English Dub Review: MF Ghost, “Teamwork”

Overview

The two-lap race of Odawara Pikes Peak is underway. With his tires now up to temperature, can Kanata start making his way through the field despite his power disadvantage?

Our Take

As one would expect, this wouldn’t be a sport if some form of fanservice wasn’t involved, even though it’s becoming a rarity to see nowadays outside of Japan with wokeness killing anything sexual. I know that some portion of the viewers won’t like it, but I don’t mind it here at all. Still, it was amusing to see Ren not being aware of what she signed up for, since the MFG angels themselves attract a good chunk of the male viewers with their skipy getups. Back to the racing, the Honda Civic Type R driver fell for the Exige’s tactic and let Nozomi in the Alfa Romeo 4C pass. To make matters worse, it also gave Kanata enough room to make a calculated swoop and pass him seconds later. It’s also implied that he crashed his Civic while struggling to keep up with Kanata’s GT86.

There are also some other noteworthy mentions of the race the tight battles between the 911 GT3/718 Cayman, the Audi R8 V10, and Aiba’s GT-R Nismo as well as the battle between the douche in the Lamborghini Huracan and the guy in the Ferrari 488GTB, where despite not being emotionally attached to his car, his thoughts reveal how much he wanted to outrace the Lamborghini more than anyone else, which feels fitting for a battle against the Italian cars. Also, the last minute of that episode knew how to hype things up…

Overall, this was a passable episode. The car battles are upping the intensity, and the CGI for this episode was very well done in many ways. Hopefully, this quality can be maintained consistently for the rest of this long-ass race. I’ll also admit, as the commentators went through Kanata’s history of how he first started racing which was interesting in its own right. Not only that, but the commentator also revealed an excellent call-back to Initial D which connects this sequel series even further. As somebody who hasn’t watched Initial D yet, I had to research the significance of this call-back but it started to make sense once I learned more about this world and the clever callbacks that further reward fans of the series.