English Dub Review: Stars Align, “Episode 6”

 

 

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The tennis club’s first practice match against championship-level Misaki gets underway. 

Our Take

The first tennis match is upon us. It may just be a practice match, but it is still very productive.

The animation here is well done and executed in a very similar fashion to the animation employed in the practice sessions of previous episodes. The camera focuses mostly on the players hitting the ball rather than following the ball itself, though are a few shots that break this trend. 

While the ball itself is never completely tracked, the camera will sometimes start a shot right next to where the ball will land at the end of a volley. This gives you a brief preview of who will score a point right before the ball actually lands. This sounds like it would rob some of the tension of the match, but I feel it actually keeps most of it. In an exchange where it’s very likely that Shijo Minami will lose and the camera cuts to where a ball will be called out of bounds for them, you hope for a brief moment that it doesn’t. It always does, but that half-second of hope grants some of the tension back to the match. 

We see the results of three of the four practice matches that Shijo Minami plays against Misaki. They’re all different in content and fun to watch, but all of them have the same result. We see the strengths of each pair, as well as the faults. The big fault that everyone seems to share is lack of endurance, as they all tire out near the end of their matches. While they do all lose, they also learn a lot and feel good about themselves for improving. In a show rife with drama, these very constructive feel-good moments are very welcome. 

There were a couple of noteworthy moments worth highlighting. 

Watching Shingo and Tsubasa’s tactic of psyching their opponents out by shouting at them was pretty funny, even more so in that it worked for a while. The English dub actors nail the obnoxiously loud war chants of high school boys. 

Also, the Misaki team captain, Arashi, seemed as though we would be a big douchebag about everything. At the end of the last episode, he came off as overly aggressive and antagonistic, eager to start a fight, even a violent one. Throughout the matches, we discover he’s not a big douchebag but is still kind of a douchebag. He wants to rile people up but he isn’t mean about it, it all seems to be in the spirit of competition. 

The only real complaint I have about this episode is that it ends on a pretty abrupt cliffhanger right in the middle of the action. I guess that might be a good thing since it proves to be an effective motivator to keep watching. Most of the people who will be watching this show will probably be in the future after all of it airs. But the next episode doesn’t come out for two weeks for me, so I have to wait.