English Dub Review: Zombie Land Saga Revenge “The Saga Incident, Part 1”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Yugiri is living a life of luxury as a courtesan in the Meiji era in the 1800s, but all that changes when she becomes too popular to be hired. She’s given her freedom by a noble patron and moves to the Saga Prefecture, but when the patron perishes she’s left all alone with no one she knows.

While out and about in town, she meets up with a young man called Kiichi Momozaki. He’s on a mission to return Saga to the way it once was, or perhaps the way it could be in the future. His ambition is infectious and she starts to have things to look forward to again, but Kiichi’s friend Itou isn’t all he appears to be…

Our Take:

Last week gave us a super fun episode of Zombie Land Saga Revenge set in the present, but things change this week. In the first of a two-parter, we travel back in time to visit Yugiri when she was still among the living. It’s a darker episode in some ways than we’re used to from this show, as it deals with governmental turmoil and societal unrest—but it doesn’t really get into any of these issues enough to be interesting and as a whole, part one of The Saga Incident isn’t very entertaining either.

It’s really not rocket science. I think the main thing going on here is that there just aren’t very many plot lines or people here that stir my curiosity. Yugiri is certainly one of the members of Franchouchou that I’d be most interested in learning more about due to her aged origins and backseat role in the group, but the show can’t even make her a main character in her own episode. While she mopes around and watches cherry blossoms fall, the real main character of the episode gets introduced. Kiichi Momozaki at least has more going on in his life than Yugiri, but unfortunately he’s still extremely one-note and lame.

His whole schtick is that he wants the prefecture to be renamed back to Saga and become a place where anyone can be anything they want. He talks in a lot of platitudes without any real specifics for good reason—it seems like he’s just carrying on his adopted father figure’s dream and doesn’t really have the mind to consider the realities himself. Probably half of his lines just consist of him yelling about Saga to strangers on the street. If Yugiri had any little thing of her own to dwell on, I doubt she’d be taken in by him to be honest.

But she is, because of course her new dream has to be borrowed from a overly-enthusiastic blockheaded dude. Since neither of the two of them are very exciting, the show introduces another new character named Itou. He’s presumably a friend of Kiichi’s, but it becomes very obvious very quickly that he doesn’t really care about his friend or his ideas about change. In fact, he’s some kind of secret agent for people who don’t want Saga to be restored and reborn.

The Saga Incident Part 1 may be the most screen time Yugiri has ever gotten this season, but the episode fails to reveal anything about her besides the fact that she’s nice enough to offer tissues to a stranger. Instead, it focuses on a stereotypical youngster eager to bring about change without considering any of the details. We end on a bit of a cliffhanger, so hopefully part 2 can manage to be more interesting—at least let Yugiri take center stage in her own episode, please.