English Dub Review: Hinomaru Sumo “National Treasure is Delicious”

Tastes like chicken.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Hinomaru is out for the rest of the preliminaries due to an arm injury, but there is still hope for his sumo dreams. His teammates are ready to take on the team qualifiers, which if they win will allow them all to continue onwards to victory. However, Hinomaru doesn’t get a chance to see them, since their trainer quickly shuffles him off to a specialized doctor who uses unique medical technology to cure athletic wounds at an astounding rate.

Meanwhile, the team preliminaries begin with Ozeki, who amazingly trounces his opponent right out of the gate with a ring out. It becomes increasingly clear that Hinomaru’s teammates are much stronger than they were a month ago. Next up is Yuma, who also proves his worth his incredibly fast and powerful karate strikes. He takes out his opponent by building a strong forward momentum and them sweeping his legs out from underneath him, making Yuma the victor.

With two wins for our heroes, the next match is do or die, since it means that they can take the victory right here. But the victory here seems like a longshot, because Hikage Tenma, a National Treasure is next up to battle Chihiro Kunisaki. However, once the fight starts, the benefits of Kunisaki’s training become apparent. More than just a fighting enthusiast, Kunisaki’s style makes him a fighting genius, who is not only smart enough to combine martial arts styles but ambitious enough to persist in learning everything there is to know about his opponents. Though Tenma is powerful, Kunisaki does the impossible, proving his strength the only way that will set him free, with an upset. He uses an overhead takedown on Tenma, and earns himself the title of National Treasure with his victory, with which he nicknames himself “The National Treasure Eater”.

Our Take:

This week’s Hinomaru Sumo has a peculiar title and is a peculiar episode, showcasing an array of both the show’s strengths and weaknesses. The episode is entertaining, but lacking somewhat in narrative substance. Furthermore, it continues to rush things along at a breakneck speed instead of taking its time to deliver on big character moments built up through large swaths of the series. Everything feels self-contained and hasty. Yet, there is still a lot to enjoy in Chihiro’s fight, which presents an interesting new dimension to his character that I really enjoyed. After this episode, Chihiro has easily jumped to the top of my list of favorite characters in this show.

The first half of the episode crams together Ozeki’s and Yuma’s fights, one after the other. This definitely lessens their importance, but one gets the impression that the reason for this is because when it comes to sumo wrestling, you can only have so many fights before they start to get stale. Ozeki’s fight is basically not a fight at all, over in a flash without offering anything new to Ozeki’s character. Yuma’s is basically the same, it only reinforces what we already knew about him, that he’s good at karate and uses it in sumo. There is an element of reflection on these characters given to us by Hinomaru’s narration of how they met and how far they’ve come, but that’s unnecessary because this show isn’t very long. We don’t need a reminder about who these people are.

However, the redeeming qualities of this episode come in the form of the second half, where Chihiro gets to steal the show and become one of the more interesting combatants on the team. Before, it seemed like Chihiro was just a musclehead, but now that he’s got some serious sumo skill to go with his brawn, he’s evolved to become a fighting prodigy whose skill rivals Hinomaru’s. This makes him an excellent rival, and his fight against Tenma was extremely satisfying. Again, there is some trouble here with pacing, but all ends well. On a side note, I don’t think the interspersed flashbacks to Tenma’s relationship with his brother and his own fears in the sport were used that well. His fight ended in one episode anyway, why bother breaking up the fight now with needless flashbacks?

Ultimately, the episode entertains, but still suffers under some of the directional failures of this show. I would say that it’s still one of the better episodes we’ve had in the show, with one of the more memorable fights being delivered here.

Score
7/10