English Dub Review: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest “A Disturbing Darkness”

Overview

Daisuke and his shadowy co-conspirator overtly take action against Commander Meld, triggering the final phase of their nefarious plan. Meanwhile, Hajime encounters a group of bandits attacking someone he has met before…

Our Take

Picking up from the previous episode, with the sniveling, boisterous, and envious bully Daisuke is back at it once again, opposing the kingdom by an internal coup d’etat first against Captain Meld. But at the very least, Daisuke sucks as a fighter and wasn’t able to completely land a fatal blow on Meld. But If Meld wasn’t holding back, he probably would’ve killed Daisuke there instead of just knocking him into the wall. Also, the interesting part is that there’s now a mysterious angelic-looking character showing up in the sky at night who design-wise closely resembles “KOS-MOS” from the videogame franchise “Xenosaga” named “Noint” who claims to be “Ehit’s Apostle”.

On the wayside, Hajime is doing what he always does best: being an edge-lord male empowerment fantasy that most teen boys would love to become that shoots villains and saves the damsels in distress, which in this case is Princess “Lily” Liliana of the Heiligh Kingdom. I do find it funny that Hajime has kinda forgotten her, but it was mostly played for laughs. Though Lily did have a legit purpose to tell him what’s going on within the kingdom along with their teacher being kidnapped by Psycho Nuns in the Divine Mountain, plus with most of the royal guard all becoming brainwashed/undead and the usual Church “religion” breaking the mold within royal ranks, it all boils down to the heretic-branded Irregular Hajime doing a service to Ms. Aiko to save her and take down enemies along their way.

Overall, many of the subplots that were sprinkled at the end of each episode during the course of season 2 are now slowly coming together leading up to this moment. With 4 episodes left there’s no telling how far the proceedings will escalate or what will happen once Hajime and his crew encounter the school Traitors Daisuke and Eri or Noint herself who seems pretty upper-tier.