Remember Familiar of Zero, the show about a student wizard who seemed incompetent but who was actually awesome summoning a human familiar and the wacky hijinx that resulted therefrom? While that show may have ultimately disappointed, especially in its second season, the premise was anything but dead on arrival. I must not be the only one who thought so, since Vermeil in Gold reuses the same basic skeleton, shaking it up by having the wizard be the boy and, to make things seem less creepy than Louise rather than more, having the “human” familiar instead only be human as a cover for actually being a powerful demon.
I know that doesn’t sound that similar, and it is certainly more than enough to get out of any shadow Familiar of Zero might have cast, but there are still comparisons to be made and I have to intro these things somehow.
So, Vermeil in Gold starts with the main character, Alto Goldfilled, being told that he’ll be held back a year in wizard school despite any other achievements if he doesn’t manage to summon a familiar before the next day is out. He gets the idea to go to the library, mutters some obvious setup about how familiar summoning is predicated on compatibility, and then the solution hits him. Literally, as a mysterious ancient tome falls on his head and proves to contain a summoning recipe within.
However, in a world where familiars range from insects to little elemental spirits, Alto finds he may have bitten off a little more than he could chew…
This introduces Vermeil, a demon who had been imprisoned in the book and who offers Alto a very suggestive anything he wants in exchange for having freed her. He manages to think with the correct head long enough to ask her to become his familiar, which Vermeil is willing to do since she is honestly grateful to be out of book jail and Alto happens to have some absurdly high-grade mana she can drink her fill of with a contract-sealing kiss. Later, she very unsubtly offers the H-scene option. Vermeil is never actually called a succubus, but it’s clear exactly what demon the design for her was aiming towards.
Remember how in Familiar of Zero, the secret awesomeness inside Louise was a big deal twist that explained both her incompetence and her powerful potential only after we’d gotten to know her and (limiting myself to season 1) mostly kind of like her? Here, two second explanation that Alto’s mana would be too spicy for a normal familiar to handle right off the bat. It should be needless to say that if there’s a reason magical learning in this world couldn’t have diagnosed this of Alto a while ago, we weren’t informed.
Vermeil puts some clothes on at Alto’s behest, and, since demons aren’t exactly kosher, decides to hide her horns and tail and introduce herself the next day as his brand new human familiar, to the shock but ultimate acceptance of the staff.
Most displeased with this arrangement is Alto’s stock model childhood friend with a crush (Tsundere variant with a hint of comedy yandere spice), Lilia, who challenges Alto to a duel (per school rules) in order to see to it that he doesn’t have Vermeil sitting in his lap in class trying to make out with him at all times. She gets beat by Vermeil, who later tells Alto point blank that Lilia is in love with him only for Alto to blow her off that such a thing couldn’t possibly be true.
At this point, you may be starting to hate Alto. On one side, he plays the meek and easily flustered gormless kid up the whole way while on the other he’s also (without any indication he’s doing it on purpose, mind) denser than black hole, defying the laws of physics in order to support the laws of the lazy ecchi status quo. Normally annoying protagonists pick one angle at which to dodge easy progress, either being terminally afraid of intimacy or being completely oblivious to romantic overtures, but Alto gets both.
This is all the first episode, though, so we’ll give it time.
We move onward, dealing with some maximally cliched bullies, a group of dragon-familiar-having students with the whiny underclassman calling on his “cool” jerkwad senior for help, all because Vermeil managed to knock away an uncontrolled dragon. Jerkface decides he even wants to get some raping in, and talks outright murderous when not kowtowed to.
Naturally, this ends poorly for the bullies, as Vermeil supercharges Alto with some of the mana she’s borrowed and the T-Rex Dragon doesn’t hold up to it.
After quite a bit of puttering around, the heartless bully gets the crap kicked out of him by the head of the dragon riders, a student council member who comes off as some kind of sadist Nazi girl. For some reason, which makes no sense to any motivations, after one scene of the bully being the most heartless bully Stephen King would write in his sleep and the scene where he gets the crap kicked out of him while still being a misogynistic piece of excrement, we then get a scene where Alto and friends visit him in the hospital in a friendly manner, he’s treated as a nice guy, and Alto decides to grow balls he hasn’t had this whole show in order to march up and challenge a member of the absurdly overpowered student council.
Naturally (again), he beats her, although the fight is honestly sold as being fairly difficult. Ms. Nazi takes surprisingly well to eating humble pie, and we get more puttering. This time, there’s at least a little character building, as we establish that Vermeil may have honest feelings for Alto. He’s shockingly non-dense about this, though there is a bit where he worries that might be more “as food” than “as a person”. I guess being told directly by the pairing the plot wants is sufficient, though.
Before we can learn too much about Vermeil, though, we start to get another subplot, starting with the unlikable bully beating the tar out of the unlikable student council girl, albeit after they seemed to make up and with a dark aura that suggests something evil is playing the scene. There’s also something about one of the teachers doing evil things and messing with students, like seducing an upper class girl and then causing her magic to run wild and send her into a coma. You know, typical Hogwarts nonsense.
We get an extended sequence of the unlikable bully fighting his shortstack sadist senpai, getting Alto on scene before things are broken up by the arrival of a different student council member. This leaves the bully in a coma, but Vermeil seems to have recognized the force empowering him.
She then confronts the slimy teacher directly about his use of a minor demon. However, she does this alone and isn’t careful about it, which means that slimy teacher gets his hands on a much better demon.
Vermeil tries to resist, taking monstrous form as everything around the school goes to hell. Alto makes it to the scene as the teacher finishes binding her, with Lilia (who had been taking advantage of Vermeil’s absence to flirt-study and who somehow fixed her clothes between edits) alongside. The teacher gloats, reveals his plans and his place as the mastermind of all evil, gloats some more, you know, pretty much doing everything applicable on that list of things an evil overlord should never do.
I guess he doesn’t really tell us his motives or history or anything that would make us understand where he came from as a villain, but it is what it is.
Alto’s presence causes Vermeil to break free and attack the evil teacher (still utterly berserk), but Alto gets in the way and gets a claw through his chest for his trouble. The grief of murdering her beloved Alto causes Vermeil’s mind to free itself from the berserk. She tries to kill the villain again, Alto stops her for some reason despite missing most of his chest, which finishes bringing her back to her senses.
Vermeil manages to heal Alto because the show can’t end in episode 6 on a downer note (though it’s eventually revealed she shared her heart with him per Dragonheart rules so from this point on if one of them dies, they both do. Which is a kind of neat cost for a seemingly immortal being to pay for this save). For some reason this causes the evil to teacher to freak out, inject himself with his demon goo, and become a big stupid monster. At least it’s not a snake, but it still doesn’t end well for him as he’s beaten to a pulp and arrested alive. All’s well that ends well, with a bonus that the shakeup of interpersonal dynamics (mostly guilt on Vermeil’s side) causes Alto to more or less confess feelings for Vermeil.
Sorry, Lilia, but you’re 100% a third wheel here. You don’t have combat prowess, you don’t have a romantic leg to stand on now that Alto’s heart literally belongs to Vermeil, and you’re pretty much impossible to take seriously because of it.
The entire snafu gets Alto conscripted to the Student Council, where the Rei-like president seems to have plans that may or may not be sinister. Meanwhile, the scummy teacher’s former backers conspire, which mostly involves a crazy little boy and obscenely overpowered mage called Iolite stepping onto the stage. We see he’s a murderous psychopath, then introduce him to the cast proper.
What for? Well, we’re at school, so how about tests? Practical and written tests for the new mages to advance a rank. Alto crushes the practical exam, then sees himself seated next to Iolite for the written.
Iolite goes and interrupts before the exam ends, provoking a battle that draws in Vermeil, who was his goal in the first place. He says he wants to destroy the world, for which he apparently needs the powers of all sorts of demons, and though Alto gives a fairly good account of himself, Iolite is built up as this incredible, unmatched prodigy. Before he can seal his win, though, a deus ex machina emerges from the book that once held Vermeil, offering Alto a time-stopped flashback to Vermeil’s memories that apparently made her want to get sealed in the first place and that still hold her back.
We thus learn that Vermeil lived as the cutest little girl in an abbey orphanage, having her horns hidden with a convenient bow thanks to the nun in charge, until of course disaster struck. This came in the form of her getting found out, causing an angry mob who blame demons for everything to storm the church, and when the church folk send Vermeil to run and save herself, she turns back and discovers that the mob has already murdered her adoptive family – the nun, the older girl who was helping out, even the two other really little kids.
Humans can be terrible creatures indeed.
The grief causes Vermeil’s magical abilities to run wild. In a single moment, she reduces the city she and her family had lived in to a smoking crater and beginning her life as a “rampaging” (scared, isolated) destructive demon. Alto may not be able to change the past, but he is able to interact with Vermeil’s psyche, give her a new view on her trauma, and promise she’ll never be alone again, so that’s sweet.
This emotional catharsis fully unseals Vermeil in the real world and lets an ass-kicking of Iolite commence. Iolite grandstands well, but this is kind of like a Sailor Moon climax. Once the power of love is on the board, the beam battle can only go to the happy couple. Iolite manages to bugger off for later antagonism.
Alto professes his love properly and swears to get stronger so he can deal with it if the whole world rises up to throttle him and Vermeil. It is strongly implied they get a proper H-scene if they hadn’t already. The student council seems to be on his side because the baddies have messed with the student body, and with a fairly long tail of good feels the show plays us out.
To me there’s a sense that Vermeil in Gold stopped kind of just when it might have been getting good. The early arcs of this show are a chore, a bitter pill of setups that range from incredibly standard to senselessly idiotic sugar-coated by our titular demon girl serving up a double-d helping of fanservice.
The later arcs, once any pretense of a contested romance are dropped, and especially the Iolite arc that dives deep into Vermeil’s tortured psyche, are much better. With a tighter focus, I felt like I really understood our leads, and that they got to be reasonably rounded rather than the detestable wimp and senseless fanservice gal they started out as.
On the other side, the baddies are… really weak. It takes until pretty much the last movement for us to get any motivation out of them at all, and it’s just Iolite saying that, like all cliched bad guys (he says that part, too), he wants to destroy the world. Why? What does destroying the world mean to him and his organization of rogue super-mages? Isn’t the world where they keep their stuff? Not explained! I do at least get the sense that Iolite is probably trolling by putting things that way and there’s likely a different big esoteric plan, but there’s still not a lot of reason to connect to our antagonists.
Unfair comparison though it may be, I want to compare this with Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. In FMA, we don’t know the real villain’s real game for, let’s face it, most of the show. Heck, that’s why despite the cut being at the halfway point, the gecko ending of the 2003 version is able to have a completely different antagonist with a totally unrelated scheme.
But, in the meantime, the homunculi are compelling. They have a clear theme, and while we may not know who they serve or to what end there’s a palpable sense that they’re working towards something both evil and clever. We also have the corruption in the government and military to consider, Scar who gets a fairly fleshed out and compelling motivation in fairly short order and who does a lot of plot lifting at the start, and the occasional episodic villain. And this is combined with the Elrics having their own goal rather than just playing defense. Here, we only have the super lame professor who got no screen time and no motivation and Iolite who prides himself on having an incredibly flimsy motivation. I guess there’s also the stock bully duo from team dragon, but their whole thing is nothing but heinous bullying here and there. Throughout this, Alto and Vermeil are entirely reactive. True, Alto wants to become stronger, with the dream of becoming the strongest class of mage, but his main path to that is just doing his studies and being a good boy, and the goal is so vague and not-really-contested that it doesn’t serve the same structural purpose as the brothers Elric looking for the Philosopher’s stone.
I don’t need this to be FMA. Nothing else really is. But it’s the model of doing what I think Vermeil is trying to do, only well. If you’re going to have this high-scale epic rather than being just silly OP school life, you’ve got to build investment. There are a few too many scenes of Alto and Vermeil making out in semi-public areas where Alto would rather not be caught and a few too few of them striving for something or really dealing with a conflict that challenges them on a deep, emotional level rather than a “she has the high ground because she’s on dragon-back” level. Again, until the last bit. We even wasted an entire episode on a weird challenge to become class rep just to get Lilia (who is remarkably pointless herself) to strip. Worth it? As cute as she is, I don’t think so.
To an extent, this brings things back around to Familiar of Zero, a show that started strong, but that killed itself with extreme amounts of waste, even when it technically tries to tell a bigger story. As similar as they are, they stand as opposites, where Familiar of Zero was winning while it was still setting up and devolved into dreck based on the negative chemistry of the main couple, where as Vermeil started as reprocessed disappointment and tried to really become something when it built good chemistry between its leads.
There have been a few shows I’ve reviewed before that have started weak, stayed weak, and then had a surprisingly excellent ending. Typically, they haven’t scored very well, and Vermeil in Gold is no different. While I’m open to the idea that, with the real plot kicking off, the source material might reach some very legitimate heights, that has to be with a running time that properly forgives the amount of effort spent on setting up, so that rather than being a weak work with a strong ending it becomes a strong work with a weaker beginning. For the twelve episodes that made it to screen, Vermeil doesn’t manage.
In the end, I’m going to choose to be a little harsh here, and give Vermeil in Gold a D+. It’s watchable, but very technically, and I think the fanservice level and type might even annoy more people than it pleases because of how relatively small Alto is drawn. It could probably be fun to get a group together and laugh at all the wizard school or battle school tropes in the main body of the work, but despite its redeeming features it’s not one I’d recommend for unironic viewing.