English Dub Review: The Dungeon of Black Company “Transfer”

Overview

Kinji awakens and meets Ranga, the cross-dressing male elf priestess who summoned him, and Zazel, the fanatical leader of an underground human village living in a city created thousands of years ago by the advanced Calonian civilization. Zazel reveals 300 years previously an evil corporation took over the world and threatens Kinji into defeating them. Kinji realizes he is actually in Amuria 300 years in the future and the evil corporation is Raiza’ha…

Our Take

After the proceedings of the previous episode, I was left wondering if this trend of character-focused episodes from last week would further continue with Kinji’s personal growth to a more heroic antihero rather than the sneaky scoundrel Kinji often is. Instead, the show has derailed a bit with the not-so-big reveal that it sort of rebooted itself and had to spend a third of the episode giving us an info-dump on the new future/post-apocalypse setting and a new character in the form of Ragna, whose entire gimmick is announcing how “cute” this individual is. And that’s it. That’s her entire deal. I was caught off guard but had to pause for a few minutes cringing after seeing the casual “grab” of the protagonist when it attempted to make a predictable joke that felt quite formulaic at this point.

All of this is leading up to a twist that’s supposed to feel like a punchline to a cruel joke and that’s only twenty minutes into the episode, that this so-called time skip is not apocalyptic at all and the humans they conquered are “lazy and not appreciative” of their fair treatment. But even I find it hard to believe that people hiding in a dark dirty cave in squalor like refugees aren’t appreciative enough of a good deal they’re getting from their otherwordly slave drivers which kinda gives the audience a hard time buying into the “benevolent” slaver bullshit for this joke to even land…

Overall, this was a strange direction to completely scrap the development of the past episodes to reinforce the same concepts with the same execution that have been used frequently. Up to this point, most of the story structure was episodic, but it looks like we are now getting a story continuation so it’ll be interesting to see what happens next because there has to be a twist about the demon lord in charge and one way or another the usual cast has to come back in some capacity right?