English Dub Review: Ya Boy Kongming!”Kongming’s Freestyle”

Overview

Past and present collide when Kongming and Kabe face off in the most epic rap battle in history! Who will drop superior bars and walk away victorious?


Our Take

As we’ve been seeing throughout this anime, Kongming knows how to work with both an audience and individuals. In this case, he manages to do both when he called out Kabetaijin in the “previous episode”. But now he throws down the gauntlet in front of everyone to get them on his side (which is really just to get Kabe to join the battle), and then punches Kabe straight in the ego by claiming that he would lose to a complete newcomer. Despite Kabe’s prior convictions, he knows that he has a title to defend and cannot resist the allure to defend it.

We also get a bit of more of Kabe’s backstory, as he was a social outcast until a friend he was looking out for, indirectly opened his world to fuel himself into rap and getting all the fame. But the rap battle itself was great not only because of how well-versed it was, but the Japanese text managed to rhyme with itself, despite heavily requiring subtitles in certain parts of the whole episode but the translation merges to make a completely worthwhile and unique without doing a disservice which is rather difficult to do.

Overall, a passable episode even if it suffers from most of the same problems as the previous one. You can tell the author who wrote this manga knows much about rap and Chinese traditions yet somehow blends both of them perfectly. I also liked the fact that they took the time of introducing Kabe’s backstory, it makes his addition to the team much more meaningful. And after the big reveals of what Kongming accomplished during the proceedings, I look forward to seeing how the newest addition to the team plays out.