English Dub Review: Actors: Songs Connection “traumend”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

A guy called Chigumi gets invited by his friend Minori to try out a new game that’s the latest craze around the school. Once he signs-up, he’s excited to find it filled with adorable cat avatars, but disappointed to learn he has to pony up cash in order to buy one. Luckily, new players are allowed to try it out for free as weird white spector type creatures.

He and Minori hang out around the school, where Minori gets really creepy trying to sneak a peek at his female classmates. They spy on a variety of groups including Saku, Sosuke, and Uta eating lunch on the roof. After the day is over, Chigumi isn’t quite sure what’s occurred, and where the line is between the game and real life.

Our Take:

The first four episodes of Actors: Songs Connection were interesting. Not the most exciting or dramatic episodes in a show this season, but they had enough twists and turns to keep me engaged. This fifth episode, traumend, is where that streak comes to an end. It’s a pretty insufferable twenty or so minutes comprised of watching a random character learn how to play a demo version of a very boring video game.

If I’m looking for good things to say about the episode, I guess it’s kind of nice to get further confirmation that there are weird things going on when it comes to the white ghosts and the cats. It’s now fairly explicit that the cats are all just avatars and there are real-life humans controlling them. That’s well and good and was already hinted at with the singing club’s strange surveillance room. But I can’t help but feel like the series showed its hand a little too soon in terms of the white spectors. They were feeling like a genuinely mysterious supernatural entity, and now they’re explained away in the same breath as the cat avatars? This also is kind of sad since it means Saku’s search for the white spectors is pointless considering they aren’t actually magical and thus probably aren’t going to be granting his wishes for Nozomi’s recovery anytime soon.

At least the dub was fine this week, if not exceptional. Brandon McInnis always does a great job as Saku, and this episode is no different. “They all conjugate here because our local catnip junky insists on feeding them.” Ryo is the best and I need more of him immediately. “What do we have to do to turn his no-mon times into fun times?” Uta’s line was priceless. “I’m not sure if he’s a stupid genius or a really smart idiot.” The swimming club is apparently important now, too? At least they’re kind of funny.

Overall, this episode felt pretty lame when compared with the previous entries in the series. The only thing it really developed was the cats and the white ghosts, and it did so in a very monotonous way. Watching someone learning to play a video game online might be fun, but watching someone learning to play a video game in an anime is not. I hope the next episode returns us to the real world.