English Dub Review: Kageki Shojo!! “Kageki Shojo!!”

Overview

Sarasa takes the stage as Tybalt. Sugimoto struggles with a crisis of self-worth. The cast list for the Culture Festival performance is revealed…


Our Take

The last episode did not disappoint. For anyone who’s actually auditioned for something, you could possibly relate to scenarios like this. From casting excuses like “the voice sounds too similar to another person we cast” to “her boobs weren’t perky enough”, which I’m sure is a disturbing truth in some industries in Hollywood. yet it’s something people take into consideration just now as well going forward. The results awaiting are nerve-wracking, but it’s not the end for the girls who missed out, there’s always room for improvement…

In anime you have limited time to give your message, doing something just out of covering all corners could be dull and unnecessary. In my opinion, the way they presented the election was enough to cover the emotional stance of every character involved based on their background. Furthermore, if we actually think about it, very little actually happened in the grand scheme of things and it ends up just feeling like I’ve sat through a long prologue rather than the actual meat of the narrative.

Overall, this show got off to a really strong start with some unexpected “after school special” like subjects coming up and being handled with surprising maturity. But it started to lose me a little in its second half as it got closer to them actually performing. At the very least, I’m not surprised at how the outcome turned out, but I did like how certain characters handled the news when they didn’t make the cut.

Although there’s no word of another Season at the time of this review, This show wasn’t as cringy or “Woke” as I thought it would be as it also did a great job at exploring each character’s backstory, struggles, and motivations. Especially with 13 episodes. But we can only hope to see more of this in the future.