English Dub Review: Strike Witches – Road to Berlin “Beyond Two Hundred Miles Per Hour”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Charlotte hears of her speedbike record being broken and becomes obsessed with reclaiming her title. Luccini, always her faithful sister in arms, offers to assist but ends up just making things harder, leading to a spat between them. However, when another Neuroi attacks, Luccini is left alone on the battlefield, forcing Charlotte to use her newly refurbished speedbike to save her and giving up her chance to get back her record. But little did she know that she broke it during her rescue, she just didn’t notice.

OUR TAKE

Like I said last week, we’re starting to get into the more episodic stretches of the season where all the rest of the cast gets the spotlight for awhile before whatever the main plot is starts to creep up again. It’s how the first two seasons handled the structure, so it’s no surprise that this one does it too as a return to form. Although the first season used Yoshika as the audience surrogate character to get to know everyone else in the group, but season two basically did what we’re seeing now. It’s also convenient that the 501st is usually divided into pairs that have a set dynamic which make good fuel for the episode to play with. In this case, Charlotte and Luccini are the fun loving gremlins of the group, but Luccini often gets too focused on fun and Charlotte gets in over her head with her ambition, leading to moments like we see here where they butt heads. Though overall, the message is wholesome and made simply: focusing on your goals alone can lead you to ignore your friends, but if you help each other, you’ll go farther without even knowing it. All very nice and fluffy, kind of like a slightly less NSFW My Little Pony fan fiction.

Unfortunately, that’s about all the nice stuff I can say about it all because this story is pretty dang weak, even compared to what we’ve seen so far. I know that the plot isn’t exactly what people come to see with these, but it’s a little hard to critically analyze how cute or cool everything is when that’s pretty much the only intended reaction that we’re supposed to get out of it. It’s safe to say that this episode isn’t going to have any long term ramifications on the plot, and we didn’t even really get to develop Shizuka’s character all that much other than a brief glimpse of her training with Yoshika, whose powers continue to fritz on and off. We’re also not really getting anything new for Charlotte or Luccini, who longtime fans will know inside and out by now, but again, not really the point. It’s just a brief bit of even fluffier fluff amongst all the other fluff. And that’s fine if that’s what you’re in here for, but I really need something solid to go with my fluff, if you don’t mind.