English Dub Review: Akashic Records of Bastard Magical Instructor “Face-off! The Mage Corps Battle”

Fight for your dreams, or all they are will be are dreams.

Spoilers Below

Glenn has challenged Leos to a duel for the hand of fair, underage Sistine. Leos gets to choose the method of combat, and he chooses a Mage Corps Battle. Two of the classes will work as the teachers’ soldiers. If one of the teams knocks out the other or takes out the enemy commander, they win. On paper, Leos has the advantage. He gets Class 4, a more advanced class, and he is used to teaching military magic and tactics in his school. Radars, however, even the odds by using easier to teach 2-man cells, guerilla tactics, and sneaky, underhanded booby traps. Did you really expect more from him? In the end, the two armies fight to a draw. This suits Glenn fine. He congratulates his students on fighting well against terrible odds. Leos, on the other hand, berates his students for not winning. This rubs Glenn the wrong way, and he tells the military professor just that. Leos doesn’t like that, and the two argue anew. Glenn’s comments during the argument about “never having to work again” not only anger Sistine, but provoke Leos into an all-new duel. This time, mano-a-mano.

That night, Sistine confronts Glenn about his comments. He admits that that wasn’t his real reason (though he is fully hoping to marry into money someday). To be honest, Leos was pissing him off by telling her not to follow her dreams. He loves the fact that she has this lofty goal of unlocking the sky castle’s secrets. It reminds him of himself when he was younger. He wanted desperately to be a “Mage of Justice” and struggled to be in the Imperial Mage Corps. Once there, however, he became disillusioned from years of bloodshed. He would have quit earlier, but a girl named Sarah stood beside him the whole way, encouraging him to follow his dreams. When she died during an Angel Dust incident (one that looks like it’s repeating in the present, by the way), he became despondent, quit, and lived as a moocher of Celica. After telling his story, however, he is confronted by Leos, who threatens to expose Glenn’s bloody past. Angered, Glenn bumps up the date of the duel to NOW! But Fool’s World won’t help him. Leos uses a strange trance to summon Tulpa constructs to fight for him, and doesn’t even need to cast a spell to do so. Since Fool’s World merely prevents spells from manifesting, he’s powerless to fight. Worse yet, he doesn’t even show up for the real fight the next day, and Leos has Sistine firmly in his clutches. Clutches which look more and more evil by the minute.

We only have one more episode to go here, and things are really heating up! I loved the en medias res of the episode’s opening. It just jumped into the start of the battle, and explained how the tactics worked as you went. I was figuring that Glenn would have gone for a roundabout method of getting at Leos, instead of taking out the enemy team with booby traps, but I guess this way was more fun. I’m a bit frustrated with Sistine. She knew full well that Glenn was playing along with her own lie that they were secretly engaged, but still gets mad about his intentions and makes him explain himself to her. As if the writers forgot the dialogue at the end of the last episode. Oh, well. At least we got to go two whole episodes without Rumia getting kidnapped. I mean, if she isn’t getting abducted, it almost feels like she isn’t even there. Really, though, the conversation between Glenn and Sistine is a pretty solid one when she gets her head on straight. He speaks from the heart. Josh Grelle does manage to get across the pain behind Radar’s story, if only barely. This is a good thing, as Glenn wouldn’t let himself become an emotional wreck in its telling. It’s just the right balance between emotion and suppression.

Animation isn’t amazing, but it is good. The way they animate Glenn running around and laughing into the booby traps is slapstick, over-the-top, and just right for the occasion, even if it isn’t the smoothest. It’s the case of a good key animator having fun. I think each scene only had a few key frames with no in-betweening, but its style made up for the lack of smooth animation, and you just end up liking it. Solid art style flows again in the flashback scene, allowing for a dramatic retelling. We don’t get these scenes animated, merely swept through, but they convey the emotion of the story well. There is also a subtle shift in camera focus used to draw the viewer’s attention. The show as a whole uses dramatic camera angles, and it works well for the storytelling.

We still have a few unanswered questions, though, and I hope one episode more is enough to answer them and wrap everything up. One, what is this Angel Dust stuff, and why is it leaving a trail of death everywhere? Two, how does Leos’ plans for Sistine have anything to do with the Researchers’ motives, such that they are supporting him? Hopefully, he isn’t the source of the Angel Dust, because that would be cliche. Third, what is the bloody skeleton in Glenn’s closet? Did he end up killing Sara while hopped up on Angel Dust? Finally, who is this top-hatted man who seems to be in control of the Researchers? What is his goal, other than immortality? I guess we’ll find out net time. Until then, I give this episode seven creepy fiances out of ten.