English Dub Review: The Quintessential Quintuplets Specials
Overview:
Futaro decides to take the summer off from tutoring. Nino acts extra cold to him for some reason.
Futaro invites the sisters to the pool. Nino and Miku try to get closer to him, but Yotsuba makes a move.
Futaro and the sisters head to Hawaii. There, a girl asks Nino for help, but she doesn’t speak English.
The quintuplets take turns helping Lily prepare for her date with the boy she likes.
Our Take(Spoilers):
To the best of my knowledge, these specials were released back in 2023 and 2024. It took a while for us to not only get them but to get them dubbed in English as well. To get the technical things out of the way first, we got all of the VAs back to reprise their roles. The show still looks beautiful, though I have to admit after doing a rewatch, the change in style from season one to season two and beyond is a bit jarring.
The first two episodes animate some chapters from the manga that we didn’t get in the show proper. Then the second set of special episodes is a new mini-arc that shows Futaro and Yotsuba’s Hawaii honeymoon trip. Before you get too excited, remember that for some reason all of Yotsuba’s sisters are going on this trip as well. Not only them, but their dad and his assistant as well… for some reason.
I liked the first two episodes because they animated a lot of my favorite scenes from the manga. There’s an especially heartbreaking one involving Yotsuba that made me want her to win after reading it. My only issue with these episodes is that if you’re watching the episodes in order, then the placement of these ones can be a little jarring. I know it’s something that isn’t technically possible, but having them included within the series somewhere would be nice.
Now the honeymoon episodes… where to even begin. If you’ve read my reviews for this series before, then you’ll know that I’m not the biggest fan of how it ends. Yotsuba and Futaro barely get any time in the series as a couple because it essentially ends after they get together. So you would think an arc like this would be a way to give us something with them acting like a couple. That’s kind of hard to do when the sisters come along, and the newlyweds barely get any time alone together.
It was cool to see them all switch places to help Nino with a girl who needed help. Since Nino didn’t speak English well, she agreed to help this girl without knowing it. All of the girls switched places and helped with different things. This almost led to what would have been a huge mistake, in my opinion.
After the honeymoon, Futaro’s grandparents come to visit suddenly, and Yotsuba isn’t prepared to spend time with them. Futaro concocts a plan where all of the quints will switch places to help solve each other’s problems. If they went through with this, that would have had Ichika spending time with Futaro’s grandparents. This would have been awful to me because Futaro and Yotsuba are married now; no one else should be inserted into these intimate moments.
Luckily, the girls all decide that it would be best if they handled their own problems. I suppose this is a student surpassing the teacher type moment. I can respect it for that, but the fact that Futaro was willing to share an intimate moment with someone else and spend time with his family was disheartening. Especially because of the reasons he fell in love with Yotsuba in the first place.
I would like to see a sequel for this series, but if this is a sign of what that might be like, I’d rather it stay done. I’ll always be fond of this series for being one of the first anime that truly hooked me that wasn’t a typical shonen series. It was also one of the first manga I decided to read because I HAD to know what happened, plus I didn’t think the whole series would be adapted. I’m glad that it did get fully adapted, but I am sad with how it ended, and these specials were a missed opportunity for me.
