English Dub Review: Hetalia – World Stars OVAs

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Belgium gains a sudden spike of tourists looking for a certain dog. Later, the countries all celebrate Christmas and New Year’s.

OUR TAKE

Okay, NOW we’re done with Hetalia World Stars. I figured they wouldn’t just leave those three OVAs undubbed if they could help it, seeing as they’re just as easy to dub as the other episodes. And there’s only three so it takes twenty five percent less work to get it done! Plus, unlike most of the proper World Stars season, these few are actually pretty entertaining, so this is a much better way to close things out. The first segment mainly ends up focusing on Belgium noticing a bunch of tourists from other countries coming to visit because, as she finds out later, they are drawn there because of a book called “A Dog of Flanders”, which inexplicably became popular in Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, inspiring no less than three Japanese TV shows and two films. That’s a pretty wacky bit of cross cultural history, and honestly what I was expecting and hoping for more of from a new season of Hetalia, much like the petty squabbles between Czech and Slovakia that was touched on earlier. So they’re not incapable of doing stuff like this, I guess they just kinda flubbed it by using so much time on that Industrial Revolution six parter.

But ultimately, I can’t be too mad at Hetalia for just doing what it wants to do. It’s not the new hotness like it was and it probably only has some die hard nostalgic fans following this new stuff, so they can afford to just go along with what they know people will like. An example of that would definitely be in the other two OVAs that just give us more of the main countries doing their usual shticks centered around their respective countries’ traditions regarding Christmas and New Year’s. Admittedly, it’s kinda weird discussing that at this point in time, considering that Halloween wasn’t even a week ago at the time of this writing, but I guess if we’re going to close out the season and possibly the series, focusing on holidays that are around the end of the year, as well as New Year’s inherently being about both endings and new beginnings, it seems about as fitting a conclusion as we could possibly get. It’s a bit strange knowing I may have just heard all these takes on these characters for the last time, but then again, I didn’t think I’d ever hear them again in the first place, so I guess I’ll just be glad we got what we got.