English Dub Review: Mission – Yozakura Family “Shion & Kengo vs. Chacha & Aonuma”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Shinzo finishes his fight, giving Shion and Kengo a pathway to face the next two Tanpopo members.

OUR TAKE

The final battle against Tanpopo continues as we keep picking off members and giving each sibling a time to be in the spotlight. This week, we quickly wrap up Shinzo’s fight against the metal guy whose name I’m blanking on, by using that age old tactic of turning his body into the type of metal that he can’t morph at his will. God, it was so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming! But yeah, still a pretty neat fight, even if it got weirdly split up across this and last episode in an odd way, though it did show that Shinzo is a pretty creative and smart fighter when he gets the chance, even if he can be kind of shy sometimes. And once that’s taken care of, we can move onto the title fight of the episode, involving the master of disguise Kengo and hacker extraordinaire Shion against Aonuma the freezy guy and Chacha the…giant head full of smart things? Look, in case it wasn’t clear, I’m kind of dealing with a massive fever right now and it’s kind of a miracle I’m able to type even this much. But still, even if it’s not a directly offense fight, it’s still pretty neat.

We’ve seen bits and pieces of Kengo and Shion’s abilities across the series so far, but while we know how disguising one’s self or being able to hack anything can be useful, we’ve never quite seen either of them get the spotlight and show off just how far they can go…until now. Shion’s Blooming is basically an extension of that skill, being able to outmaneuver Chacha in terms of information control and being able to get him closed off before making the killing blow. Kengo however shows us a different side, being able to apparently read an opponent entirely when he uses his Blooming, even down to reading their own memories back to them. And in the case of Aonuma, even able to recall memories he had long forgotten, taking him out of the fight of his own volition. And just like that, two more Tanpopo agents are off the board, leaving on a scant few left with only three episodes remaining, and Taiyo seeing Makoto in striking distance. I guess we’ll see how things move closer to the climax of the season next week! Hopefully with a bit more fighting than we got here.