English Dub Season Review: Cardfight!! Vanguard Will+dress Season One

Overview:

Four months after the battle at Nagoya Castle, Yu-yu and his friends received an invitation to a tournament. That “Deluxe” tournament aims to determine the strongest fighter, bringing together both “Front Fighters” who are active in official tournaments, and hidden powerhouse “Counter Fighters” like “Blackout” that compete against each other for flags.
The existing characters from overDress will be competing with new characters from will+Dress such as Raika, Michiru, and Urara, to become the strongest of them all!

Our Take:

Not much to write about this one if I’m being honest. There were some fun episodes but when an anime is thirteen episodes long they can’t all be bad. The animation was serviceable but nothing to write home about. Sometimes when they would do “battle” scenes there would be an uptick in quality but those scenes were few and far between. Most times the card fighting was just two people looking at each other from across a table and screaming at each other. If they would have done more of showing the battles as they were playing out in the participant’s heads it would have been a lot better. As the episodes that had a lot of that were some of the higher-rated episodes I watched.

The voice acting was pretty bad and I hate saying that because I feel like it’s a lot of actors getting their starts. It just felt like the voice director didn’t try on this one. It reminded me a lot of early 2000’s dubs where there was almost no effort put in and when you watch as a kid that’s fine but as an adult, you pick up on more. The one positive thing I can say about the acting was I saw something you rarely see. Karin Kagami did the voice of Urara for the English dub and she was also the voice in the sub. I’ve never seen that before, she wasn’t great but when you’re using a second language to act that’s still impressive to me. She definitely made Urara the cutest and funniest character I enjoyed watching.

This is one you can skip out on for sure. If you are a fan of the series and have been watching there might be some merit for you. But if you’re like me and this is your first foray into this series then just don’t waste your time. There was the occasional enjoyment to be had but it was few and far between, you can spend your time better.