English Dub Review: Kaguya-sama: Love Is War – Stairway to Adulthood
Overview:
Kaguya’s birthday is just around the corner, and Fujiwara has come up with (what she thinks is) the perfect surprise: pretending that she and Shirogane are dating. Unfortunately for Shirogane, he and Kaguya have been secretly dating for real! Now Shirogane scrambles to keep everything under wraps, but when Kaguya suddenly shows up and does the unthinkable, everything takes a shocking turn!
As Kaguya and Shirogane head home together, he invites her to dinner so he can show her his new place—appropriately, of course. But when Shirogane’s little sister says she’ll be out for the night, the two suddenly find themselves alone!
Our Take(Spoilers):
While not really a negative, there is one other thing I’d like to mention. The way this story is presented makes it feel like this is the end of the series. There’s a movie that has been announced, but no idea when it will come out. In the press release, it says that it’s a new and original story, but with what happens in this special, I can’t help but wonder: what will it be about?
The story in this special is presented as Kaguya reminiscing while going through photo albums at home. She’s out of high school now, and in the final few minutes, we’re shown that she and Shirogane are living together. We don’t know if they’re married or anything, but I feel pretty confident they are. From what I can tell, there’s a fair bit of the manga that wasn’t adapted, but that feels unnecessary given how this one ends.
I know that sounded fairly negative, but I want to be clear. I love this series; it’s one of my favorite romcom anime out there because in some ways it feels like an American sitcom in anime form. I would love to have more of this show, but I don’t want it to overstay its welcome either.
One of the biggest parts of the manga was finally adapted in this special. Kaguya stayed over at Shirogane’s new house, and I don’t know if you remember being a teenager, but I think you can imagine what happened. The way sex was handled in this series was done very well, in my opinion. It was handled in a mature way, and there wasn’t anything crazy or gratuitous in it either. It was a little funny as well because they had both agreed not to do that, and then somehow they got swept up in the moment, and it happened.
The moments of Shirogane and Kaguya doing couple things were no doubt fantastic. But my favorite part had to be when Shirogane’s father started to become a successful YouTuber. Not only that, but his sister gets in on it in a hilarious way. She notices that anytime she walks by the camera, her father gets a bunch more donations. I imagine their reasons aren’t altogether altruistic, but it was made funnier by her getting on when her dad’s not around and scolding the people for making poor financial decisions.
If you’ve been following the series since 2019, then I can’t imagine you’re going to want to miss this one. I loved this show when I watched it subtitled because that was the only choice. I’ve now watched it all again with an English dub, and honestly both are great. I have a slight fondness for the sub because it was the first one I watched. But you cannot go wrong with either.
