English Dub Review: Mission: Yozakura Family “Government Spies”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Taiyo tests his abilities against a couple government spies, Sui and Oga, by tailing Sui for days and fighting him until he can get a hit in.

OUR TAKE

We’ve seen Taiyo deal with a corrupt cop and some stray assassins here and there, but now we get to see him go up against the government. Specifically, he goes up against two spies in very anime looking uniforms you would never see any government workers wear outside of a convention, but you get my meaning. This is Taiyo’s first real test against another big group, possibly the biggest centralized group, and Sui wipes the floor with him several times. It’s true that Taiyo has definitely improved rather quickly in his spy training in only a handful of episodes, but now he gets a bitter reminder that there’s always a bigger fish. Thankfully, from what I can tell, Sui doesn’t seem to be a major antagonist or a very challenging rival, just a very competent lawful good opponent to test his skills against, while Oga…is kinda just there to be Sui’s foil. While this definitely seems like a major milestone in the kinds of opponents that Taiyo has faced and how to further improve, this is hardly a do or die situation that I get the feeling is coming at some point soon, at least based on my familiarity with shonen genre convention.

Although on top of all that, we do get to know another sibling Nanao, a bit better. This and the last episode have kinda just thrown in stuff with more of the Yozakura siblings as a side thing instead of making part of the main plot like I expected, but that’s probably fine as long as it gets in there somehow. Last week had stuff with Shion, the hacker sibling, while this time opens with Nanao using his apparently enhanced digestion system to process and destroy an experimental virus made by an evil group. That seems like a pretty useful skill, but also hints at there clearly being organizations that are much more nefarious than the Yozakuras or the government. So, while this skirmish against Sui and Oga was educational and embarrassing for Taiyo, I get the feeling that he’ll also be facing someone from a much more deadly group that will be far less forgiving of his weak points and shortcomings. No idea when that will be coming though, and hey, we still need to do an episode about the family dog in the meantime (of course the spy family’s dog is going to have special powers and a personality, why are you looking at me like that), so we may have to wait a little bit to see that.