Assassins Pride Review
Adapted from Kei Amagi’s light novel series, Assassins Pride is set in the world of Flandore, where humanity resides in layers of glass domes to protect themselves from the monstrous lycanthropes that roam the outside world. Divided by class in a society ruled by a feudal house system, discrimination is rife, and for the ruling classes, holding the magical power of mana is everything. Kufa Vampir finds himself in the underworld of this system, working as an assassin for the White Knight guild whose clients are frequently made up of those in ruling class families. His next mission is to investigate the daughter of the prestigious House of Angel, Melida, who is thought to be the product of an affair as she appears to not have any magical abilities. Assigned as her personal tutor, if Kufa feels that she has no mana, then he is to assassinate her.
While it’s obvious Melida has no mana, Kufa takes pity on her and decides to save rather than kill her, transferring some of his own mana to her. Now having betrayed his guild and their client, Kufa must protect Melida’s school life or risk them both being executed.
Assassins Pride is a weird series which could have been really interesting, but it squanders so much of its potential. Initially it grabs you with a really rich sense of worldbuilding in how it paints Flandore as this gritty and beautiful world encased in the chandelier-like glass domes, while the opening scenes show Kufa as a pretty dangerous individual as we’re plunged into his world of assassinations. Yet it sweeps away intentions of exploring this further after the first episode, as it’s Melida who is the main character here, not Kufa.
What we’re actually getting here is a school-based magic show where Melida quickly has to level up her newfound magical abilities to keep up the pretence of her being her father’s daughter and heir to the Angel name. Apart from this overhanging thread, a lot of the plot points are relatively by the numbers, especially in the show’s early stages. There’s the class bully to take down a notch, new friends to make, an inter-school tournament to win, and various nefarious plots to uncover that threaten either Melida herself or the school at large.
It’s not really anything new, but I did find myself slowly getting into things as they gradually explore Flandore’s social structure and how the different feudal-esque families are vying to take each other out. While this sadly doesn’t really come into play until the end of the series, it is one of its more intriguing parts, as you start to get new characters introduced that want to overthrow the Angel family’s position and it’s evident that a few of the students at the school aren’t as friendly as they seem.
It does also try to explore the world at large with an interesting thread in the second half that looks at Kufa’s backstory and his relationship with Rosetti, the tutor of Melida’s cousin, Elise. As the girls embark on a field trip to the town of Shangarta, one of the few times we go outside the school, strange incidents begin occurring where citizens and students are being mysteriously drained of their life force. Here it tries its hand at a supernatural mystery, and while it’s not too hard to figure out if you’ve been following things closely, it’s probably the closest it gets to showing that initial flair of promise from its opening episode.
Despite these occasional promising storylines, it so often struggles to break free of the confines of the school setting and as a result marks down a lot of the first half of the show. It doesn’t help either that the characters aren’t really awe-inspiring, and it takes a while to warm up to them, if you even do at all. Kufa is boring as he’s just yet another overpowered male power fantasy character, coming across as character archetype Kirito crossed with the stoic genius of The Irregular at Magic High School’s Shiba Tatsuya. The fact that he’s half-vampire (his name completely gives that away) does give him something interesting to work with at times, but ultimately doesn’t do anything to change the fact that I just wasn’t invested in him. Melida fares better, as starting off as the underdog it’s rewarding to see her growth as she builds up her magical powers to not just rival but surpass some of her classmates. However her infatuation with Kufa is a major distraction in her development and his lack of boundaries on that makes things a bit too seedy. Elise on the other hand is too one-dimensional, with her entire thing being how she doesn’t want to stand in the limelight despite being the most powerful student at the school. Rosetti is kind of fun though and has an interesting twist, while half-lycanthrope William Gin is surprisingly hard to work out as he doesn’t play by the rules.
The series is produced by studio EMT Squared and I think they’ve done a pretty good job even though there’s nothing really ground-breaking here. The dark, almost gothic vibe comes across well, and I feel they do get to stretch their legs a bit when depicting the surrounding world – the city feels very Victorian despite some 20th Century tech here and there (electricity and cars are very much present) while the outside world is depicted with dark and gloomy forests or barren wastelands. The monsters that we see are pretty well designed (a fearsome-looking giant spider makes this one not for arachnophobes) and I liked the easy-to-see depiction of mana through the use of magical auras. It’s a shame though that the costume and character designs sexualise the female cast too much, particularly those dreadful uniforms for the girls which look too much like a certain style of women’s underwear.
I did like the soundtrack for this show though, with the folks at MONACA producing a fitting gothic-styled sound that matches the setting well. Opening theme “Share the light” by Run, Girls Run! Is a hypnotic electronic track that makes for an impactful opener, while ending theme “Ijin-tachi no Jikan” by Tomori Kusunoki offers a bittersweet ballad as the closer.
Assassins Pride comes to the UK in a collector’s edition from MVM featuring all 12 episodes of the series across 2 discs both in English and Japanese with English subtitles. Unfortunately, there’s an issue with the Japanese audio in Episode 2 where it uses the audio from Episode 3 which makes it impossible to watch other than in English, which is a shame as it’s definitely the better of the two audio options. The English dub script can sound a bit ham-fisted in being too literally translated early on, but gradually smooths out further into the series. That said, I found Kufa to be a bit flat in both versions, in perhaps a reflection of his character, while the rest of the cast were definitely more emotive.
The collector’s edition set packages the series in a rigid slipcase and comes with 4 art cards, while on the discs you’ll find clean opening and ending animations, next episode previews, and a promotional video for the series featuring the Japanese cast.
Overall, Assassins Pride feels like a missed opportunity. There’s a lot of different things in here that would make for a really interesting tale as the world the series is set in has so much potential, but the story opts for the well-trodden “student in a magic school” route which plays things too safe and reduces it to choosing formulaic, by-the-numbers plot points. Add in some bland characters and an inappropriate student-teacher relationship and you get a series that you just can’t get emotionally invested in.
