Taking a cue from Kei Amagi’s light novel series, Assassins Pride takes place in Flandore where scientists and doctors stashed humanity inside layers of glass domes to keep them safe from beasts known as lycanthropes who rule the outer world. The serviettes there is a class system with feudal houses, and racism exists, with the upper caste regarding the possession of mana, a magical energy, as everything. In this structure, Kufa Vampir occupies the bottom and serves as an assassin of the White Knight rather aristocrats the clients the families often belong to. His next target is the daughter of the prestigious Anger House, Melida, who is considered a love-child since she has no talents, especially magical abilities. She is given position as the personal tutor of the child, however, if Kufa determines that there is no ‘mana’ within her, she has to be killed.
That being said, it is clear that Melida doesn’t possess any mana, Kufa is thinking otherwise, he knows something should be done to her, it lessens the burden of killing to her though. And now Kufa has betrayed the guild and the client as well, he now has to make sure that Melida would be able to remain in school and not be in any danger of them being executed.
Assassins Pride is an odd series, one that had a lot of interesting facets, but wasted a lot of its potential. At first, it gets you by its worldbuilding prowess when it shows you the Flandore – an industrial and yet gorgeous territory surrounded by the chandeliers of glass domes, opening with Kufa being posed as quite a risk as we are rushed into the killing orientation of his life. However, the episode then proceeds to throw away ideas of pursuing this after the first episode as it is Melida rather than Kufa that is the Proxy protagonist in this case.
What we have here instead is a sort of magic school manga where Melida is made to advance her recently discovered magic skills very quickly because of the need to perform the role of her father’s daughter and heir to the name Angel. Apart from this overhanging thread, a lot of the plot points are relativety and relatively by the numbers, especially in the show’s early stages. There’s a class bully to be defeated, new allies to be found, an interschool competition to be won, and several sinister conspiracies to be put an end to, which jeopardize either Melida herself or the school as a whole.
There isn’t anything new, but I did find myself gradually becoming more involved with the things as they for some reason go through little by little Flandore’s social system and the different feudal-like clans struggle to wipe each other out. Though this unfortunately does not come to action until the last few episodes of the series, it is still some of the more interesting parts of the story, as new characters are starting to be introduced that seek for the downfall of the Angel family’s dominance and some students of the school are not as nice as they appear to be.
In the second half, it does also try to explore the world at large but with an interesting thread that examines Kufa’s backstory and his relationship with the tutor of Melida’s cousin, Rosetti, who is one of the major characters in this half. Some of the interesting events take place when the girls have to go on an excursion to the city of Shangarta which is probably the few times we venture out of the confines of the school, peculiar things start to occur where people both within and outside the students are being seen to have their life force mysteriously drained. This is from my understanding when it delves into a supernatural mystery, and while it’s not too difficult to piece together if you’ve been paying attention, it’s probably the nearest it gets to displaying that initial promise from the first episode.
Even though these episodes present interesting developments at least once in a while, the school environment proves too burdensome so that it becomes quite a blight on the first half of the series. It doesn’t make things better that the characters are not so impressive and it takes you some time to warm up to them, if ever. Kufa is dull, because he is yet another fish in the pond of male power fantasies. You will learn to hate him in just five minutes – he’s very incoherent sea-otaku, and a skilled anti-mage sword master. He’s also half-vampire (literally, if his name does not give it away), and on certain occasions this fact has given him something interesting to do, but again, none of that helped ropes me in. Poor or not, he surely gets through every bully story tropes and Mary Sues (since Kufa and his stoic presence doesn’t help with those either). Most of the time. Kufa improving worked, particularly with Melida, cause minus the obvious sex thing you wished him to win, she started as an underdog. Why the admiration particularly for someone of Kufa’s stature Kuhba in particular, is a spoiler to her growth.
As for Elise, she is rather too one dimensional. The whole theme surrounding her character is that she is the most powerful student in the school but does not want to be bothered by the limelight. Rosetti is kind of fun though and has an interesting twist, while half-lycanthrope William Gin is surprisingly hard to work out as he does not conform.
The series is handled by the studio EMT Squared and as far as I’m concerned, they have done quite well even though there is nothing particularly impressive about it. Their dark, nearly gothic tone comes off well and I think they are somehow able to breathe a little when it comes to drawing the whole surroundings – the metropolis is quite Victorian though there are certain anachronistic elements like electricity and cars in the mid-20th along with how the outside world is painted with gloomy Dull Oak trees or bare land. Well, the beasts that we see are quite spectacular as well (this one being not for arachnophobes, a fearsome giant spider) and I liked the clear-cut presentation of mana which does not require more elaboration than a magical light surrounding a person. I however very much regret to say that the styling and costumes of the characters in this film are overly sexualized which applies greatly on the female characters in particular some obnoxious outfits on the girls which seem to pass for a type of female garment.
I am fond of the soundtrack that accompanied this show, as MONACA often delivers an excellent dark-themed ambient that is quite copacetic. The opening theme, “Share the light”, composed by Run, Girls Run! is a thumping mesmerizing electronic kick song. Whereas the end theme doesn’t do any justice to the show either, where “Ijin-tachi no Jikan” is again a good song but not enough as a closing.
MVM brings the Assassins Pride collector’s edition to UK containing all 12 episodes presented over 2 discs in both English and Japanese language along with English subtitles. The only problem is that there is a flaw in Episode 2 where the Japanese audio used is Episode 3, so you can only watch it in English, which is too bad because this is definitely the more preferred audio option. The English script is bad especially during this first few episodes such that it seems the verbal aspect is trying too hard when it comes to verbatim translation but improves much later on in the series. For that matter, I found Kufa uninspired in both versions although that might be a weather of his character. If anything, the opposite was true as almost everyone in the voice cast was more than convincing.
The content-rich collector’s editon set retains the entire series in a sturdy box and includes 4 art cards unlike the regular episodes that are included in the discs where you get to see opening and closing foreword with next episode previews and branding video starring Japanese voice cast of the show including its promoters.
Assassins Pride is a very disappointing series that proved to be quite a waste of potential. There are a lot of things out here that will make a rather fascinatinginfantile out of this world fantasy is doped down to a simple cliched ‘magic school drama’ which is too boring and heartless to even for some popcorn audience to bother filling with useful. Extricate some dull and bland skits of sorts including a nonappropriate teacher-student interaction and what you have, is a series that you simply can not care about, and thus get, emotionally involved in.
Watch Assassins Pride on Kimcartoon
