English Dub Review: Skate-Leading Stars “Indecisive”

Overview:

The skate-leading competition begins, Ionodai gets second in the first competition but comes in sixth in the free-form. They decide to stop “caging” Maeshima and let him loose.

Our Take:

This show is poorly written, and the pacing is so awful I keep getting whiplash. We just fly through things that seem like they would be interesting while focusing on events that are boring or don’t matter. There are two positive things I can say for this episode.

We finally got a couple of full skate-leading performances and they could be interesting. If they bothered to show more of them over poor and awful character development that is. It mostly seems like synchronized skating but with more than two people. They only spent maybe four minutes on the performances so still not much but we might get more over the next few episodes. I would feel more confident saying we definitely will get more skate-leading but the writing is so all over the place that I can’t predict much. Who knows maybe that was what they had in mind with this… though I doubt it.

The other positive thing was seeing Sasugai get really close with his score predictions for the other teams. I really feel like as little as the actual sport and competition is focused on they might as well of made him the main character. At least he’s interesting.

I was really mad that last week all of Maeshima’s development was just give to us in an exposition dump. This week all of that development was made entirely irrelevant. We spent the first five episodes seeing the team trying to get Maeshima to work better as a part of a team. He finally does and they score well on the first event but then Sasugai says that to win they need to unleash Maeshima and let him do his thing.

A couple of problems here, like why didn’t he say something sooner? Yet he was all gung-ho about Maeshima learning humility and working with the team. Also, why did we just spend all that time growing Maeshima’s character (offscreen but still) to just say screw it after he finally reaches that point? It is beyond frustrating to see how all of this is developing.

I can’t really see any positives to this anymore. Especially now it seems like they were writing this show on an episode-by-episode basis and changed their mind multiple times. Just don’t watch it, there are hundreds of better anime out there you could be watching.