English Dub Review: Monster Girl Doctor “The Centaur of the Arena”

Overview (Spoilers Below): 

Long ago, monsters and humans battled, but these days, they live together in relative harmony. Dr. Glenn Litbite and his assistant, a Lamia named Saphentite “Sapphee” Neikes, have recently opened their own clinic in the town of Lindworm. Humans and monsters live together in this city.

One day, the doctor receives a request from his mentor to perform physicals at the Lindworm Arena for the arena fighters. He and Sapphee work together to make sure the monsters are ready for the fights, but are a bit stumped when it comes to the centaur princess named Tisalia. She’s been on an unexplainable losing streak lately, and her attendants Kay and Lorna are concerned. Luckily, it turns out all she needs is some horseshoes, and despite initially resisting the procedure, Tisalia ends up erasing her losing streak.

Our Take:

Monster Girl Doctor is a series that’s pretty easy to grasp. It’s all in the title: there’s a doctor who examines monster girls. For fans of this type of fan service-y monster content, the show may well be worth checking out. But for everyone else, there’s not a lot here to appreciate so far.

The first episode of the show is generally used for introducing the characters and setting up the plot. They can be hard to get right due to serving two purposes: being entertaining while trying to convey a lot of basic exposition. Oddly enough, Monster Girl Doctor doesn’t suffer as badly from the premiere blues as others, and that’s due to the simple nature of the series. Because there’s only two main characters (as of now) whose only real purpose is giving medical checkups to monsters, The Centaur of the Arena doesn’t have to spend a lot of time on the details.

We jump right into the ‘medical mystery of the week’, which involves a centaur named Tisalia who is a kind of royalty in the city due to her being the inheritor of a popular shipping/travel company. She’s a take charge kind of gal who isn’t used to her underlings going against her wishes, which makes the resolution to the episode a little strange. Doctor Glenn seems like a nice enough, though bland, guy up until then. But once he tells Tisalia she needs horseshoes, she refuses the diagnosis and declines the painful procedure. But the princesses attendants refuse to let her leave until the operation is successful, so Glenn continues with resistance from Tisalia. Sapphee even goes as far as sticking her tail into the centaur’s mouth to keep her quiet.

Obviously, this is par for the course for sexy monster shows enthusiasts, but for more casual viewers like myself, it just undermines the doctor’s credibility. He even goes so far as to say it was a test from his mentor to see if he would do what was best for the patient against their wishes, which seems like a weird thing for a medical professional to conclude.

When it comes to the artistic credentials of the show, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The studio is fairly new, and the visuals definitely don’t stand out in any way so far. That’s both good and bad, as it means no gaping errors, but no laudable highs either. The soundtrack is being done by TO-MAS, who I’m a big fan of thanks to their work on shows like Flip Flappers and Alice and Zoroku. The dub itself is cast very well, with Griffin Puatu sounding perfect as Doctor Glenn and Cristina Vee playing a sufficiently sarcastic Sapphee.

Though it doesn’t really have much going for it apart from the monster girls, Monster Girl Doctor isn’t particularly offensive in the premiere episode. The Centaur of the Arena probably won’t appeal to the average anime fan, but hopefully it will continue to build on its main cast and expand into something for more than just monster lovers.