English Dub Review: Witch Watch “We Got Trapped in a Death Game, But…”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The guys of the house get kidnapped and forced to play a death game…but they have notes. Later, Nico’s magic makes some body parts get longer! Not those parts, you pervert.

OUR TAKE

Hey look, it’s the episode description from that glitch that happened a few weeks ago! But yeah, we’ve got another certified banger of a Witch Watch episode this week, as these segments put together some of my weird niche likes in a story: unexpected cooperation out of conflict and, later, weird body horror shenanigans. The first is very clearly a parody of the gory horror franchise Saw, with everyone except for Nico kidnapped by some Jigsaw-esque mad man trying to get them to play a game of risk and blood…only for everyone to be annoyed by how complicated the game is and end up having a whole session of workshopping the mechanics and refining the structure and all of that. Only for it to be revealed that the culprit was…actually Keigo, trying to film another viral video. While the Keigo in the group was actually Nico in disguise spell. You know, with all this focus on Keigo being a werewolf with a rebellious alternate personality, I’m kinda glad they haven’t dropped his pension for trying to make viral videos. These aspects aren’t really related at all, but people are multi-facated that way, so it kinda makes him feel more realistic as a character.

The other half of the episode is another “Nico accidentally magics some wackiness to happen” sort of episodes, this time with the return of Student Council President Tenryu, the guy who can’t take his hand off his hat and had that whole council of tropey anime villains. In this case, Nico trying to help elongate a whittled down pencil ends up making Morihito’s nails, Keigo’s hair, Kaneshi’s neck, and Tenryu’s right arm get way longer. So naturally, shenanigans arise as the guys try to hide their newly formed deformities. It kinda seemed like everyone was cool with there being ogres and witches around, though apparently Tenryu is checking up on everyone to make sure they’re not causing a disturbance or letting people know stuff they shouldn’t or…something. I guess whatever makes this more funny is the correct answer here. And thankfully it works because this was actually pretty dang funny, most notably Morihito using perspective with hand to make sure those passing by only see his longer nails from a view that make them look normal length at a glance. We’ve still got nine episodes left in this season and so far the comedy and characterization have continued to go very strong, so hopefully that continues for the remainder.