English Dub Review: Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka “A Very Realistic Way of Dealing with a Problem”

A very realistic way of making a bad anime.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Asuka and Kurumi are going head to head against the mysterious terrorists that have been causing all the ruckus around generic Japan town lately. Asuka faces off against a pair of twins who fight with axes and have a water spirit accompanying them. The two are pretty decent in the fight but Asuka is able to turn it around with her “Rapture Talon”, a generic special move where shoots out a magical blade that slices one of the twins in half. After that, she eviscerates the other with relative ease, which makes one wonder why it was so hard for her to do any of this in the first place.

Meanwhile, Kurumi goes up against the rogue magical girl working with the terrorists, “Barber Scissors Abbey”, whose name would be more at home in an episode of “Jojo.” Abbey is something of a magical girls fangirl, who admires Kurumi for being as strong as she is. To demonstrate how much she loves her, Abbey summons to “Halloween-class” Disas to knock her around a bit and make her spine emit a goofy “Crunch” sound. But hey, its okay, Izuka’s got a crack military squad with conveniently discovered weaponry that can kill the Disas. Unfortunately, they’re not convenient enough to kill Abbey, so Asuka has to finish the job. But at the last moment, a masked figure shows up and allows Abbey to escape.

Later that night, Asuka and Kurumi go visit Nozomi, who is in the hospital being cared for by her father after getting “disarmed” by Abbey earlier. She wakes up while the three of them are talking, and boy is she unhappy to see Asuka. Since she’s a magical girl, Nozomi starts going into a conniption and screaming her head off. Kurumi helps her pass out and then offers to erase her memory so she can put this awful incident behind her. Asuka is harrowed by the experience and reflects on her traumatic past some more.

Our Take:

The proverbial shit is hitting the fan in Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka, the show made for nobody as the adaptation of a series that no one on this side of the Pacific Ocean cares about. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Asuka should have been buried in the ground a long time ago so that it can’t hurt anyone. Sadly, that is not the case. Another episode of this garbage has been left hot and stinking on Funimation’s simuldub schedule.

I’m not sure what’s more disturbing, the impressive amount of body-arching contortions that Kurumi endures to the sound of cracking bones, or the horrible, soul-piercing eyes that rest on her weird face. Needless to say, the art is questionable here, as it has been for the whole series, and there are some curiously sexual moments of intense violence that make my skin crawl. Accompanying these scenes of awkward fighting are plenty of explanations for what’s happening on-screen since the animation is unable to demonstrate the fighting with any depth. And that, of course, gives us plenty of time to endure the wretched deliveries of underpaid voice actors who are beginning to question their life choices when forced to try and give life to this material.

On a side note, I don’t think I could come up with a worse magical girl name than “Barber Scissors Abbey”. This is probably one of those cases where the Japanese version of the text used some English words without understanding the importance of context or just how silly the word “Barber” is, but this is the part where the localization needs to earn their salaries a bit. And if “Barber Scissors Abbey” was, in fact, the best translation that they could come up with, then god help us all.

Don’t bother, Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka, don’t even try to get me to care about what’s going on here anymore. You’re like a toddler holding a machine gun, shooting wildly in all directions hoping that something will land. A dismemberment here, some misplaced lewdness there, and of course a nervous breakdown to keep hammering home just how miserable is in this show, including the viewer. Let me be clear, shock value is not a replacement for character development. I love me some violent anime, I was watching “Higurashi” back in my freshman year with my eyes glued to that loli butchery. But violence like this is not for weak stories to play around with; you have to earn it. Otherwise, your anime is little more than an edgy teenager, trying to provoke others without having anything of value to say.