Devil's Line Episode 4 Review: Monster

Blood, sweat, tears, and goofy action scenes. I won’t lie, Devil’s Line is such a mess of a show but, honestly, it has good plot ideas that unfortunately were poorly executed in the anime.

Japanese Original Episode Title: モンスター

Plot

The white-haired guy, aka Hans Lee, gives blood to Anzai in order to heal his wounds, but unfortunately, Anzai has no tolerance when consuming human blood and goes into a frenzy. Sawazaki and the cops go to Tsukasa’s place to see what had happened and they soon realize, by reading his temperature report, that Anzai is beyond control. When they go to the scene, they see Hans Lee trying to stop Anzai and the sniper ‘Zero Seven’ trying to kill them both. With the help of Hans, they manage to catch Anzai and sedate him but Zero Seven and her accomplice, Fifteen, escape. Two weeks pass and Tsukasa hasn’t heard from Anzai, which makes her go around the area that she last saw him, thinking that she might bump into him, but instead, she finds Hans there. They go around together, Hans explains her some things about oni and gives her hope that he can help Anzai overcome his weaknesses. As they are on their way to find where Anzai is, a live weather report is taking place nearby where a slasher suddenly jumps in and cuts the forecaster in order to awake one oni that is nearby.

Episode Highlights

Hans Lee: He is such an interesting character. At first, I thought he would be something like the main antagonist of the show, but he is actually a good guy. His monologue when he was talking to Zero Seven made so much sense and he sounded so reasonable, I wanted to scream ‘AMEN BRO!’. He helped the cops even though he doesn’t seem to like them and he is helping Tsukasa to find Anzai as well. He probably shares the same dark past as Anzai which will be interesting to see in the following episodes.

Tsukasa & the cops: So they were on scene and no one tended her wounds first? And when she told them ‘I am coming with you’ they actually went along with it and said yeah little girl, hop in we are going after your dangerous boyfriend. The sense of this show is unbelievable.

Themes & Trivia

Missing out the humor: As you can imagine, the anime is missing quite a lot of content compared to the manga as it tends to happen with serializations. There is plenty of humor in the Devil’s Line manga that is missed out on the show, probably because they want to give a more serious vibe to it. According to the manga, when Hans meets Tsukasa again after the incident, she is being hit on by some random guys and Hans, after speaking German to them, kicks one of them in the face. They didn’t stay out in the rain but they actually went inside a restaurant to talk and Hans ordered almost half of the menu. He also took out a whiteboard and started analyzing the progression of their relationship and made really funny faces throughout their whole conversation. If you are interested in seeing the differences yourself, you should read Chapter 8 of the original manga.

Comments

First of all, why is Hans Lee (who by the way looks like the child of Makishima Shogo from Psycho-Pass and L from Death Note) not wearing shoes while wondering around the streets of Tokyo? His feet should be very hobbit-like by now, but yeah forgive me, one scene later he suddenly wears boots so I guess I am just seeing things…

Two weeks have passed, Tsukasa still hasn’t fixed her window glass door and it’s been held with tape. I honestly burst out laughing when I saw it. Hans is also looking for his cross chain two weeks after the incident. Oh Devil’s Line, you and your clever plot pacing. Also, how the hell did Fifteen manage to hit ONLY Anzai with the car in that action scene? Zero Seven jumped at the last minute, but honestly, if you look at the scene carefully, the positioning and everything is so god damn wrong from a directing point of view.

Last thing, I really liked the way that the organization, who seems to hunt down oni, thought of making their existence public. Slashing a weather forecaster who is on live broadcasting and making her cameraman who happens to be an oni attack her will certainly make everyone hate them, fear them, and want to destroy them.

I felt inadequate

I kind of like Tsukasa as well because she doesn’t seem to be the typical wait-and-do-nothing type of shoujo girl. She might be useless, yes, but at least she tries to do something every now and then. In general, I feel like the first two episodes of the show made it look like a huge mess, and don’t get me wrong, it is a huge mess, but it is starting to get fun and intriguing to watch.

NEXT TIME: Plan B (プランB)