English Dub Review: Witch Watch “Kanshi Kazamatsuri, The Tengu”

If this episode’s bad, I’ll eat crow

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kanshi Kazamatsuri, Nico’s crow familiar, makes himself at home, but butts heads with Morihito.

OUR TAKE

This week does away with the multiple skits and titles for the time being (don’t worry, it’ll be back next week) to focus solely on the proper introduction of Kanshi to the cast. Naturally, being another guy, he and Morihito are pretty much immediately at odds, though not for what I expected. I honestly thought this would be a pretty straightforward love triangle between the two, but it doesn’t seem like Kanshi likes Nico, at least not in that way. Seems more like he’s just a socially awkward kid like Mori, and so they see a bit too much of themselves in each other, leading to conflict. So, naturally, the main point of commonality between them is being friends with Nico, which ends up bonding them a bit when Nico gets wrapped up, literally, by a piece of magic clothing that takes her hostage. And so, the two that seemed like they would never get along finally see eye to eye on their devotion to protecting their mutual friend. However, that may not last long as Kanshi decides to move in with them…mainly because he already blew all of his money and needs a place to crash. Ain’t life grand?

While this episode is just as rapid fire with the gags and manga references as the previous ones, for some reason this week’s batch of jokes don’t hit as hard as they have before. Maybe I’m just getting acclimated to the pace of the show and it takes a bit more now to get me chuckling, but it could also be just as likely that there were less jokes this time because the focus was on building up this new character dynamic. Still, that was by no means a considerable subtraction from enjoying the episode as a whole. I may enjoy the jokes more than the characters, but the characters themselves have proven to be plenty enjoyable on their own, and taking out more time to build them up so that I DO care about them more than before is an understandable and smart move for strengthening the fortification of my investment in what’s going on. Speaking of, there’s still the matter of these prophecies that Nico’s mom keeps sending, which I’m sure will be a bigger deal as the story goes on. For now though, we’re back to more comedy as next week is once again a many titled episode, so I guess get ready for more laughs than plot!