English Dub Review: Hinomaru Sumo “Attack!! Nagoya Castle”

It’s time to crank things up a notch.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The sumo club arrives in Nagoya to train with ozeki-level sumo wrestlers. Once they arrive, however, their minds are much more on sights and good food before anything else. Despite his reservations, Kirihito lets the team take the day for a well-earned vacation before their training really begins.

While Hinomaru and Kirihito check out Nagoya castle, they come across an actor pretending to be a sumo wrestler asking people to fight him. Hinomaru volunteers, but a mysterious shaggy-haired man gets in his way. The two have a confrontation over sumo and end up getting into an impromptu bout. Little does Hinomaru know, but his opponent is Tenma Hikage, a high school sumo wrestler the closest to becoming a yokozuna in the league. He proves to be enormously powerful, so much so that Hinomaru fails to pull off his demon wheel, subdued by the presence of such a strong foe. Things look bad, but their fight is interrupted by the team captain of Hikage. He ushers them away but says they can finish their fight in the finals.

Later, the official training begins, and Saenoyama takes Hinomaru on a walk, who is down because his special move isn’t going to work at the tournament. Saenoyama tells him not to worry and tells him they’re going to train him through the wall he’s facing. Hinomaru goes to train with some elite wrestlers in the stable, who are unhappy with Hinomaru coming to train. Since he has no rank, they see him as lower than dirt. Hinomaru isn’t about to give up, however and faces the strongest sumo in the group. He’s outmatched, but through his strain and struggle, he is able to conquer his fear of failure and manages to drop his opponent.

However, in subsequent fights with the wrestlers, he finds his combo drop to be ineffective since each one is able to learn how to counter his technique after seeing it performed. His move, it turns out, is full of weaknesses. He’s got a long way to go, but an old man with a cane comes to offer his training for Hinomaru. Though he doesn’t know his name, it seems this man is extremely well-respected. He guides Hinomaru to a private training hall and reveals that he is a former yokozuna willing to train Hinomaru’s skills into something much more powerful.

Our Take:

We’ve finished the first big tournament arc in Hinomaru Sumo, which leaves us needing to get ready for the next milestone in the journey of the Odechi High Sumo Club. After a tournament like that, there’s really only one thing left to do: train, and reach an even higher level of fighting power before the next challenge arrives. It’s a common move for shounens to go for, whether its “Dragonball Z’s” hyperbolic time chamber or Naruto’s training with Jiraiya, a good training arc is essential to the shounen format. That being said, while Hinomaru Sumo’s heart is in the right place, its execution of the beginning of this arc is lacking in a few places, mostly owing its failures to the rushed feeling of this episode and trying to do too many things at one time.

This is an episode that gets better as it goes along but suffers greatly at the beginning. A lot of time is wasted on the fluff dialogue between everyone as they get to Nagoya, which ultimately hampers Hinomaru’s confrontation with Hikage. The fight itself is interesting, but it ends too soon, right before Hikage would lay the smackdown on Hinomaru. That fight should have had its own episode to develop out so we can feel the full weight of Hinomaru’s weakness. Not to mention, the breakneck speed that the conflict between Hinomaru and Hikage goes it makes the dialogue feel immature and silly, and not in the fun over-the-top anime way.

However, from there, the episode does improve quite a bit. Hinomaru’s encounter with the top level sumo wrestlers does a great job of putting just how much Hinomaru has to learn into perspective. I’m really on board with the idea that special moves aren’t enough for Hinomaru to be a true champion. This keeps the power level necessary for victory high and just out of reach enough to keep the tension strong.

In particular, I thought this episode’s strongest point was its ending. I love a good “Old man” character who teaches the protagonist. I look forward to seeing how he’ll work out in the grand scheme of things. Sadly, this episode wasn’t strong enough on its own to write home about. We’ll have to see how things go next week and see if the show can recover and move on.