English Dub Review: Strike Witches – World Witches Take Off! “Introducing the 502nd?”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
The 202nd work on cleaning up a space for their new arrivals.


OUR TAKE
It’s an even numbered episode this time, meaning we’re switching back to covering the 502nd strike team, the Brave Witches. And like with last time, we are now starting to see a plot slowly form now that we’re a couple segments into this respective storyline, namely that while the 501st are regrouping their members and making a little documentary about the whole thing, the 502nd are getting ready to welcome their newest member, Hikari Karibuchi, who is basically their Yoshika equivalent. Well, I guess that’s not entirely accurate, since there are a couple things that make her distinct from Yoshika, the main one of those being that she’s working with her own sister Takami on the same team. Takami seems like she would be the Sakamoto of her side, especially in that she is clearly Hikari’s mentor in the same way that Sakamoto was for Yoshika during the first two seasons, but it’s hard for me to say that for sure without having seen the Brave Witches spinoff that primarily stars this team. All I can really for certain is that I don’t think there were any biological sibling relationships among the 501st (I know that some members had siblings who were also in the military but they were recurring characters at best).

We also get to know some of the other Brave Witches members a bit more. A few of them we had seen a couple episodes ago, but they didn’t really get a whole lot to do, and certainly not enough for me to really take much of a liking to them. This time at least, there are quite a few more legitimately funny moments, particularly in how one member is so concerned about the budget that she’ll count off how much money every single bullet is using up while another is on the training range. It’s good to know that this spin-off team has characters who are able to stand out on their own through their respective personalities and not just fanservice jokes like what might have been the case in the previous part of this story. I am not going to delude myself and deny that fanservice is a major component in the appeal of this franchise, but it’s still rather hard to take when it becomes the sole focus of an episode. Give me better characters and more enjoyable personalities with decent action and we’ll be golden, Strike Witches.