English Dub Review: Dagashi Kashi “Internets, Super Ball, and…”

Let’s get digital.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The newly arrived convenience store has been doing pretty well lately, and Koko learns from the store’s enigmatic owner, Beniyutaka Shidare, that he’s switched from selling his fancy sweets in a display case to selling them made-to-order. Following this change, Beni’s cakes have been selling like, if you’ll excuse the pun, hotcakes, especially since his customers can now even order them over the internet. This sparks a surge of creativity in Koko, he realizes that the next big step for his dagashi to take is to enter the domain of the world wide web.

Lucky for Koko, Hajime has some HTML knowledge she picked up in college, and the two quickly put together a website to try and get that sweet, sweet internet money. Of course, neither of them are web designers, so their attempts at making a homepage look less than stellar. They try the direct approach, putting “We sell dagashi” on the homepage, but this is so obvious and absurd to Koko and Hajime that they break out laughing. This goes on with a few different website catchphrases until they try to go a different direction, selling the store as a venue for nostalgia. This prompts them to the phrase, “We offer simple pleasures” with a picture of Hajime on the front page, but this takes things on a turn for the lewd. They try to recover by saying they offer toys as well, but it seems the more they try to fix the page, the more scandalous their store appears. Embarrassed, the two of them decide to let the idea be, and cut their losses to do something less awkward.

In the second story of the episode, Hajime has forgotten to make the store order for the week and is completely vexed with her ditsy self. She wracks her brain remembering what to order, and realizes that it was the super bouncy balls she was supposed to buy. Just her luck then, that a group of sassy kids walks into the store demanding just that item. They chastise her for being lame and not having super balls, but Hajime stands firm and resolves to remedy the situation. She decides to show the kids how to make their own super balls out of household items. While they’re initially skeptical, they quickly become enamored with Hajime’s super ball crafting skill. After she finishes the first one, the rest of the kids want one too, and she sells each of the kids one for a tidy profit. Realizing what she’s stumbled upon, she spends the rest of the day making a big bucket of super balls, proud of her resourcefulness. Just as she finishes, however, she trips and knocks the super balls over the store, just in time for Koko and Saya to return to the store and find her head over heels.

Our Take:

This was a cute little episode of Dagashi Kashi, but not one that particularly stood out to me. Hajime’s antics are entertaining enough, but Dagashi Kashi is primarily a character comedy and it’s at its best when there’s the interaction between its eccentric cast. Will you chuckle watching this episode? Probably. But there’s something lacking about it that makes Dagashi Kashi the unique show that it is. Maybe if Hotaru returns sometime soon, they can shake things up again, but for this week, I’ll have to accept this episode as something of a downturn.