English Dub Review: YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World “Parallel World Constitutive Theorem”

Takuya tests his time-traveling abilities.

Overview (Spoilers Below):

When Takuya is asked to sort through his father’s research, he enlists help from the Historical Research Club, aka Mio and Yuki. After they finish going through the materials, they wander upon Mount Senkaku and find that weird blue haired girl doing some unknown ritual that involves flowers.

Later on, they run into the foreman of the building site (or ‘Asshat’, as Takuya likes to call him). He’s trying to deflect blame for the accidents that have been occurring but since she’s the mayor’s daughter, Mio gets to talk some sense into him. On his way to visit Ayumi, Takuya discovers she’s being harassed by some thugs, and he tries to use his powers to save her without much success. As the episode ends, the foreman enters the arena…

Our Take:

After a pretty bland premiere episode, I was hoping that YU-NO would shake things up and try being more interesting for the follow-up. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Instead, the second episode of YU-NO is almost more boring than last week’s premiere. Nothing really happens until the final few minutes runtime, when Ayumi gets cornered by some crooks and Takuya has to use his newfound powers to save her.

I was happy to see Takuya beginning to experiment with the strange device of his father’s as the episode begins, but I really wish we knew as much as he does. It seems like he’s already learned a lot about it offscreen between last week and today, but I have no idea how the device works. There’s a ton of buttons without labels, but apparently, he knows what they do, or he’s comfortable fiddling around with potentially dangerous time travel tech anyway. Based on what we learn in this episode, it’s not really ‘time travel’ that the machine enables him to do, per se. Rather, it allows him to travel to parallel dimensions where different choices have been made. I guess it’s kind of like an upgraded version of time travel?

Despite nothing really happening until the end, we did get to spend a lot of time with our core group of three. I’m actually liking Mio and Yuki more and more. I just wish they had dropped Takuya like a hot potato, or send him to an alternate dimension or something. Imagine how much better the show would be if Mio was the main character who found the device, and Yuki her loyal henchperson. Regardless, they keep the episode from being completely unsalvageable. Mio’s love for investigating both the historic and the paranormal make her a fun character, and I hope the show doesn’t do something stupid with her. That weird interaction between the blue-haired girl, Mio, and Takuya was already dumb enough. (“Are you attracted to her?” Mio asks out of the blue when Takuya defends the girl.)

The dub was alright this time around. We actually have a cast list, so thanks for publishing it in time for the second episode, Funimation! Eric Vale is doing a nice job giving Takuya a personality through his line readings. Right now, Takuya’s voice is probably his sole redeeming feature. Megan Shipman is fine as Mio, but nothing spectacular yet, though that may be simply because she hasn’t been given any major scenes so far. The rest of the cast is fine as well, but nobody else stood out to me as being particularly praiseworthy. The dub is being directed by Anthony Bowling, who I’m not familiar with… here’s hoping he has fun with it! There’s definitely some playful lines in the series, like Takuya calling dibs on his father’s potential porn collection: “I’d be shocked if dad and I have the same taste.” Also, I love his introduction of the foreman, just because he’s the only character maybe more annoying than Takuya: “This is Asshat. He works with Ayumi.” 

Episode 2 of YU-NO was not a step up in terms of writing, animation, or anything else. But it wasn’t really a step-down, either. Two episodes in, I’d usually expect a show to be in the midst of hooking my attention, but YU-NO still feels like it’s warming up. I’m interested to see what the series can come up with that’s unique. From how it’s going so far, I’m not holding out any hope, but hey, they’ve got 22 more episodes to surprise me.