English Dub Review: Watari-kun’s XX Is About to Collapse “Now’s My Chance”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Naoto learns Satsuki is at the same hotel with her new school and plots to see her come hell or high water.

OUR TAKE

Depending on what news you follow, you may be aware that Crunchyroll is planning to switch to some lesser quality subtitles which will make things harder to watch for pretty much everyone. Well, I dealt with that in this episode as a good portion of it involves Naoto and Satsuki passing notes to each other through third parties, and Crunchyroll decided to not translate those notes. I can kinda get what they say based on context and the reactions, but for the predominant anime streaming platform, this is way below the standards they set for themselves. Again, not as bad as Prime Video doing AI generated dubs, but it’s not much better. As someone pointed out, anime streaming this year really is a race to the bottom. And race to the bottom would also describe this series, as Naoto basically resorts to the same, and even worse, tactics to see her now that he knows he is in love with her and learns she is around the same hotel as his class. If this were not a transparently male audience skewed story with girls who are not actual characters, I would say that this would be a horrible message to send to teenage boys about how to locate women who want them to stay the hell away.

And look, fair is fair, I have been calling out Satsuki’s own crappy behavior throughout the show, doing things that, were she a guy, would take this story in a far darker direction, and Naoto hasn’t done anything close to tackling her to the ground her fondling her without consent, so she may in fact be in the lead when it comes to being a worse person. AND if we’re look at the text as is, it’s clear by the end of this episode that Satsuki does still have feelings for him, but was just fed up with being rejected. And then there’s Ishihara who just feels obligated to be supportive because her ex is going after the girl that she was worried he would go after the whole time they were together. I wish I could say this was entertaining in a sort of slow trainwreck way, but really it’s just a bunch of shitty people. But the episode count has been confirmed to be twenty six episodes, meaning we still have five more left, so let’s just hang on for dear life and see how much worse it can get.