English Dub Review: Sarazanmai “I Want to Connect, so Sarazanmai”

Kazuki, Enta, and Toi’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kazuki, Enta, and Keppi run after Toi into Dark Keppi, where he is tempted by a vision of his brother, really the Otter disguised as his desire, to shoot past versions of himself in order to disconnect him from the world, much like the Sarazanmai rituals did with Kappa Zombies. Soon, he’s erased every significant moment with Kazuki and Enta except for the time four years ago, when he gave Kazuki his Micanga. The Otter Boss arrives to stop them, but Keppi holds him off while the boys pursue Toi. They don’t make it in time to stop him, however, and Dark Keppi throws them all into a zone (that is surrounded by circles that say “Butt”, so I guess it’s the Butt Dimension?) that begins to disconnect them from the world.

Luckily, they then realize how important their connections to each other are and, with Keppi’s help turning them into Kappa, use the Sarazanmai ritual to reconnect the memory of Toi handing the Micanga to young Kazuki. Keppi also refuses with Dark Keppi to become complete again and revives Reo and Maru to help the final Sarazanmai succeed and defeat the Otter, who disintegrates. The boys then go through the usual “Leaking” part of the ritual, but this time it shows them…a future. Is it a future that could have been? Might still be? That’s hard to say, but they’re all professional soccer players who are constantly at odds with whether to stay friends or not. But in the real world, the battle is over and the Kappas, including Sara, float away while talking about the importance of connections to Haruka.

Three years later, Toi is released from Juvenile Hall and tries throwing himself off a bridge, thinking that his life and connections are already over, but is saved by Kazuki and Enta, who happily greet him back to society. And then they…turn into Kappas again?

OUR TAKE

Never thought I’d see the day that I’d a show would have its finale literally go up its own ass and somehow not have that ruin things. Though while I definitely didn’t hate this ending, it WAS a bit of a crash landing. Sarazanmai has always been more of an emotion-driven story than a logical one, but a lot of this ended up feeling like a rush job as result. For one, I didn’t expect the final episode to have so much focus on Toi of all people, even when he has the darkest backstory to comb through. I guess Kazuki and Enta’s respective character arcs have been more or less resolved, but that basically builds Toi up a bit more than I think he might have meant to be, especially with the end credits JUST focusing on his time in prison. Although it’s neat to know what the ending theme song was referring to all this time.

Having them all enter the place where connections are dissolved and making them face an alternate future where their friendship is in jeopardy probably should be in the finale, but the way it gets there seems to have a lot of pieces jammed in to the plot in order to get here. After the tragic deaths of Mabu and Reo last week, it feels a bit cheap to revive them the very next episode later, as well as the rather sudden defeat of the Otter Boss. Was his master plan really just to absorb Toi all along? Would getting rid of him from the timeline bring back the first Kappa Zombie? Was this not something that could have been accomplished early on? There’s a lot of questions this finale brings up that are likely never to be answered, because, again, it’s more focused on emotions than logic here.

Normally, that would be a bit of problem, and it sort of is here, but the emotions raised here serve the show’s greater theme of the challenges of making and maintaining connections between people, so a lot of the more vague and abstract moments of the episode focus on those vague and abstract people have when they feel a strong connection with others, like fear that it will fall apart or wanting to end it before it can hurt them. On that level, I could certain relate to those feelings, so that made it easier to connect with them, but it still makes for a pretty sloppy way to end what was, for the most part, a pretty strongly written series. I still really think that doubling the length would have given more time to build up to a more focused ending.