English Dub Review: Boruto “Wasabi and Namida”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Team 15, consisting of former sleeper agent Sumire, crybaby Namida, tomboy Wasabi, and led by Hanabi Hyuuga, gets their next mission: capturing animals that escaped from a park. Seems easy enough, though Hanabi is concerned about how Sumire might be handling it, seeing how she was responsible for a horrible attack on the village a few dozen episodes ago. Sumire is also worried, wondering if she should explain things to her teammates, but decides to focus on the mission.

The next day, the girls try to work out a plan to find the loose animals, so Sumire lets her furry flag fly by giving them all special fursuits to mask their scents. They make pretty good progress, but a miscommunication leads to Wasabi getting hurt. She and Namida start arguing which makes the whole rest of the day awkward with their bickering. One of their last targets is tiny monkey, who keeps getting away and seriously hurting their mojo. Eventually the two fighting amongst themselves leads to splitting up, with Namida getting cornered by a giant wolf. Sumire summons the mini Nue to absorb its chakra, but that doesn’t cut it, so Wasabi finally gets over herself and helps out. They defeat the wolf and Sumire explains herself, and once again the day is saved thanks to Team 15.

OUR TAKE
We got another filler episode about one of the less important teams, this time being basically the anime equivalent of the Powerpuff Girls (if they didn’t already have an actual anime version). Namida is very clearly an orange Bubbles (shy, nice, prone to crying), Wasabi even more so obviously Buttercup (tomboy, eager to fight and argue), and while Sumire is not quite as similar to Blossom, she’s clearly among the three and trying to keep everyone in line. They even have a tiny monkey! Just give Hanabi a lab coat and a pipe and you’re all set!

But besides that likely coincidental realization, Team 15 is also not very good at sparking interest. Wasabi and Namida, despite being the focus of this whole episode, are REALLY underwritten as characters. Heck, they’re BARELY characters. Both are basically just a collection of traits rather than actual people with goals or flaws, so the episode naturally reflects this. Then there’s Sumire, who you’d think would have more going on due to being a sleeper agent remnant of a radical nationalist cell now trying to adapt to a normal life, buuuuuuuuut nope! Not that necessarily has to be the crux of her character, but there’s SO MUCH about that to make use of that they simply leave on the table without even touching! And then there’s their captain, Hanabi, who has none of her interesting connections to better characters made use of…but then again, that’s pretty consistent without she was handled in the old show.

I don’t think I can stress enough how we’re coming up on nearly a year’s worth of episodes in this series and yet it feels like nothing has really happened. It’s like we’re all just waiting on getting to the arc that adapts the movie (which is pretty soon) in order to kick things off, but the studio vastly overestimated how much people were willing to sit around and watch characters do nothing of real consequence. But I guess it’s no coincidence that this is Studio Pierrot, the same studio that is also working on Black Clover. Back when they were handling both Naruto and Bleach in their respective primes, they could get away with dragging some fights out or diverging from the plot into filler arcs, but now every other big Shonen hit has moved on to more proficient release schedules and Pierrot feels like a relic of the past decade. But fine, let’s just get to the movie arc already.