Dies Irae

Episode 3

For a while in the first part of this episode, I actually thought that Dies irae was improving. Mind you, I don't mean that it was actually getting good, just ascending to the level of mediocrity at least. Then it stopped making sense. I'm starting to wonder if some level of familiarity with the source game isn't being assumed here, since what gets thrown at us over the second half of the episode is just a jumble of story concepts with poor linkage between them.

Of course, I wouldn't expect everything to make sense at this point, but four episodes into the series, we should have at least some sense of where the story is going beyond just a vague “Ren is eventually going to run into the chief bad guy” assumption. The main problem is that either the original game writer, the script adapter, the director, or some combination of the three doesn't have a solid sense of how to throw out enticing hints while still keeping the story coherent. The redhead's rooftop conversation with Ren delivered just a few annoyingly vague tidbits; if you want Ren to be a participant in some upcoming challenge, then cluing him in about it would probably be beneficial to your cause. (Unless, of course, the whole point of the challenge is for him to figure out what's going on.) This became even more problematic after Kei (the Japanese woman siding with the Germans) stepped in much later to throw out other distractingly vague implications, not to mention the whole business with the energy-infused guillotine representing one of eight “swastikas” – guess they couldn't keep away from more explicit Nazi connections, huh?

Despite all that, the series actually had something decent going on with the Ren/Kasumi relationship, until the reveal that she's possessed by some highly destructive force that may be connected to a string of gruesome murders. I'd say this was a poor man's The Garden of Sinners, but apparently Kasumi is either directly or indirectly awakening Ren's own power and confusingly, Ren asserts that the power she's using was actually his. The scene with Marie and Ren muddles things further, with the cliffhanger of Ren bearing Marie's scar looking more like an attempt at a simple stunt than anything meaningful for the audience. The one moment that did make sense was the revelation that this Mercurius connected to Marie is actually Karl Krafft, though why he seems to not be working with the Germans at this point is utterly unclear. He implies (through cheesy imagery) that he is some kind of trans-timeline being who's looking for Ren to show him something that he hasn't seen before. Maybe he's looking for this series to become coherent.

Anyway, the musical score continues to make a decent effort, but it's being wasted so far, and the show's bloody scenes are hardly the most effective graphic content of the anime season right now. I'm rating this just above the trash heap because of the nice dynamic that Ren and Kasumi share, but it isn't showing much other merit right now.

Rating: C-

Dies irae is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.