English Dub Review: I Shall Survive Using Potions! “I’ll Find a Husband with a Treasure Hunt!”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

After accidentally deciphering some coded language, Kaoru is recruited by law enforcement to find a lost fortune. Also, a sickness begins to form in the area that even Kaoru’s potions can’t treat.

OUR TAKE

I Shall Survive Using Potions finally returns from break to knock out the first of its last two episodes. And to my actual legitimate surprise, their penultimate outing is…actually kind of decent? Maybe it’s because I’ve managed to get some space from the show that I haven’t very much cared for so far or that this episode specifically is trying a bit harder, but this week seemed to make use of Kaoru’s abilities in somewhat interesting ways. First off, her shop is seemingly doing better after a while, but after shenanigans in the previous episode, it’s down to a single store again. She also accidentally ends up reading a note meant to hide the hiked up resale of some of her potions, which gets her roped in with the authorities, so her seemingly unending abilities given to her by the goddess actually has some unforeseen NEGATIVE consequences, not just constantly giving her spontaneous edges in everything she’s doing. This leads her on a bit of a mystery as they search for some lost treasure, and even making a honed metal detector doesn’t find it right away.

It’s only after some out of the box thinking that they are able to find out that the treasure itself has been melted into a safe, which has been painted to simply look like a regular safe so that the entirety of the gold could hide in plain sight. Now, I’m not super sure what exactly the goal was in keeping it around like that, especially in the house of the people it was stolen from…but maybe I need to rewatch the episode to fully get that. I guess it may be just the deliberate way the treasure was transferred and that was the method in which it was transferred that was lost to the ages. Either way, it’s a decent twist, which are few and far between in this show. And that leads us into the last minute twist that will then lead us into the finale: there’s a disease going around that the potions aren’t helping. With one episode left, it makes sense to present a challenge that the potions not only can’t solve on their own, it might also be making things worse. I don’t exactly trust this show to stick the landing in handling all of that, but I’m at least willing to see where all of that ends up next time, with the final episode of I Shall Survive Using Potions, titled…“I Shall Survive Using Potions!”