English Dub Review: Sasaki and Peeps “Real Life, Fantasy, and the Fourth World”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Sasaki and Futari Shizuka race to the site of the attack by the Magical Girls and manage to turn the tide with Sasaki’s magical abilities. This does raise some eyebrows from Akutsu and Hoshizaki, but Sasaki is able to steer them off the trail and keep things under wraps, as well as get Futari a more permanent position on the team. With things calmed down, Sasaki heads home to eat with Peeps, but the soon see a lizard man on TV. Meanwhile, Otonari is approached by an otherworldly prince about doing something for him.

OUR TAKE

In rushing to go through this entire series to get ready for this review, I have come to an unexpected conclusion: A clever seeming premise doesn’t really add up to much if the results are mediocre at best, and that’s basically what we’ve ended up with for Sasaki and Peeps. While the idea of a freakishly normal looking salaryman navigating learning magic powers from a talking bird wizard while working for a local psychics organization may SOUND pretty neat in theory, what we got basically ended up feeling cluttered and almost flavorless. Like yeah, a lot of the stuff that happens all season certainly SOUNDS interesting, but doesn’t really add up to something greater than the sum of its parts. As such, even this finale doesn’t really feel like the culmination of plots and themes that go back to the beginning of the story, it’s just a rematch with the magical girl from earlier, only this time she has a more talkative friend who wears yellow. It does give Futari Shizuka kind of a closure to her character arc of joining the organization, which ends up feeling so small in comparison to everything else. It just feels like another regular episode instead of a season finale, which may or may not determine if this turns out to be the ACTUAL series finale.

Watching every episode to this basically just left me drained, thinking about how blah everything is, which only then served to frustrate me because of where all of these concepts and subversions could go but probably won’t. And yeah, there’s certainly some merit in this last episode being a big fight against psychic targeting Magical Girls, while the fight does get a little bit clever, it still ends up not matching the story’s full potential. And so, the episode ends with everything feeling pretty normal, except for this sudden appearance by a lizard man (which I can’t imagine as anything significant) and some sort of hint on how the story will FINALLY involve Otonari. To be completely honest, the tease regarding her plot does look at least relatively interesting, but otherwise, it just doesn’t seem like this story has much reason to keep going after all. There’s a lot of threads that are left dangling after the episode ended that the following one is going to have to wake up. I guess we’ll see if the show gets renewed and is able to follow up on its potential. But one thing’s for sure, that ED is HORRIFIC.