English Dub Review: Tsurune “For Better or Worse”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Masa gathers the kyudo team together for an announcement: apparently a famous pop idol, Noririn will be shooting around the temple, including practicing kyudo, so he asks if they know of her. Turns out one of the members of the Kirisaki team, Daigo Sase, is a huge fan, bringing the two teams together in alliance on how to handle her arrival. While no one is quite as into this as Daigo, the group goes through a rundown of the principles of kyudo in a way that Noririn will be able to understand. Despite this, Masa gets a call that the shoot’s been cancelled, but he’s still glad he got to do things with the teams.

OUR TAKE

With dubbed anime releases slowing to a trickle as we wait out the pandemic, we turn to the stand alone OVAs for comfort. And better yet, it’s something from Kyoto Animation, notable for projects such as Haruhi Suzumiya, Lucky Star, Free, and many more notable anime of the last decade and a half. Unfortunately, this one might not be worth much more than twenty minutes to numb your brain. Not in the sense that it’s particularly bad, but more that it’s just…rather dull. Tsurune’s dub ran through early last year, making the hesitance to put out this lone extra episode rather puzzling, especially since it ended up just about as much of a snore as the rest of the series. I went through the previous thirteen episodes to prepare for this, and while these OVAs are typically nothing substantial in terms of story or character work, it still ended up feeling rather starved for anything of note.

One of the things that I kept noticing throughout my viewing of the series was how thin the characterization was on the majority of the cast, save for Minato, Seiya, Masa, and Shu. I wasn’t expecting this sole episode to take care of that, but I also didn’t expect the most character exploration to come from one of the bit players on Shu’s team, all to build up for the arrival of a celebrity who never shows up. I mean, the point of this sort of plot is really more to see how the characters react to a celebrity being there, not them being there themselves, but at least then maybe someone with a more dynamic personality could add some spice to this cast that all come out to slightly different flavors of stale corn flakes dipped in La Croix. This is a KyoAni production, so naturally the animation is gorgeously fluid, but you might as well mute the dang thing if all you care about is the visuals.

Though this episode is notable, if only in a bittersweet way, as this was the last full series and OVA that the studio released before the horrific arson attack last July. Knowing that, it kind of adds a sad reminder of how the studio was prior to that, but simultaneously a bit of hope. As much as I have problems with this series on its own, it was definitely made with the same passion and dedication as those of KyoAni’s best works, meaning that once they’re back on their feet, they’ll be able to do their best work again. And just like them, so will we all once this current crisis passes.