12.20
Famous last words.
In this, the penultimate installment of Valvrave The Liberator, lots of ground has to be covered. This is not surprising as Valvrave, due to MBS’ apparent policy for Animeism shows to be in the twelve episode range (don’t be surprised if Kill La Kill only has 24 genuine eps) and its own oddball split season sked, is short one episode. Last week’s, while necessary to clear out all the secrets that Haruto, Shoko, and L-Elf were keeping from each other (outside of the one where Haruto raped Saki, but thats for another time), ultimately didn’t add anything else to the equation other than said infodumps leading to a badly written, and rather boring episode. Happily this week’s episode is an improvement. While not a great episode by any stretch, it sets up the finale suitably enough that hopefully episode 24 won’t need a 50 minute director’s cut next Christmas (HAHAHA fuck you Seed Destiny).
He's back bitches...
We begin where we left off last week with X-Eins about to kill R-Drei…and then he doesn’t. You see X-Eins knew the whole time that Cain had killed H-Neun via an audio recording the latter made on one of his little earrings. The two set off to overthrow the Dorssian emperor only to conveniently run into L-Elf who has re-infiltrated Dorssia’s base. With R-Drei now knowing that L-Elf didn’t shoot him in the eye, the three are able to let bygones be bygones and L-Elf finally gets his Dorssia uniform back (congratulations resident TZ Newsbot River26, you were right! Eventually! But not really!).
So long Raizo... we hard knew ye.
This is all part of L-Elf and Haruto’s plan to show that the Magius have already infiltrated the world. Basically it entails L-Elf assassinating the ARUS president and Dorssian emperor on live television and millions watching them miraculously heal. However that plan dictates that the Magius can’t cut the feed so the surviving Valvraves head off to a large satellite to firewall it. A lot of the usual pre-battle focus this week is on Thunder because, to noone’s surprise… this week he dies. Seriously you know somebody’s going to die in an anime when they give him too much focus in the pre-battle prep.
"...and that's what you get for calling me JoJo!!!"
The battle goes rather badly for the VVVs with Haruto losing nearly every single memory of Shoko in the process but they get the job done in the end, minus Thunder of course. Akira’s insane hacking skills creates a firewall on the satellite and thus millions see Emperor Koyasu’s neck get slit only for him to emerge without a scratch. The stage is set for the final battle as now the only threats are Cain and that little twirp Q-Vier, the sole remaining asshole of the original Karlstein bunch.
Well that didn't take too long did it?
Episode 23 is just a decent, if rushed, action episode. The problems with it are pretty simple. A: the death of Thunder which comes off as rather matter of fact, much like Kyuuma’s a couple weeks ago, and B: the L-Elf stuff which seems a little too easy with there not being enough residual animosity between the trio of former comrades, suggesting that the writer did not have enough time to work on this arc and just wanted to get it over with. You can chop it up to the shortened episode count, or the simple fact that Valvrave is, as it has always been, one of the worst written anime in recent memory.
Next week is the finale. As usual, I’m not getting my hopes up and boy is there a lot more ground to cover. 7/10.