English Dub Review: The Gymnastics Samurai “Dueling Samurai; Samurai Daughter.”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Tetsuo Minamino confronts Jotaro about flaking on his retirement, challenging him to a gymnastics match, though with the deal that should he lose, Jotaro will truly retire. Noriyuki accepts for him, though says Jotaro will need six weeks to train and recover from an injury. The two research how to beat Tetsuo, namely in doing him better in a certain move that he is known to be sloppy on and with a move that Jotaro invented himself, though on the day of the match, Tetsuo shows he has overcome this. Still despite losing, Jotaro only sees this as reasons to continue his training, which Tetsuo objects to until Leo begs him to relent.

Later, while Jotaro starts training for the upcoming big meet, Leo notices some kids making fun of him at Rei and tries to intervene, though he just continues to embarrass her with his efforts. He does eventually get her to tell the bullies to knock it off, which seems to calm her down though.

OUR TAKE
Well, silly me, seems that I forgot last time was a DOUBLE release and completely skipped over talking about Episode 3. But I’m handling it now, which is partly to my benefit since there isn’t a ton to talk about either of these and cramming them together makes this easier. So, we seem to have a rival character now who has started off via the usual entrance of “I’ll fight you in the show’s established device for competition but if you lose you quit because I hate what you stand for in this sport”, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen the protagonist ever just go “yeah I was never going to hold up my end on that anyway”. Then again there are never any real stakes with that kind of stunt so I guess it’s good they got out in front of it? Plus, as his prominence in the OP shows, this is obviously not the last we’ll see of Tetsuo. Still, I find it worth noting that the training montage for this episode was a legally distinct knock-off of “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins.

The other episode surprisingly puts the spotlight on Rei, Jotaro’s daughter, which I guess makes sense as there’s a lull in the…action? And so this is a good time for some character development. And neither of this or the previous episode are bad, but I do sense this show possibly lacks confidence about making its topic of sport very interesting. Gymnastics is not all that thrilling a sport to watch for some, but I’ve seen anime make stuff like Tennis and Finger Skating into amazing sights to behold. Yet so far, it seems like this show is just making stock archetypes for a sports anime while not giving many who would normally never seek out watching gymnastics much reason to feel engrossed. Funimation’s three week gap between episodes also isn’t really helping my investment, though that only covers so much. We’re more than a third into the series now, but I’m not feeling much of a tempo going for the story. That said, next episode may begin some of the competitions, so that could be a way to get things going again. And if not, well, it’s not like it’s a particularly BAD show or anything, just that it’s going to make the time between episodes feel more like a break than a wait.