English Dub Review: Million Arthur “Shivering Secret Hot Springs”

Oh wow, a hot springs episode? Wonder what will happen. Wonder what we’ll possibly see here.

Overview

Since Yama’s memory loss, the gang had been searching for a way to help Yama fully remember who she is. Renkin discovers a hot spring (much like the one which caused Yama to lose her memory in the first place) that possesses special abilities depending on the spring a person chooses to dip into. They can range anywhere from changing a person’s gender to making them super horny (because, like, this is a bad anime.) The hope is that they’ll find one which will get Yama’s memory back, but Renkin also discovers the terrible, fanservice-y secret to getting Fairy Combine to work.

The gang goes to the hot springs (where Pharsalia is also, like, just chilling out?) They don’t engage with her and focus on feeling out the hot springs, but of course, they continuously fall into ones that do Wacky Things™ such as making someone mentally a baby, swapping the characters’ sexes, making them super angry, or, as previously mentioned, making them super horny. This makes things especially hard when they have to face off with an Arthur who owns the hot springs. Renkin (who is, like, super horny) presses Bodach to enact the Fairy Combine method with her, where she pins her to the ground and tries to make out with her in front of the whole cast (thus revealing the sexually ambiguous Fairy Combine method.)

Anyway, they defeat the Arthur and just have a hot springs day.

Our Take

It’s easy to go into this thinking, “this can’t be what they’re actually doing, right? A played out trope is one thing, but they wouldn’t actually go through with the horrible things they’re setting up, right?”

Well, we’re here to invalidate any hope anyone has left about this anime.

It’s no doubt that if they hadn’t made Dancho fall into the “serious leader” hot spring, that she would have absolutely taken advantage of her teammates in their incoherent states. It’s a wonder how viewers have gotten this far since the protagonist is basically a sexual predator, but this show seems to have no problem playing that up for laughs. If that weren’t enough, they had to make an entire episode where the cast ran around in towels, blushing and/or humping things for 30 minutes straight. As an extra disgusting dash to this depraved display, the child-passing character (Renkin) nearly got her very own soft-core porn scene — which was just legal enough to pass in the eyes of the FCC!

Oh, also, who else loved that when the men were transformed into women, they suddenly became timid and useless? We don’t have a box cutter big enough to begin unpacking that!

What on earth was the point of Pharsalia — the “antagonist” — being there? Why does the Thief Arthur make a better protagonist than Dancho? More importantly, why are we still here?

This episode was so terrible beyond its stereotypes, tropes, and pedophile-friendly fanservice. Although the background artists and musicians are doing a great job, there’s no excuse for bad plot, bad characters, and downright nasty animation. It really exemplifies any reason to just stop watching the show altogether.

On the plus side, it did accomplish one thing: this is the first ‘2’ this reviewer has ever given!