English Dub Review: Shaman King Season One Part Two

Overview:

Shamans are extraordinary individuals with the ability to communicate with ghosts, spirits, and gods, which are invisible to ordinary people. The Shaman Fight—a prestigious tournament pitting shamans from all over the world against each other—is held every five hundred years, where the winner is crowned Shaman King. This title allows the current incumbent to call upon the Great Spirit and shape the world as they see fit.

Our Take:

So Shaman King is the next anime to get remade to fit more in line with its manga counterpart. Just like Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Fruits Basket before it. The second part of Shaman King is out, does it keep the good work or start to fail?

The first thing you need to ask yourself when wondering if you will like Shaman King is, do you like typical shounen shows? What I mean by that is do you like things like Dragonball Z, Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, and My Hero Academia? If you answered yes then I think you will really enjoy Shaman King especially if you like tournament arcs. Though I think we will get more of that in the next part.

Speaking of the next part that is going to be out on January 13th so we don’t have all that long to wait for it either! I am pretty sure part one came out in April and the second part came out a couple of weeks ago so that was definitely a long wait. But luckily Netflix is getting a handle on everything as they go it seems. Kuroko’s Basketball got dubbed really fast from them as well.

There were a few things that personally just rubbed me the wrong way. One thing was that the proportions on the characters just looked really weird at times and I felt like I spent more time judging that than actually watching the show. I had to go back and rewatch a few parts cause of this. This is my first experience with Shaman King and the way they have these spirit mediums that also fight for them sometimes really reminded me a lot of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Like almost too much where I felt like I was watching a lesser version of that at times.

What this show really gets right is its voice cast. They do the typical anime thing of getting women to voice young boys which works because the talent they chose has a lot of experience doing it. I haven’t personally heard Abby Trott do it a lot but she sounded fantastic as the main character Yoh. Laura Stahl and Erica Mendez are no strangers to voicing young boys and they do fantastic.

Shaman King sticks really close to the shounen formula and pretty much nails it. The fights are good and the power system is fun. Almost all the characters get an episode or two to shine so far and of course, there is a tournament that starts. I am looking forward to seeing its conclusion in the next part. I definitely think Shaman King is worth your time especially if you enjoyed any of the other shows I mentioned. There might even be some romance brewing if that is your type of thing. Keep an eye out for part three coming in January!