English Dub Review: Watari-kun’s XX Is About to Collapse “New Life”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Naoto and Satsuki adjust to living together, though rumors spread of a pregnancy scare. Later, Tokui tries to reconnect with someone he briefly dated.

OUR TAKE

Despite my hope that the holiday delay would lead to Crunchyroll dumping the remaining episodes of this show all at once, I unfortunately must deal with the three episodes left one at a time, showing that even when we try to make the new year about a new beginning with a clean slate, we still have to deal with the business of the past. Ugh. So, since it’s been awhile, in the last few episodes, Naoto and Satsuki finally fully admitted their feelings for each other and began officially going out, and are now living together, despite still being in high school. As someone who always finds it irksome when a romance centered story ends right when the main couple starts going out, part of me is glad that we do get a few episodes to dig into how their fully fledged relationship actually plays out. And it would make sense to have one of the initial questions up in the air would be if Naoto will repeat the mistakes of his parents, who had him as teenagers and had to drop out of school to raise him. Luckily, despite some people misinterpreting some things Satsuki says off hand, it turns out they are not letting that happen and have decided to not have sex until they’re out of high school. So, hooray for the next generation learning from the mistakes of their parents, I guess.

Once that’s all taken care of, we move onto a mostly unrelated story about Tokui trying to track down an old flame he briefly dated for like a month before she found out she was pregnant and left to try things out with the kid’s father, and he hasn’t heard from her since. We had gotten hints about Tokui’s past scars from love through slight comments he had made over the course of the show, but I kinda got the sense that he was into Ishihara since…that’s usually how these kinds of situations go in these shows. But hey, a neat little subversion there, even if it feels kind of late for a character who has mostly been in the background getting so much backstory dropped on us. Well, two episodes left, hopefully set after everyone has graduated high school, and I will just be glad to be done with all of it! Like holy crap, I need this show out of my goddamn life.