English Dub Review: A Sister’s All You Need “A Lack of Problems is All You Need”

You think Chihiro’s voice would be a dead giveaway.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The episode begins with a flashback of Itsuki’s life, his mother’s passing and the remarrying of his father, who he never forgave for doing so. But, Itsuki thinks to himself that he’s quite happy to have his new little stepbrother, Chihiro, in his life. The two have lunch together, and Chihiro says he is getting a new job as an accountant’s assistant. Itsuki is worried but gives Chihiro his approval.

We follow Chihiro on his first day at the accounting office working for Ashley Oono; golden-haired, cat-eyed and cruel as she is glamorous. She puts Chihiro to work cleaning her room and is surprised at the strength of Chihiro’s work ethic, who wants to make his brother proud. Impressed, Ashley offers Chihiro a bath. Ashley accidentally walks in on Chihiro changing, and we see that *gasp* Chihiro is a girl.

Chihiro talks with Ashley about how she hides her gender only from her brother and Ashley warns that Itsuki’s little sister fetish might cause problems for her in the future.

Later, Itsuki is presenting a draft of his new project to Kenjirou. The new project has a horrible premise: a boy loving his little sister who’s an 8-foot tall blob monster. Frustrated, Kenjirou scolds Itsuki and tells him she would be working on the next episode of Mahou academy. The next day, Itsuki takes Kani to the zoo, who is delightfully perverted the whole time. The two exchange sex jokes about pandas while Kani tries to flirt with Itsuki. Things, overall, go great and the two settle down for food to finish off their day. Just as he remarks that things were pretty normal, Kani starts making more jokes about animal balls and the physics of their testicular trajectory and reveals that she has a naked butt photo of Itsuki.

We cut Itsuki writing another one of his stories, which is about an evil wizard who summons indecent animals to fight his enemies. Itsuki hits a block and needs to go to the aquarium for ideas, and Chihiro insists on going with him. While the two walk to the aquarium, we get more flashbacks about how well the two have gotten along with each other in the past four years. Chihiro gushes to Itsuki about the fish and her love of cooking them. The two have a chill day, and Itsuki finishes the night by promising to take out Chihiro again sometime soon.

The two are about to depart on the train home, but a delay forces them both to take a cab home together. As the cab drops off Chihiro, their dad unexpectedly shows up, and Chihiro tries to get them to talk to each other, to no avail. It’s a tense moment, but Chihiro gathers her courage and tells Itsuki that she wants him to patch things up with dad and let them be a family again. The episode ends on a bittersweet note, and Itsuki stares at the window, feeling the weight of his relationship with his father and Chihiro upon him.

Our Take:

With this episode, I was most impressed by the story development it had to offer but was also distressed by how poorly it progressed along. The entire Zoo subplot with Kani didn’t really go anywhere, and it just interrupted the good dramatic development between Itsuki, Chihiro and his father. I wanted to see more of that story, and it really sucks that we’ll have to wait another week to see how it continues on when it probably could have been done in this episode.