English Dub Review: The Dinner Table Detective “Welcome to the murderous party File 1”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Reiko Hosho breaks out her detective persona Inspector Kazamatsuri to help solve the mystery of who attacked someone at a friend’s dad’s birthday party.

OUR TAKE

Surprise! Did you think the new Gundam show was the only anime Amazon was distributing a dub for this season? Well, think again, as we have this procedural detective show that is apparently based on a novel, following the misadventures of socialite Reiko Hosho as she solves crimes under a detective persona for some reason. Or at least, that’s what the basic summary of the first episode told me, as this first episode is not exactly a good introduction to this premise, starting off in a situation that apparently feels no need to catch us up on why Reiko is a detective or why she uses a secret identity. I guess it’s just a thing that is meant to give this story a bit of uniqueness, for all the good it does in that department. It doesn’t help that the character designs are kinda bland, including ones that are meant to stand out like a rival detective whose main character trait is that he gets shit wrong, but with a flourish. This first case involves people at a party that Reiko knows, so I guess that explains why she would be hiding her identity from them, but it’s implied she’s already been doing this for some time, so why does she make a whole different identity for that? Beyond that we know little about her, which I suppose will be remedied in the remaining eleven episodes.

But that’s not the only thing working against the show, as the dub is just AWFUL. I’m not sure how often dubs are done in Cape Town, South Africa, but if they’re anything like this, they really need to up their game. So far we’ve gotten Elon Musk and this out of that country, so it’s not a great track record so far. This show is most definitely not on anyone’s radar for this season, made clear by its lack of a Wikipedia page, so clearly this studio was just picking up the scraps of something for their actors to work on, but HOLY SHIT can you tell that these voices do not normally speak English, with line flubs that would be inexcusable past the nineties. So yeah, not really looking forward to covering more of this as my new Saturday show, but at least I know it’s only for one season before it’s shown to bomb and left to collect dust in Japanese bookstores.