The final battle is here!
What They Say:
The ball is interrupted when Eco adopts her dragon form. Mordred reveals himself, and tries to possess Eco’s dragon body. Can the others stop him?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While Dragonar Academy started off fun for me, it sort of felt like it was kind of listless along the way and not sure of itself. There was a lot going on but not a lot in the way of something that felt cohesive towards an actual story outside of just getting to know the characters. Which is fine, but I had hoped for a bit more. As it progressed in the last few episodes, especially as it moved to the capital and Silvia had a larger role, there was a whole lot more to like and it felt like things were finally starting to get somewhere. Just in time for the season finale of course. That’s not unusual, but at least as it works through this last episode, there’s a sense that we’ve gotten to know these characters a bit and any more time spent with both Silvia and Eco alongside Ash is a good thing.
With the family issues that have come into play, which was part of the reason the group headed to the capital, there’s a good sense of something big and nefarious at play that works nicely to establish the stakes and the motivations behind the villains that are working all of this. Of course, it goes big and cruel with the whole using humans as little more than cattle to achieve their goals, but Julius has gone around the bend in his new form as Milgauss as he’s been taken over completely and it just speaks of something dark and evil. That makes everything kind of black and white in a way that keeps it simple, especially as we get Silvia’s sister going after him with your basic sword strokes to take him down, but that simplicity comes at a cost of not making it come across as more real and intense. All of this is just the start of things going wrong though since Mordred has opted out of Milgauss since there’s such a tasty morsel in the form of the rare Eco to take advantage of and cause trouble with.
This puts a kind of amusing group together in a way since Milgauss is helping them, at least in a simple way, and it plays well with the large scale of the action starting to unfold all while Eco herself is caught up in a virtual cage by Navi, who has been dealing with Mordred and fills her in on what’s going on. As it plays out, you can see easily where it’s going to go – Dragonar Academy has not broken any molds throughout its run or challenged the tropes – but it hits things effectively as the big battle plays out, everyone gets involved in their own way and it comes down to Ash swing his big, big sword to save the day and rescue the damsel in distress inside. With most of the episode focusing on the action and only a touch of epilogue material, it’s kind of old school in a way where it just lets things settle out quietly and, well, simply end. Which is probably for the best.
In Summary:
As season finale’s go, Draagonar Academy certainly isn’t bad as it plays out to the action side of things, a touch of character material in a few places and a decent bit of closure. At the end of the day, it will leave you ambivalent about wanting more, but you likely wouldn’t turn your nose up at more of it if you did watch the whole thing. It’s a kind of harmless show that in a lot of ways you feel like it could have been a lot more and better structured, but it’s working off of the source material and sticking to the general approach of it. Which is why I keep wishing that we’d see some more radical interpretations or proper adaptations that don’t just mirror and animate what’s on the printed page, giving us something that works better for this medium.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: FUNimation
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.