English Dub Review: Ranma ½ “Kiss of Death”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Ranma, Akane, and Ryoga wrap up the business with the figure skaters but face a new threat: the arrival of Shampoo, who has sworn revenge against Ranma when he beat in her in a fight as a woman long ago.

OUR TAKE

And we have finally concluded the way too long figure skating story arc, which apparently had so little left to it that it barely made it over the halfway point of this episode. Almost as if it didn’t need to flow over into three episodes at all and was perfectly fine just being fit into just two, but who the hell am I to say that? Gives me almost two episodes of content to talk about apparently, so why should I complain? Well, it ends up with the skating rink basically turned into a giant glacier filled rubble hole, as well as a bit of a needless scare of Akane possibly drowning which of course she was never in danger of doing, but at least we got to see that skating duo fight about who gets to have a blanket. Don’t you feel like this and the past two episodes were such a great use of your time to watch them? No? Well, now you know how I feel. Look, I’m not gonna pretend these past few episodes weren’t good for advancing Ranma and Akane’s romantic development, as I have mentioned the past couple weeks, but there were absolutely a ton of other ways of going about this, ways that we’ll likely see in the future of this series.

So that brings us to the other half of the episode where we introduce another new character! And this one is a bit more uniquely designed so she seems more likely to be recurring! Shampoo, at least as we’re introduced to her here, basically shares a lot with Ryoga in terms of backstory and initial motivation, with her having been humiliated by girl Ranma in the past when she was beaten by Ranma in a fighting tournament. After that loss, she gave Ranma what was known as a “kiss of death”, essentially to say she’s going to kill him later as revenge. But now she’s here and is about to learn that Ranma has actually been a man this whole time, which will no doubt change her mind on that killing idea real quick. That’s just kind of how things are going so far when women with any fighting ability meet Ranma. At this point I’m not even really criticizing it, I’m just making an observation, but we’ll get more into how that is one hundred percent what is going to happen in the next episode!