English Dub Review: Mix “Because We’re Brothers”

For fun than the Mets.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

This week’s episode sees both the build-up and a portion of a game played between Meisei High and Kenjou High School. Between Soi and Haruka, there’s been a fair amount of research done on the incoming opponent for Meisei and it seems to have worked because with what little portion of the game we get to see, it’s a tie ball game at zero with both teams getting men on base, but overall playing good enough defense so that no one scores. The Kenjou team has a decent line up of hitters with Tomohito Akai, of whom we met the last episode in a most unpleasant interaction with To, being the most dangerous. The goal, make sure no one else for Kenjou gets on base before Akai gets up to bat. While To is only human, both he and his brother do a good job of getting creative with their outs and making sure no serious damage is done. But will it last? We’ll have to wait until the next episode to find out!

Our Take

I’ve mentioned numerous times in previous reviews, I much prefer the episodes of Mix that are all about baseball. They are by far the most fun to watch and they help pace the episode so that you’re not just getting bored of the same ol’ same ol’ off-field slice of life drama that I really don’t care about. It would help if the placards used to tell you all about a players’ stats were in English so as to add that extra level of “Oh, this guy’s good” type of sentiment that would certainly take the baseball action to the nth degree. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, so the viewer is forced to go by scoping out cliched characteristics of a player instead, i.e. a big oaf of a player is likely a good hitter but is slow and cumbersome so he could make for an easy out. It also helps when, certainly in the case of Akai, you have a character whose facial features look like Sephiroth so now every time he comes to bat it looks like the unholy himself is getting ready to take a swing. I think the future is incoming where English dub anime producers are going to have to pay those few extra dollars to make everything dubbed for English e.g. musical intros/outros, graphics, etc especially for a sports anime where it’s important to get certain information read in print that allows you to more effectively portray whatever the scene is trying to build-up to. Until then, let’s just play ball.