English Dub Review: Ensemble Stars “Retrospective Special”

Overview

Recap episode. Subaru narrates how Trickstar formed, how Anzu became their producer, and how they slowly formed a “revolution” from inside the political schema of the school. Eichi didn’t like how a non-student council approved group was becoming popular, and tried to split Trickstar up by offering them millions of yen and attempting to assign them to other groups. While it initially works, Subaru’s faith in the group eventually gets all the members of Trickstar back together, and they defeat fine and all the other groups in the DDD competition. Been there, seen it.

Our Take

There’s something so unbelievably pointless about recap episodes, but why does it seem like within the past few years, they’ve gotten even more popular to include in every anime show? Obviously, the answer is to save money, but there were never any “.5” episodes in classic anime. Really now — who are they catering to when they do these? People who are tuning in to watch the show with friends but don’t care enough to watch the whole show? Here’s the thing: people who watch a recap episode but won’t watch the actual episodes probably aren’t going to get into the series. It really just seems like it’s a space filler.

Also, it’s funny how Subaru became the narrator when Anzu was initially the narrator for the series. It just goes to show how unimportant Anzu is, and how she’s literally just there so that drooling fans can put themselves in her shoes. If the series replaced Anzu with a mop, there would be no difference. If there’s anything this episode did, it’s that it established that Subaru is truly the protagonist of the show.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can we watch the actual show now, please?