English Dub Review: Sakura Quest “The Cry of the Mandrake”

It’s the battle of the mascots.

Spoilers Below

Yoshino’s next task is up: A TV interview!  Hello, Sleepy Town is hosting a mascot competition for all the small towns in the area, and Manoyama is entering the Chupacabura. The interview is going swimmingly, until the reporter goes off script and starts asking the town’s queen about the town itself. She’s only been in for a little bit, but she knows absolutely nothing about the people or what they want. Ushimatsu has a prescription: Get out there and meet the people. This doesn’t get her much raw data. The majority of the people don’t want the town to change and don’t really care about tourists. The keeper of the bookshop fully realizes that a day will come where the youth of the town will all leave, and the town will be dead. But that’ll be long after he retires, so he doesn’t care. One bit they do learn, though. The Chupacabura was not Manoyama’s first mascot. It used to be the cuter Kabura Kid. Ushimatsu rolled through and changed it in an attempt to revitalize the town with the new trends. It didn’t work, but he stubbornly held to it.

It’s the day of the contest, and our team has a problem: The Chupacabura’s head is missing! Frantically, they search for it, but it’s nowhere in the tourism board’s office. The rest of the team look for another solution, and Ririko has one. What if they got the costume for the Kabura Kid? They manage to track it down, but it’s in bad shape. Fortunately, Maki took side jobs in building props, so she can stitch it up. They arrive in time for the competition, at the same time as the boys arrive. The Chupacabura’s head had been accidentally thrown in the trash, and ended up at the dump. Ushimatsu doesn’t want to wear it, but he doesn’t want to dress up as Kabura Kid either. Yoshino gets mad and gives him a third way. Chupacabura body, Kabura Kid head. Given its stitched up nature, it looks the part of a Frankenstein, so the monster part still sticks. Coupled with a speech about the town’s struggle with finding their mascot, and her promise to learn everything she can about the town, the gang manages to eek out… third from last. Still, Yoshino has decided to stay of her own free will and names her four resourceful friends as ministers to help her bring the town back from the grave.

This episode was satisfying, at least. I like the story’s theme of growth by falling. They continue to fail, but get better every time. No miracle wins here. The easy, expected thing to do with this episode was to have her force him into the Kabura Kid, but they chose instead to make her amalgamate the characters, creating something new and simultaneously more cute and more frightening. It’s really hilarious how they have her keep Ushimatsu, her boss, on a chain leash when they’re in character. My complaint from the previous episode still stands, the show would do better with a bit more humor. It’s got a lot of heart, but it’s kinda dry. The great part about this episode is that we get to meet the residents of the town a bit more. We get to learn more about how each of these background characters feels about their town.

The animation was actually the worst I’ve seen for this show, which is still better than other shows. There were several errors in the gestalt mascot while he was moving, Other than that, P.A. Works is still churning out stuff that is visually fine and dandy. Voice acting is great and continues to get better as these people get into their characters. This is normally where I shout out particular voice actors for how well they did, but I can’t really choose which to talk about. Suffice it to say, Alexis Tipton and Tia Ballard really sell it for their characters. With that in mind, I give this episode seven kabura kid heads out of ten!