Dies Irae – 04/05[Spider/Reunion]

Forgive my tardiness in not covering Dies Irae last week. I had a few things going on and a serious lack of motivation. I am certain all two of you(Might be an overexpression of the number) that read these Dies Irae reviews were deeply disappointed. We have two episodes this week, one which was rather mediocre and the other which was actually surprising entertaining. It might be due to the previous episode being about action as Ren faces one of the members of the Obsidian round table and naturally the animation quality cannot match the quality needed to make this fight entertaining. We did at least get some exposition on the kind of magic this series will be using. Namely it being former execution and torture devices that killed so many people as to gain supernatural power from absorbing their souls. The more people you kill, the more powerful you become.

So in that regard Ren is ata serious disadvantage as the members of the table have been killing for quite a long time while he only recently acquired his Ahnenerbe, aka magical execution device. The Ahnenerbe has four levels of power and I will go by the Visual Novel names rather than the wrong crunchyroll definitions. Assiah is the first and it basically is a level to confirm that someone has one. In Ren’s case it means he can cut things by willing it, which would be very useful but trust me when I say this level is rarely used. Yetzirah is forming the Ahnenerbe into a useable weapon, as Ren did against spinne when he summoned up those red blades. Briah is the third and it’s basically a ripoff Reality marble complete with ripoff unlimited bladeworks chants. And the final level which we shall just pass over for now.

The fifth episode was surprisingly good as i said before, though it certainly starts bad with the oldest anime cliche in the book. Waking up with random beautiful girl in your bed is something I remember from harems of yore though I am certain if I looked there’s a few light novel adaptions still using it. Though I do like the past of Marie, the spiritual manifestation of the guillotine, or ghost of one of its victims. A girl who was born under a guillotine, freaked out her parents and everyone around her with her one man sing a long while unintentional chopping off the head of anyone who touched her. Certainly a mysterious girl but the biggest question i have is how did two parents with dark hair give birth to a bright blonde baby? Either the misses was getting around or whatever power she gained decided to bleach her hair.

I can’t say her personality is much to speak of though considering she pretty much doesn’t have one unless you count puppy dog level affection. She does gain more of a personality later but while I do find her design appealing, I never really saw her as much of a strong character. Who I do find to be strong characters are the two introduced in this episode, Shirou and Ellie. Otherwise what I would call the characters that should have been the protagonists. These two are barrels of fun though right now they are more on the serious side due to wanting to get involved with Ren’s fight. The coming episode could help redeem this somewhat seeing as we have passed much of the slow start and gotten into the real story. But this is a story of style over substance and things really aren’t going to get better if we can’t up the style.