English Dub Review: Plunderer “Rain”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

While Nana is throwing her party, Hina confronts Licht about his feelings. He changes the subject, telling her that he was friends with her mother, Tsukina Farrow, and that he’s responsible for killing her father, who was Tokikaze! Yep, the time travel has things all mixed up. He drugs them all with fancy booze in order to sneak away to fight the army singlehandedly, and even Jail can’t stop him.

Meanwhile, Schmerman and the SSU are assassinating all their enemies in order to collect all seven original ballots and garner all the power of Althing to them. Ever since Hina’s mom stole one of the ballots, the government hasn’t been able to vote to preserve Alcia, so the floating land is starting to fall apart. They’ll stop at nothing to recover the ballot, which is why they can’t have Licht interfering, and who better to stop him than good ol’ Doan?

Our Take:

After the last few outrageously silly episodes of Plunderer, Rain does fair job at getting things back on track. We get more of Licht and his self sacrificing nature, more of the devious doings of the SSU, and even a look at how petty the army leaders can be during their squabbles. It doesn’t exactly break any new ground for the series, but it’s a return to the slightly more entertaining level of plot that Plunderer can offer.

The big revelation is that Licht was the one who killed Hina’s father, and that that man was Tokikaze. It’s to be expected that these kinds of familial ties would pop up after Hina went time travelling into the past, but it’s still quite the reveal. I was almost afraid the show would make Licht out to be her father, and that’s basically disavowed with this new knowledge, although knowing Licht’s nature, I wouldn’t put it past him.

After knocking his friends out, Licht tries to escape undetected in order to take on the army of Alcia by himself, but of course, drugs don’t work on Jail. He confronts Licht about his choices to continually abandon those who care for him, and the two of them rehash all of Licht’s troubles and guilt about being the only member of the army that doesn’t kill who actually does kill. It’s pretty tiring at this point, and it was nice to see Jail was a bored of it as I was.

The background scenes we get of the SSU and the army leaders was pretty interesting, as was the information that the reason Alcia is decaying is due to the SSU losing an original ballot to Hina’s mother. It’s a little strange that Jail and Licht are still on opposite sides due to them both having many of the same experiences now, but hey, things get complicated when Althing is involved.

Overall, Rain was a nice return to form for the show that focused on the things Plunderer does better: less incipt fan service and more weird plot points and confusing political drama.