English Dub Review: The Ones Within “DAYDREAM AND NIGHTMARE”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

For their next trial, Paka assigns the group to enter a mysterious village and rescue their young maidens from demons who have been terrorizing the city during a festival. They meet with the village elder and his granddaughter, Kikka, who tell them the demons show up on the festival night and kidnap beautiful maidens, secreting them away in their fortress.

Only it turns out that the elder and Kikka are demons themselves, and they decide to take Karin with them to their evil lair. Akatsuki volunteers himself, too, because he can’t stand for Karin to go alone. The episode ends on a cliffhanger as Yuzu tells the gang she planted a tracker that will lead them straight to the demons and their friends.

Our Take:

DAYDREAM AND NIGHTMARE is an episode that does a good job assimilating all of the things that makes The Ones Within the show it is. In this fourth episode, we’ve got spooky horror, silly gags, and the whole set of quirky characters playing off each other.

Zakuro and Kaikoku are two of the guys who get somewhat of a focus this week, with a little duo scene of their own. In the scene, Zakuro confesses that he’s here for a reason: to find his twin sister. I’m guessing she was one of the Let’s Players previously selected who didn’t make it through. That could be a really interesting angle later on, as Zakuro becomes more intent on locating her before the end is near. But it also brings up a question about Paka’s true intentions. Surely, he had to have known that Zakuro had a twin who he kidnapped previously…

Anya and Akatsuki’s drama occupies a lot of the episode (and Himiko’s) attention. Since Aki learned of Anya’s troubles with his sleeping disorder, he obtained sleeping pills from Paka and tried to give them to the grumpy boy. But in all of his emotional angst, he slapped Aki for his help. Later on, he seems to genuinely regret it, and I think it’ll be cool to see the two of them become closer friends as the show progresses.

One of the things I found funny this time around was just how much trouble the group has with making a selection of the players for the challenge. Honestly, the choosing process made up more than half the episode. No wonder this arc is a two-parter! In a way, this just illustrates how different all the characters are. Would I have liked to see a little less of this scene and a little more of the demons and their town? Yes, but I acknowledge that with such a fun, quirky cast it would be difficult for them to come to a consensus about who should do what.

The dub this week has some great performances from Kate Bristol as Himiko. I loved her line about Anya’s disrespect for peppers especially: “Those peppers raised with love and care by farmers and shipped here for us to enjoy!” She’s so precious! And his blunt response was just as funny:  “Pepper’s ain’t babies, you damn freak!” It’ll be weird to see if his personality rubs off on Aki now that they’re becoming closer.  At first, I was conflicted about the village elders line: “According to the ancient scroll passed down through generations, what they really want is a young, beautiful girl with bouncy boobs and a firm, perky butt.” It was kinda funny at the moment, but also gross? But him being the demon chief makes it make perfect sense, so nice foreshadowing, show!

This week’s episode of The Ones Within started off pretty exciting. It ended up being more funny than exciting, though, because we hardly got a chance for the adventure to begin. The group spent about half their time so far just arguing about who should do what. That’s good and well, and it wasn’t boring to watch, but I can’t help but be more excited for next week than I was about DAYDREAM AND NIGHTMARE.