English Dub Review: Hatena Illusion Episode 11

Overview:

Hatena and Makoto set out to steal the last piece of the puzzle to free Hatena’s mother.

Our Take:

This episode happened, alright.

To be fair, this show has never had stellar writing. A lot of plot threads seem to come to and resolve out of nowhere, but it was really apparent this time around. The family has the first two artifacts needed for the exchange, and now they have to steal the final one, the violin. The violin heist, the first official heist that Hatena and Makoto have been training for, takes up maybe a third of the episode. The rest is devoted to a mysterious new lady that from what I recall, hasn’t appeared in the story beforehand, and at least from this episode, has barely has any leadup, who is now the antagonist of the final two episodes. Not the people who have taken Hatena’s mother hostage, but this completely new person who we have never met before.

On top of that, it turns out that the magical violin that we don’t know anything about is actually a completely different artifact with deadly powers. To be fair, this artifact is actually pretty dangerous, with the ability to nullify artifacts around it. It would have been nice if this was brought up earlier, so it could be shown to its full potential, but instead it comes up and then is shortly dropped due to a simple scuffle. While using actual magic tricks to diffuse a situation is a neat trick, the surrounding parts are so weak that I couldn’t really enjoy it.

The real weight of this episode is on Makoto and Dina, specifically their rivalry and the fact that Dina is actually a girl. She disguised herself to become a proper apprentice, and despises Makoto for being able to gain an apprenticeship so easily. Once again, this is potential drama, but it should not be in the second to last episode, and it feels like something far more important that should have come up much earlier.

Knowing that the next episode is the last episode, the climactic moment isn’t on the team returning the stolen artifacts to get mom back, but on a mysterious new lady and how one of the artifacts that they want is actually something ultrapowerful. It’s putting the dramatic tension in all the wrong moments, and I can’t say that I’m impressed.

I try not to hate on animation, even shoddy animation, because there’s a lot of hard work that goes into the process, but this was just bad. The action scenes felt very flat, the characters didn’t move well, and even the still shots seemed off. Altogether, not a very stellar episode, and for the second to last one, that’s not a very good sign.