English Dub Review: The Vampire Dies in No Time “Heisei Annoying Vampire Battle in Shin-Yoko”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

There’s a festival going in on Shin-Yokohama, but not all is fun and games. There are a bunch of vampires infiltrating the festivities and trying to suck the blood of innocent passersby! Hinaichi tries to put a stop to their antics, but there’s too many of them and she fears all is lost… until the arrival of the Vampire Empress. Later, Ronaldo and Draluc track down a runaway experiment and Draluc pretends to to host his own radio show.

Our Take:

Another week, another new dubbed episode of The Vampire Dies in No Time! This week’s episode, Heisei Annoying Vampire Battle in Shin-Yoko, puts us into the heart of the action with a festival, an escaped experiment gone wrong, and Draluc having a bit too much fun. It’s nothing more than the sum of its parts, but the parts themselves aren’t too bad this time around.

The first part of this week’s episode was definitely my favorite. The atmosphere of the festival made for a nice change of pace from the usual storyline, and I liked Hinaichi and Draluc getting some nice moments together. The whole ‘vampires running booths’ gag got old pretty quick, but then the show did what it normally doesn’t do and added on some additional plot. Hinaichi finds herself in an oddly-animated other dimension of sorts and is almost swept up by a malevolent presence before she’s saved by… Draluc? It’s never made explicit, but I like the suggestion that he’s more than just Ronaldo’s silly sidekick.

Sadly, the show reverts back to its usual hijinks after the festival wraps up. Ronaldo and Draluc are summoned to the Vampiric Research Facility and given the task of bringing back one of the escaped experiments—which, of course, happens to be a weirdly sexualized creature that attaches to people’s crotches and looks like a ball sack. Subtlety is not this show’s strong suite, so the creature makes its host a major magnet for the opposite sex. Things go pretty much as expected, with the thing attaching to random vampires and humans as Ronaldo and Draluc chase after it. The ending where it turns John into a god of sorts was kind of nice, at least.

The final segment this week has Draluc hosting a kind of pretend radio show where he goes around asking people questions. He leaves Ronaldo to battle a vampiric vegetable and then hightails it to the Hunter’s Guild, where he does things like asking the nun why she dresses like a nun and asking the duck why he wears a duck costume. It’s a nice way to involve some of the background characters in the show, but feels more like it should be a bonus web short or something instead of taking up space in an actual episode.

Heisei Annoying Vampire Battle in Shin-Yoko definitely won’t go down in history as one of my favorite episodes of the show, but it did have its moments of levity. The festival was a lot of fun, and seeing John worshipped as humanity’s savior certainly feels like one of the highlights of the show so far. I just wish the series could cut back on some of the less enjoyable aspects.