English Dub Review: The Quintessential Quintuplets “Sisters War: Part 1”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Kyoto Trip begins with everyone on their own personal mission: Ichika to maintain her lie with Futaro, Nino to go full steam ahead with Futaro, Miku to feed Futaro her homemade bread, Itsuki to get Futaro to remember six years ago, and Yotsuba to…just have a good time. But Ichika’s lie is undone and the mood of the trip begins to unravel.

OUR TAKE

Things begin to come to a head with the two parter which will finish the second season. And boy do they try to cram a bunch of stuff in all at once. Obviously this plot is going to have a lot going on, which typically makes for a potentially great finale that wraps up a lot of things set up over the course of the season, but in this case I think there may have been a bit too many misfires. The main one being that the sorta three, sorta two way battle for Futaro here is a bit over dramatized. I’ve already made my position on who I think the story is trying to have us root for here, at least among these three, which is Miku. Nino is earnest in her “efforts” to woo him, but they pretty much all come down to “I definitely love him the most and I’m great so that’s all I need to do”, which just kinda makes her look more like a narcissist who Futaro should not touch with a ten foot pole, while Ichika has caught herself in a lie that she feels she has to maintain but which is already falling apart. So clearly these two are out of the running.

So that would lead me to believe that Miku and her bread are the obvious choice, and it seems that Futaro is also aware of her feelings (proving to not be as dense as he previously seemed), but it seems that her lack of confidence is proving to be her Achilles’ heel. And even putting that aside, it seems like this sudden tug of war over the dude has completely left his own decisions and feelings out of the loop, which ends up making it all feel like I want no one to win, which is not the feeling I should be having. And yet I don’t feel confident rooting for Yotsuba or Itsuki just because they’re not officially in the competition because…well, they’re not really very involved. And we’re getting pretty close to the end of the story at this point, so I feel like this should be pointing towards someone being the clear winner, but it isn’t. Maybe this is just the pitfalls of having this sort of story finally becoming a problem. It could also be the result of trying to rush too much of the story at much, as we are adapting a considerable amount more than we did last season. But we can get more into that next week for the season finale and all the problems THERE.