English Dub Review:Takt Op.Destiny “Music -Reincarnation-”

Overview

It all began ten years ago. D2s attacking Boston, a blood-soaked concert hall: The incident known as the Boston Tragedy. The conductor who lost his life in that tragedy was none other than Kenji Asahina, Takt’s father. After losing his father, the boy decides to devote himself to playing the piano and he lets his rage play through his melodies. The one who took care of him was a girl named Cosette, who looked just like Destiny.


Our Take

Usually, in anime, we get the “obligatory flashback episode” either in the middle or near the end of a season that’s meant to recontextualize everything we know about the characters or lore of a show’s universe, but it’s clear this is sort-of a flashback episode given what we the audience were just introduced to in the last episode since Destiny/Corsette used to be a very different person back then compared present day where she currently has the emotional depth of a coffee table. But we also get quite an exposition dump of news coverage in the opening that explains the banning of music being played publicly unless it’s a legally approved event such as what happens later in this story…

Takt is obviously quite attached to the piano, but to everything else, it’s filth. Anna has to behave like a mother for the two and finds it a problem of taking care of both Cosette and Takt, the latter especially of his past as a well-established pianist along with his late father Kenji who was a Conductor before his untimely death, which stopped him from playing the piano in front of people. I sure as hell would understand Takt and his motivation to play music if he was more upright towards Cosette, who’s more inept at playing Beethoven’s pieces yet shows some degree of skill. Seeing the New York Symphonia Party festival for the first time with Grand Maestro Sagan, he also seeks a world where the D2s are nonexistent, but then people cannot play music for fear that the D2s will attack out of nowhere, and the surprising part? He was sadly absolutely right and it lead to dark aftermath and the dramatic change we see with Corset/Destiny that we see now.

Overall, while the first episode felt like Mad-House in action in terms of action sequences, this one was done by MAPPA and was leaning more towards the music & story side. We also got to see some past events in this episode involving the characters, but in all honesty, this should’ve been the first episode as it sets up so much story and explanations behind how this world works. At the very least, we now have an idea of what happened before Cosette transforms into Destiny. But a lot of details are not yet there. Let’s see if these will be answered this season…