English Dub Review: Tougen Anki “Let the Training Begin!”; “The Path to Growing Strong”

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Overview:

Shiki and his fellow Rasetsu Academy students face a new training challenge: climbing a mountain in a freezing blizzard. Every student must reach the summit within 24 hours, but part-time instructors Hagure Nekosaki and Yu Innami have been brought in to stand in their way.

Shiki is caught in an avalanche while shielding Homare, who has injured her leg. He survives, but develops a high fever and loses consciousness. Meanwhile, Juji has been immobilized by Innami’s ability. Kuina is ready to abandon him, but agrees to fight Innami at Rokuro’s request.

Our Take(Spoilers):

I need to get some technical stuff out of the way here first. This show is listed as being available on Crunchyroll, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. If you want to watch the English dub specifically, the only place to watch it currently is on Amazon. I’m not sure if the other platforms will catch up later or not, but if you’re looking forward to it and don’t have Prime, that could be an issue for you. Luckily, you don’t need the Crunchyroll extension or anything; it’s natively on Amazon Prime. If you have Crunchyroll, typically you would have to subscribe through Amazon as well or cancel your other one, so that was nice, at least. Now into the show review!

I’m not going to lie, I’d forgotten that this was going to get a second season. Not only that, but I didn’t think we’d get it as fast as we did. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the first season, but this one seems to be off to a better start in my eyes.

Homare was a character that I wanted to get a little more background on, and well… be careful what you wish for. It’s not that it was bad from a delivery standpoint; it’s just that what happened to her was pretty bad. Imagine your own father trying to sell you into prostitution when you’re fourteen years old. Then, when your sister attacks him to save you, he kills her. I would probably be messed up in the head too. But it seems like she’s turned a corner, and I hope we see her grow a bit after this.

I liked these first two episodes, but I’m wondering if that’s because my expectations were fairly low. Plus, the characters have grown together a little more, so they seemed a little less annoying this go-around. Hopefully it can keep that up because it would be nice to look forward to this show instead of hating on it.