Black Clover

Episode 162

After watching this episode, one thing's for certain about the Spade Kingdom war: it's intense.

With Zenon going after the Golden Dawn over the last two episodes, Vanica and Dante from the Dark Triad are now making their moves. The Megicula-possessed Vanica is attacking the Heart Kingdom, which means that a confrontation with Noelle is inevitable at some point. The two of them going head-to-head is shown in the advertising art, but is Noelle truly strong enough yet to stand and fight on that level? She has been shown to rise to the occasion before and certainly has sufficient motivation, so I'm hopeful, while Luck and Leopold will presumably get to face off against her massive flunky.

However, that potential match-up looks like it will be put on the back burner for at least a couple more episodes, as Dante has also gone after the Black Bulls HQ in search of Yami. Instead he matches up against Asta, Vanessa, Grey, Gauche, and (technically) Henry. Gauche has a neat new trick with being able to duplicate Asta, but ultimately only Asta and Vanessa matter here, the latter because Rouge can mess with everything an enemy does. Grey's basically useless so far (though it looks like she will finally get some introspection next episode), Henry is limited by lack of magic and especially vulnerable to gravity magic, and Gauche can't do much against Dante, but it doesn't look like Dante was reckoning on Asta or Vanessa. Goading Asta may not have been the correct play there; he was able to harm Dante (even if only slightly) when Dante was at 60% power. He might have come for Yami, and on a whim be seeking to add Vanessa as his woman as a bonus, but he's not going to be able to ignore Asta.

However, Asta vs. Dante is an arc-climax match-up, so this is just going to be an indecisive preliminary encounter. Yami showing up next episode will spice things up as well. Still, the series' action animation effort kicks into high gear for some spectacle shots as Asta loses it and goes after Dante, and the music – with its symphonic sounds and accompanying vocals – is one of the series' most intense tracks. Yami does not need to be here for the show to start; it is already ongoing right now.

One amusing side bit, where Gordon's family gets The Addams Family treatment (with all of his family members clearly being voiced by Kenichirō Matsuda, Gordon's seiyuu), serves as a warm-up to this, but some interesting revelations are also sprinkled throughout the episode. Yuno's backstory has recently been laid out, and now we finally get the first hint about Asta's: a brief flashback shot of Asta's apparently-mortally-injured mother. This raises all kinds of questions, but at least clarifies that Asta winding up at the church was also the product of desperate circumstances rather than just abandonment. Dante also clarifies something that I had been misunderstanding: there isn't just one devil in the Spade Kingdom, but rather a whole passel of them. Vanica specifically has Megicula, while Dante has Lucifero and Zenon a yet-to-be-named high-level devil. That suggests that the others with devil powers just have lesser devils, rather than everyone getting their power from Megicula. We also finally get the name of the devil who messed up Clover Kingdom: Zagred, and that he was a high-ranking devil. But where does that leave Asta's devil, then? The brief encounter between Zagred and Asta's devil back in episode 120 did not suggest that Asta's devil was a low-level one.

All totaled, this episode does an effective job of opening the second battlefront in the Spade Kingdom War.

Rating:

Black Clover is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and FUNimation.