquered in a single night by the Zaloudek Empire. The king of Kusperchia, in an attempt to stall for his daughter’s escape, fought a losing duel against the Zaloudeki prince. Unfortunately, the enemy units are all empowered by technology reverse engineered from the Trandorkis. They are all stronger, faster, and have back weapons. Worse yet, during their escape, the princess and her two escorts, the sister and the niece to the current king of Ernesti’s country of Fremmavilla, are captured. After not hearing from his family in a while, the king dispatches his son and the Order of the Silver Phoenix. Between the raw firepower of the Goldleo, the charging speed of the twin Tzendribble, and the unbridled combat potential of Ernesti’s Ikaruga, not many of the enemy units can stand in their way. Learning from their spies that the Zaloudeki prince plans to marry the captured princess, and runs off to rescue her. The caravan comes under attack by a specialized raid, but Addy and Deitrich defeat their sword-happy leader.

This episode takes all of the formulas we are used to seeing in this series and throws it away. It’s all about fights. We have abandoned all scenes and segments about new technologies being developed, and instead, we get awesome looking mechs making short work of mooks. Ikaruga is impressive, to say the least. It has a total of six arms, each at the strength of the Telestare. It also has a pair of swords the pop open to reveal cannon wands that require specialized, typewriter-like controls. It seems that Ernesti can use these controls to program various spell macros on the fly. What confuses me is why he chose not to include integrated weapons solutions like we see on Goldleo and Gilbariga. With six arms, placing even small spell cannons over each wrist still, provides the mecha with incredible combat capabilities. It also does not preclude the use of external weapons like those mega-gunblades. My other question: what happened to the artillery chariot? Does it only work with the Toybox? It would have been incredibly helpful here against the airships. Also, why didn’t Ernesti give chase in the Ikaruga. It has jet boosters for a reason!

In a strange choice, the English Dub chooses to call the enemy Knight model a Tyrantos. However, in many of the Japanese publications, it is often written in English and written as Tyrant. Why they decided to translate it straight as they were hearing it is a bit odd to me. Ernesti seems to be in the business of collecting up the chunks of the enemy units. This seems to be less about analyzing their alterations in the design, and more about reclaiming instances of his IP. I’m interested to see how Zaloudek handled the power-consumption issue. Did they do as the SKL did, and hybridize with both Strand and Plate type Crystal Tissue? Or did they come up with a completely different solution? It doesn’t seem like the Tyrants have the use limitations of the Telestare. Also, that enemy commander unit at the end was ridiculous. What I liked about it was that its back weapons are also blades. This meant that it is capable of attacking in between its attacks. It is a great melee combatant for one-on-one fights. However, as we see, it is extremely vulnerable to being flanked, and it has no ranged capabilities.

Our Take

This episode lacked many of the pacing issues we are used to seeing in this series. It doesn’t use action to break up and accent Ernesti’s romps into mechanic-land. Instead, brief asides for plot break up the action. This makes it feel like more is happening in a much shorter period of time, even though the episode covers a period of weeks. The anime makes a point to show instead of telling. From what I can see, the light novel series had Ernie being summoned by the king, who explained the situation. The anime skips that and instead shows what happened, which is always good storytelling. We are given light narration, at a couple points, but I feel like that narration is superfluous. It largely existed to tell us what we were seeing and explain why the Zaloudeki leaders are referring to the Order of the Silver Phoenix as a horse and rider carrying the grim reaper. We don’t really need that, but it doesn’t take up much time, or hurt the pacing much.

The story is tying together various bits that have been laid throughout the show. We now know who stole the Trandorkis, and can see the results of several years in reverse engineering the unit. The spy girl Nora Frykburg from the Azure Hawk has continually made appearances throughout the show, but now contributes to the story, undercover as a maid in the enemy castle. With these story threads tied together, we are ready to charge after the conclusion, which seems to only be four episodes away!

The action is fast and furious. With the Ikaruga built for speed as it is, you really couldn’t expect anything else. Almost all of our hero mechs are given time in the sun. The exception is the Earlradcumber, that just stands around. I enjoyed the animation in the action sequences, as attention was given to tiny details. When the Ikaruga uses its sword cannon, you can actually see it pull a trigger. Most shows wouldn’t bother with that bit. Instead, they’d just hold out the gun and it would fire. The enemy units are sliced up in front of our eyes, and the animation for it happening is as smooth as butter. Even the traditional animation we see outside of the mecha is of good quality, likely because they didn’t have much of it to do.

Voice acting in this episode wasn’t all that bad. None of the characters stood out as feeling out of place, but they also didn’t sound all that deep. There were a few notable exceptions. Isodora, the niece of the king, has a great amount of emotional depth, and even does impersonations of other characters. She was very entertaining to listen to. The other exception was… the narrator? That’s right. The narration of the episode was actually rather expressive. This was part of the reason why it didn’t mess with the pacing. It kept your attention, where else it might have lost it. Too bad there was little point in it being there. There was one thing that bothered me about this episode, though. The opening credits are visually the same, and even uses the same song. For some reason, though, they added a bunch of sound effects that were not only unnecessary, but were so loud and piercing, they overwhelmed the music. I really hope they don’t bring this back in the next episode.

So, the story has finally gotten its feet underneath itself, and is taking off at a run. To couple with this, we get some really solid animation and action. Those few examples of truly good voice acting aren’t brought down by any mediocre examples. I like where this show is headed, and I think it’s going to finish as strong as it started.