English Dub Review: Bungo Stray Dogs WAN Episode 12

OVERVIEW
Atsushi and Dazai randomly switch bodies, leading to a series of body swaps. Later, the agency holds a wrap party.

OUR TAKE
And we finally come to the end of this comedy spin-off of Bungo Stray Dogs, putting the series to bed until they have enough manga material to make a new proper season of the show. For a final episode, I think it handled it pretty well, basically giving us one more fun skit with the Armed Detective Agency and giving everyone from that group one more time to give their respective comedy bits before the credits roll. It’s a bit disappointing that not everyone got one more chance to be on screen, most notably Akutagawa, who you would think would have gotten even a small appearance at the end. It’d be kind of like not having Vegeta show up if this were a show about Dragon Ball. But it’s not a huge deal and it doesn’t hurt or help the episode all that much. Even if I haven’t seen much of the show prior to its third season, I think it has done a pretty good job representing the series in its parody and in an affectionate way that fans of it will recognize. I know that if I were more of a fan, I would at least be glad for this to exist so that I could continue to support the work for at least a little longer.

Heck, maybe now that we’re finally in the offseason of this series again, maybe I’ll actually get around to watching those first two seasons. Maybe even rewatch the third and that movie we reviewed awhile back. Bungo Stray Dogs is, at the very least, a pretty novel shonen series with some interesting fights and power ideas. It might be potentially a little pretentious with how it uses authors for the basis of these abilities, but it also opens itself up to some fun opportunities and handles those quite well. Like most shonen, it does end up relying on the character designs and the weird powers a bit too much over the characters, but that’s just a problem that you come to expect with the genre itself. Or maybe I’m pulling that critique out of my ass because, one more time now, I haven’t seen most of the show. But now I finally have the time to fix that! Will I use that time to watch it? Eh, maybe, maybe not. I guess we’ll see if Season 4 every comes around and if we cover it.