English Dub Review: Full Metal Panic Invisible Victory “Intermission”

Play it again, Sosuke.

OVERVIEW

A recap of the first four episodes narrated by Kaname.

OUR TAKE

I’m surprised Funimation opted to actually dub the recap, since I figured they’d take that opportunity to simply move onto Episode 5 and close the gap a bit, or even just take the week off instead of adding rather pointless narration around selected clips. I’m glad Luci Christian possibly got a couple extra bucks for this, but it really strikes me as not needed for English speaking audiences. From what I’ve heard, the reason for this recap in Japan was due to Golden Week, a cluster of national holidays that are celebrated close together. I haven’t been keeping up with a ton of other shows this anime season, so I’m not sure how they were affected if they were at all.

This is understandably frustrating for fans of Full Metal Panic, who have been waiting over a decade for new content and probably weren’t expecting a road bump like this only a third of the way through this new season, especially on such a cliffhanger. In a way, this was probably a good place to put an intermission, as the events adapted in Episode 4 were the conclusion of Volume 7 of the light novels, so it makes more sense to have a break here as opposed to in the middle of one. And, without giving anything away, the next few episodes apparently show a drastic change to the setting, plot, and cast, so we might as well vividly remember every grisly detail of just how all that we were accustomed to in the past sixteen years of the franchise was so suddenly torn down in about less than an hour and a half of runtime. Just in case you had somehow managed to put the smashed pieces of your heart back together in the past week.

Though I have to say, these first few episodes, while more on the dark side than I would’ve liked for this show, have shown promise in being a worthy continuation of the story. We have the majority of the old cast back (#NotMyKalinin), we have the fresh mech battles to gush over along with new mechs brought to animation for the first time, and we have the high energy and investment needed to carry the rest of the season at least. There’s more CGI than I prefer in my mecha and how the show will manage with separating the main couple AGAIN is anyone’s guess, but I’m eager to find out. So, going by an average of the previous scores…