Black Clover

Episode 34

I'm probably always going to be blasé on the bulk of Black Clover's cast, but the badass adult characters carry a shocking amount of the weight for me. In the Royal Capital arc it was Fuegoleon, and now it's time for the Black Bulls' very own Yami to have his chance to shine. (Although "shine" is kind of ironic because he's a dark magic user fighting against a light magic user and—you know what, forget it.)

So Yami has appeared on the scene, and not only is he giving our new foe Licht a run for his money, but we get to hear a little of his (implied) backstory as well, where he was a young fisherman from a foreign land who washed up onto the Clover Kingdom's shore, faced adversity, and then beat everybody up to become the boss man that he is today. This is a somewhat flip response to Licht's much more flowery story about a group of powerful magic users that he seems to belong to, and it comes across like they're competing over whose backstory is more interesting. I love how unapologetically tough Yami is and how dismissive he is of the entire fight as a result. Even in the middle of combat, he keeps getting distracted by completely unrelated things that he happens to find more interesting.

The action in general is kind of a trainwreck this week, however. It's a lot of extremely repetitive swiping between Yami and Licht as they run throughout the cave, trading blows and even heading straight up the wall. These sequences are mostly bland and ugly. There'll be a brief few seconds where the choreography lights up and finally looks kinda cool sometimes, but those moments are far and few between. The idea of this super intense battle being held together by an otherwise casual conversation is neat, but more impressive animation would have gone a long way in making that dissonance more entertaining.

From there, the next big lesson for Asta to learn as a Magic Knight is that of "Ki". In the Black Clover world, Ki is different than mana; it's more about being able to sense somebody's physical presence through your five senses, so even a magic-less kid like Asta could be capable of honing it. The battlefield might not be the most ideal place for someone to learn a new technique, but then again where else is a person expected to surpass their limits? Shonen heroes need to constantly be adding new skills to their arsenal, and though Asta may pick up on it alarmingly fast, the show gets a good joke out of Yami's disgusted response to his aptitude just seconds after he was making a big manly speech about it.

This feels like the kind of episode that I may have enjoyed more if I was reading it in the manga. I like Yami a lot, and I'm also into seeing Asta find new ways around his lack of magic as he grows stronger and more well-rounded. Seeing the cream-of-the-crop fight each other is still cool, but the pacing and animation let the episode down. Licht has a creepy aura that makes me interested to know more, so on that front we've got at least one more thing pulling me along in this story. Black Clover continues to be pretty okay.

Rating: B

Black Clover is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw