English Dub Review: The Quintessential Quintuplets “Begin the Offensive”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Nino confronts Maruo about her and her sisters continuing to live on their own, despite his protests. Futaro arrives to bring Nino back to the party, and despite Nino’s attempts to keep her feelings buried, they boil over and she confesses her love to Futaro on the ride over. However, it seems he didn’t actually hear her, so she makes sure to reiterate, telling him that even if he doesn’t see her as girlfriend material, she’ll MAKE him see, all of which Ichika overhears.

Later, after winning a trip out to a special hot spring, Futaro and his family run into the Quintuplets and Maruo. Most of the sisters act nervously around Futaro, though Nino starts acting very familiar, alarming Miku, and Itsuki asks to talk to him later that night. He does go to see her later, but it turns out the Itsuki he runs into…is not actually Itsuki, and is asking for a change in their student-mentor relationship. He does talk to the real Itsuki later and mentions this encounter to her, wondering if one of the sisters is still trying to get him fired. This is interrupted by Nino, but what is learned from this is that Futaro has changed from being just a tutor to at least being a friend. If only he knew.

OUR TAKE

Thus begins the major shift for story events to come, as Nino is now fully on the attack to win Futaro over. It is certainly quite endearing to see her go from being the one who resisted him the most to now fighting earnestly for his affections, but as I think I may have mentioned before, her being the one to confess first is, ironically, what dooms her. Even putting aside the fact that she’s treated him horribly before (not the least of which being her drugging him a couple times), her role in the story is more about being a catalyst for other characters with a better to chance to get a move on with their own routes to conquest. Ichika overheard the confession and is grappling with whether or not to follow her own feelings on this, so this (and a few more pushes next episode) are probably the kick in the pants she needs to hurry it up. Meanwhile, Miku has been pretty fervently been working on her end for awhile and pretty much INSTANTLY picks up what Nino’s up to the moment she starts calling Futaro by his first name. One would kill for a feelings radar like that.

The fake Itsuki thing is going to carry over into the next episode and the significance and meaning behind that will be worth saving for then, but I’ve been putting off mentioning something that relates to pretty much all the times that Futaro is unable to tell the group apart. Keep in mind that this series was first released as a manga, which was naturally in black and white with no audio. Also that the manga designs for the sisters, even when they were shown in color, have them in the same hair color. For the anime release, this was obviously changed to make things easier for the viewer to tell them apart, but that and their very distinctly different voices, both in Japanese and English, have the side effect of making Futaro look really dumb when he says he can’t tell who’s who sometimes. This was kind of excusable early on, but now it strains credulity. As English Dub viewers likely picked up, the fake Itsuki shown here is Miku, who attempted to change her relationship with Futaro to move towards possible romance, but he sure as hell isn’t going to figure that out. And what’s weirder is that they’ve actually done good fake outs with this before, but I suppose it’s hard to work that in all the time. We’ll see that pushed to its limit next time.