English Dub Review: Wise Man’s Grandchild “Let’s Go to Camp!”

Did somebody say “Obligatory hot springs episode”?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The training between the student mages and student knights finishes up as each class gives their all to defeat the demons that they’re set to fight. After the last episode, the tension between the mages and knights is lessened greatly. They work together a lot better, though the knights are still filled with an arrogance that tens to rub the mages the wrong way. After a particular bout of bragging from the male knights and lewd comments made at some of the female mages, said mages lob an incredibly powerful volley of magical blasts which “accidentally” do some damage to the knights.

With their training done, Shin and his friends take a moment to relax and dwell on what the future holds. They move on to their next training session with each other, and August implores to them the importance of their magical abilities. They are to become key players in the war to come, and their magical abilities might be the thing that stands between humanity and destruction at the hands of the demonoids.

To that end, the gang decides, with the help of Merlin and Melida, to go to a training “camp”, or more accurately, a hot spring. They ride on some carriages into the mountains and begin training by killing more demons together. The students continue to master the magical powers that Shin has been teaching them and use them to great effect.

With their training done, everyone retires to the hot spring for the night where, you guessed it, shenanigans ensue. The boys all have a good time chilling out, while the girls get up to the kind of lewd silliness that anime girls always get up to in hot springs. They compare breast sizes and grope each other, you know, as friends do until the episode finishes.

Our Take:

Even if nothing series, sometimes there is nothing episodes that bring a whole new level of meaning to the word. This is an episode that could have been over in five minutes since the only thing of relevance is the understanding that the students are going to be called to a greater purpose in the coming battles and the rest is just noise. Not particularly funny, not particularly entertaining, this episode is just a silly sort of pointless affair that has nothing going for it.

I’m a little baffled as to the episode structure here that defies conventional logic. Instead of giving an entire episode to the hot springs plot, the episode bizarrely begins at what should have been the end of the “Mage students and knight students” plotline that we went through last week. The knights just kind of stick around even though that story is over and done with, so their presence this week just wastes time. It doesn’t help that the comedy between the mages and the knights is pretty lowball. It’s the same kind of tired routine you’ve seen in almost any anime before this.

Training at the hot spring is virtually the same as training with the knights, except with fewer characters. We do get some kinda-good dialogue with Merlin and Melida who talk about their pasts, but it doesn’t amount to anything valuable. With a show that’s all about training up mages, you’d think there’d be some more interesting training sequences to watch the characters grow and develop. Instead, the training usually just consists of people waving their arms around at hordes of demons and then watching them disappear. I’ll give a little credit for the flashy animation, but it’s used to so little effect in the story that it barely even matters.

This is dull, even for a hot springs episode. They’re usually just deviations on the course of the story to deliver fanservice and try to be funny, but this hot springs episode has only about four minutes of actual hot springs in it. It’s almost as if the hot springs trope is only present here so that it can be here and find a way to get the female characters of the show naked. It’s a painfully transparent tactic to try and get views because the story is so lackluster. If a show is going to pander, it could at least be a little more successful at it.