Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King’ on Netflix, the Hyper-Hyperbolic Feature-Length Continuation of the Anime Saga

Anime overload overboard overkill extravaganza Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King (now on Netflix) is a feature-length film continuing the Black Clover saga (currently streaming on Crunchyroll) that ran for four years and 170 episodes, ending in 2021. The same creative team behind the series tackles the movie, which opens with the Triumph, the Clover Kingdom’s once-a-decade festival of powerful mages battling each other – but any hopes of an epic “tournament arc” are quashed with the arrival of a genocidal villain who disrupts the fest and initiates a plot that’s essentially a “tournament arc” without the tournament. In other words, it’s nearly two hours of psychedelic battles, not for bragging rights or to determine whose magic powers are greater, but for the lives of everyone in the kingdom. So, stakes! This one has lots of stakes!

BLACK CLOVER: SWORD OF THE WIZARD KING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: There’s this guy, Conrad Leto (Toshihiko Seki). He once earned the title of Wizard King of the Clover Kingdom, but after he revealed his evil ways, he was imprisoned by current king Julius Novachrono (Toshiyuki Morikawa), who told the citizenry that Conrad was dead. Well, that comes back to bite him in the ass when Conrad returns from the Phantom Zone or wherever with renewed interest in creating a fair and equal society by killing everyone and then resurrecting the souls worthy of upholding his ideology. That’s apparently an efficient way to promote fealty to his rule – enforcing his power via fear is easier than interviewing every single Clover Kingdom citizen individually before killing them, one presumes. Conrad is more powerful than ever now, having acquired the Sword of the Wizard King, and resurrected three fellow ex-Wizard Kings to help him. Trouble brews.

Meanwhile, at the local coliseum, the first two Triumph competitors stare each other down in the arena: Yuno (Nobunaga Shimazaki) vs. “the masked one.” And who is this mysterious masked fellow? Asta (Gakuto Kajiwara), of course, the hero of this franchise, who, unlike all other Clover folk, was born without magic powers, but now famously wields “anti-magic,” which involves canceling out others’ magic spells by whipping around a comically gigantic black-bladed sword and, to the layperson, seems pretty much indistinguishable from regular magic. “Never giving up is my magic!” is Asta’s catchphrase. Yuno and Asta still engage in friendly rivalry, but before they can start casting spells and, um, anti-spells at each other, Conrad and his trio of cronies – Edward Avalache (Hochu Otsuka), Jester Garandaros (Fumiya Takahashi) and the terrifically named Princia Funnybunny (Miyuki Sawashiro) – disrupt the competition and whup everybody’s asses. Turns out, Conrad can use the Sword of the Wizard King to steal others’ magic power, which makes him extra dangerous, but more crucially, exponentially exacerbates his unbearable smugness.

What with one thing and another, our protagonists – Asta, Yuno and a collection of their compadres too numerous to mention – escape the fray and regroup to lick their wounds and figure out what they might do to thwart Conrad’s apocalyptic endeavor. We all know by now that Asta hopes to someday be Wizard King, and he shows his predilection for leadership by bellowing his revelatory idea (note: he bellows everything he ever says; he’s quite the gregarious sort) – all the Magic Knights Squads should set aside their rivalries and join forces in order to counter Conrad’s “gargantuan compound magic.” It’s a plan that’s as good as any; “gargantuan compound magic” is surely not to be taken lightly. And so begin the battling seizure ideologies, as the good guys and bad guys exchange heaping mounds of exposition about how killing millions of people is and isn’t great, in between exchanges of maniacal magic spells that require them to string together a series of nearly random words such as “WEDGE MAGIC: WORLD END CHURCH!” or “DEATH SCYTHE: LUNATIC SLASH!”, which are accompanied by images of post-hyperbolic destruction. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The likes of Dragon Ball, Naruto and My Hero Academia boast their share of “tournament arcs” alongside Black Clover; the last time I experienced characters who screamed their power moves before executing them was Seven Deadly Sins.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s not a lot of nuance to Asta, but I have to say, the guy really delivers in clutch situations. 

Memorable Dialogue: Funnybunny gets one of the funnybunniest lines: “Don’t make me yawn, you nearly dead idiots.”

Sex and Skin: Just a few stereotypical skimpy anime costumes.

Our Take: “Amateurs won’t be able to breathe in this space!” exclaims Asta at one point, a rare  instance when the dialogue reveals a second layer: self-description. Sword of the Wizard King is not for dabblers in anime; it’s for Black Clover diehards who’ll relish this conglomerative mixatorium of characters, many of them teaming up so they may combine their magic powers in an unprecedented fashion in order to defeat a ruinous fartknocker of a villain. The first act is chock-full of battles, and the second act takes a breath before the third act delivers multiple concurrent battles that are edited together like a tornado and feature characters improbably pausing amid lunatic melees so they may utter amusing bons mot such as “Being foolish is… pitiful.” 

That line can be interpreted as a bit of ironic self-commentary, because you have to be just a little bit foolish to enjoy this type of OTT anime – and yes, I’m implying that being “a little bit foolish” means being “high as hell.” Speaking from a state of sobriety in which six cups of coffee is an exemptive asterisk, I can report that the animation here is frequently unbridled in its eye-popping creativity and the outcome of this minimalist plot is hardly in question despite one of the bons mot being, “Fate can be manipulated!” (“And destiny can be fed to worms on a cracker!” I shrieked in reply.) Perhaps the more fully committed can squeeze a political metaphor out of this scenario, but I found it too ludicrous and simple in its mega-ultra-uber-overstatement to suss out anything beyond an excuse to make our eyes bug out at the onslaught of colorful, bloodless carnage. When everything is hyperbolic, things like dramatic tension and consequence wash out to sea to drown and be devoured by roving packs of ravenous barracuda. But stuff like Black Clover exists to deliver hyperbole with relentless ratatat, and fans of it wouldn’t have it any other way.

Our Call: Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King is classic FFO (For Fans Only) fodder, just feeding the beast without averting the expected spectacle. Go ahead and STREAM IT if that’s your thing; me, I’m gonna decompress from all the overwhelmingness with Kiki’s Delivery Service.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.