English Dub Season Review: Yakitori:Soldiers of Misfortune Season One

Netflix continues its roll out of original anime with the release of Yakitori: Soldiers of Fortune, based on a short lived manga from 2017. Following the Earth’s colonization by a federation of animal based species, the human race finds out that not only are they not alone in the universe, but they’re actually at the bottom of the food chain. However, instead of being turned into food or slaves, most earthlings find their only hope for employment is working as a meat shield in their multi-species military. Among them is high school dropout Akira Ihotsu, who finds himself on the frontlines against the federation’s enemies. Together with his other poor human comrades, Tyrone, Erland, Amalia, and Zihan, these five grown adults with attitude must brave the harsh training and the deadly battlefield as the unit known as Yakitori (which translates to “barbecued chicken”).

Honestly, considering the short six episode length & mature and dry subject matter, this actually brings to mind my memories of the late 80’s, early 90’s OVAs that were only a handful of episodes long and about grown adults in more violent and adult circumstances, such as Bubblegum Crisis and Patlabor. And indeed, this is not a story that is won by the power of love and friendship, and can get pretty grim and desperate. That said, while it starts pretty pessimistic and cynical, it does land in a place acknowledging the importance of teamwork. Akira and his newfound team scramble to get over their own issues and their displeasure with their situation, one part of that being they work under a literal dog, but eventually learn that their combined effort makes them all greater than the sum of their parts, proving themselves to be a well oiled machine and possibly even sparking some hope for the human race to get its fire back, if some implications by some characters are to be believed.

With that said, I wish this story wasn’t told in such a way that was such a slog, though that owes itself to a few different aspects. For one, despite only being six episodes (kind of seven since the first one is double length), the pacing of this series feels incredibly labored, making it incredibly difficult to maintain attention and interest, not helped by the training and actual combat being cut between two different plots at two different time periods. This is also not helped by the rather uninspiring character designs, not helped by the choppy CGI that sometimes seems to operate on half a frame a second.

The former is at least appropriate considering these are meant to be disposable soldiers who can barely be told apart except by the colors on their shoulders, but the latter just feels like someone was cutting corners. Not nearly as bad as other CG animes I could name, but definitely not nearly to the standards of the recent Trigun Stampede. So should I recommend this? I honestly couldn’t tell you, but I’m leaning on the side of “no”. It’s not a bad production by any means, but it’s certainly not amazing or memorable. It’s short, if that helps, but you might find that one episode is more than enough to tell you if you should watch the other five. And if you end up liking it, maybe mentally prepare for the eventual subjugation of the human race. In any case, this won’t be the last season of anime we’ll be discussing on the site soon, so get ready for that too at your own pace. The truth is out there, but hopefully it’s not dominated by a bunch of cats and dogs living together.