English Dub Review: Hina Logic from Luck & Logic “The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins With Effort”

Final exams, a crossover, and a dire warning.

Overview (Minor Spoilers)

It’s time for final exams, and tensions are high. Not only will there be a written exam, but a practical one. The girls must take stuffed animal “innocents” to the principal’s office. The teachers are acting as very aggressive obstacles, and they aren’t alone! Three of the logicalists from the previous series are here to make things tough, too! After the exams are over, Miss Shizuha has an aside with Liones, warning her that she is giving far too much of herself in her trances with Rosa. But what could this mean?

The episode felt kinda flat, honestly. It was funny, but most of the characters were just… there. Liones, the main character, feels like a non-presence except in one scene. It was supposed to be a big thing to have Mana, Chloe, and Yukari in this episode, but they could have been anybody with the way they were utilized. It was as if I was watching a show made of marshmallow fluff: all the form and sweetness, none of the substance. I did like those characters, but it felt like they weren’t really even there.

I think that this may have been because the episode was trying to focus heavily on Yayoi, a character I disliked from the start, and whom I’ve grown to dislike even more as time goes on. She’s a stuck-up rich kid who talks like her poo ain’t got stank, but rarely backs that up. Add to that, Mikaela Krantz is not doing a good job as her voice actress. She’s so busy trying to be posh that none of her lines are believable, and many are just plain obnoxious. Even when she’s in a spot of vulnerability, she continues this snooty voice. Heck, there’s one spot here where she’s panting from exhaustion. She sounds more like she’s rutting because the voice actress is trying to pant in a snooty way. So, when you build an entire episode around the shallow, vapid, rich girl, the entire thing ends up being without substance. If she actually grew from these events, sure. But something tells me character growth isn’t as important to the writers as showing all these girls in their school swimsuits.

The animation in these parts was rather good. One difference in the returning characters is that they had been animated using CG when in combat in the prior series. Here, they are animated traditionally, and animated well. The art style is different from their native show, as this show was intended to be a lot brighter, cheerier, and cute. I felt like Chloe’s face was a bit odd, but otherwise, the three of them actually looked better than their CG counterparts. The episode lacked errors in the animation, but there was an oddity. Due to the angles, she was drawn at, it looked as if Liones was climbing the cliff completely naked. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case, but it was odd to see.

Our Take

Despite the great animation and the humor and fun, even the cameo characters couldn’t save this Yayoi episode from feeling like a flattened marshmallow. Even Miss Shizuha’s warning at the end felt meaningless, and that’s the first sign we’ve seen of this show having a plot!  I enjoy the humor and curiosity of Hina Logic, but I don’t know if it’s ever going to go anywhere. It certainly isn’t throwing monsters at our heroines, that’s for sure. I give this episode six failed exams out of ten.