English Dub Review: Skate-Leading Stars “One Lead”

Overview:

Focus is more on the different skate leading groups in the competition. In particular we “see” Yokohama Super Global High School versus Kogahara High. Yokohama has the idol Kuonji at the lead and Kogahara has the former Ionodai star Himekawa. Who will come out on top?

Our Take:

I put “see” in quotations because we only got to actually see half of the competition. The rest was all montaged with the Ionodai boys talking about what happened. There were even occasions that scores were just being thrown up on the screen and I am not a very big fan of that. There is tons of development of characters happening off-screen.

I had more enjoyment watching the idol group perform and following them. Still wasn’t great but it was at least fun to watch which is saying a lot. Kuonji’s group did a lot of new things that have never before been done in skate-leading. I really liked seeing some of those boundaries being broken down. Would have been nice to see them advance but of course, the group whose performance was montaged went on. It just makes little sense to me how they decide to structure these episodes.

I don’t really feel like harping on the same issues over and over. Essentially development offscreen equals bad and they advanced the group we didn’t even see. Why are they better? Is it because Kuonji and his group changed the status quo too much? Either way, I don’t think this show is trying to leave things up to the imagination in a high brow way I think they just don’t know how they want it to go.