English Dub Review: Ensemble Stars! “New Wind”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Welcome to Yumenosaki, a school-based in Japan meant to help the droves of pop stars inundating our society. Unfortunately, it’s run more like a dictatorship with the Student Council assuming control meant to just pump out quantity, not quality in terms of talent. When a new student named Anzu transfers to be a producer, the band Trickstar thinks they have what it takes now to make changes in the school for the better. However, we see what we’re up against in full-force when during a rather innocent Dragon King Competition, the Student Council shows up to break up the party. Anzu passes out and has to go to the nurse’s office where the band finally unveils their plan to take back their school.

Our Take

I’ve always thought of most pop music as corrupt, so I’m fortunate that there’s a series that deals with this very same subject. There are going to be some problems moving forward that I think, as a whole, will prove the dubbing of this series to be naught. All of the songs are in Japanese and there are a lot of them already, so now each of the episodes is going to be 60% subtitles anyway which makes me wonder why the hell Funimation chose to dub this series, to begin with. And then when we DO get to the English dub, the cast across the board sounds almost intolerable in terms of quality output with cliche characters working on a nonsense premise. The show looks pretty, and I’m grateful that there are some signs of life when we get to the more X Japan-inspired scenes during the Dragon King Competition, but you’re gonna need to love Japanese pop music to get into this one.