English Dub Review: The Vampire Dies in No Time “Ridiculous Hunter Guild”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Hinaichi has been suspicious of Draluc ever since the two of them met, but she’s never been able to prove that he’s up to anything devious. In order to investigate him further, she convinces the chief of police to give her permission to tail him. She puts Draluc under some extreme surveillance, but all she founds out is that he’s kind of a wimp.

Later on, Ronaldo goes to a meeting of the Vampire Hunters’ Guild and brings Draluc along, which turns out to be a big mistake. Draluc can’t stop commenting on the hunters’ strange costumes and weird personalities. Then a beefy hunk named Senya comes along and challenges Ronaldo to decide who gets to be Draluc’s partner. Ronaldo lets Senya take the lead at first, but when his editor instructs him to work together with Draluc on another book, he has to step up and win the day.

Our Take:

The third episode of The Vampire Dies in No Time starts out innocently enough with another segment involving everyone’s favorite mini vampire police offer Hinaichi. But in the second storyline, things get a lot less fun with the introduction of Senya, an oddly off-putting, queer-coded stereotype who falls flat when it comes to comedy. The combination of these two makes for a mishmash of an episode that isn’t really much fun.

It does start out pretty well, though. Hinaichi already had a lot of potential from her initial appearance last week, and this week we get to experience the segment from her point of view, which does wonders in shaking up the traditional storytelling format the show is already starting to settle into. Usually it’s just Ronaldo and Draluc arguing, but with another layer added in thanks to Hinaichi’s perspective, it comes across as a fresher take on things. Some of Hinaichi’s reactions to Draluc’s escapes are especially funny, like how she interprets his getting bullied by middle schoolers as an act of self-sacrifice. The ending of the segment leaves this storyline open for more episodes down the road, so I’m definitely looking forward to that.

One thing I’m not looking forward to is more of Senya. He gets introduced as part of a segment where Ronaldo takes Draluc to meet the rest of his vampire-hunting associates. This one actually starts out okay, with Draluc getting all excited over the hunters’ and their crazy costumes. Some of them are pretty fun, like the baseball playing vampire hunter whose weapons of choice are a baseball and a bat. Even he has to admit that it’s pretty hard to defeat a vampire with a baseball.

Once Senya enters the scene, though, things go downhill quickly. With his revealing outfit, sex-crazed pushiness and refusal to take no for an answer, he’s out of place among his fellow hunters and desperately unfunny. His treatment of Draluc like some kind of pet/slave is just gross, too. There’s a few slightly silly bits, like when Senya and Ronaldo get into a Twister contest, but for the most part it’s a chore to watch and it drags on waaaaay too long. Hinaichi’s segment only lasted the first eight minutes or so, whereas the guild meeting takes up the entirety of the rest of the episode’s length.

Ridiculous Hunter Guild is definitely a mixed bag for me. I did enjoy the first third or so, and think there’s plenty of potential for keeping things interesting with more 3rd-person POV segments like Hinaichi’s storyline. The vampire hunters’ guild meeting started off pretty good, but finishing it out with a bunch of overly long and unfunny Senya scenes left a bad taste in my mouth. Less Senya and more John the armadillo please!