English Dub Review: Mission: Yozakura Family “Bug”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Taiyo is targeted by an assassin who is both in love with him and obsessed with killing him, and later helps hacker sibling Shion with a mission that is disguised as a video game.

OUR TAKE

We continue checking off the episodes that even tangentially include and focus on one of the many Yozakura siblings, this time being one on the purple haired hacker Shion. I think that just leaves Nanao and the guard dog who haven’t gotten any focus at all. Anyway, Shion is a more nonchalant kind of character, much like disguise expert Kengo, so she hasn’t gotten much in the way of character development yet. This is more just to further establish her skillset in hacking and how it might play into future plots, which is probably in a lot of ways since this story is in the present day and information warfare can happen mostly through computers. As for how she seems to want to teach Taiyo, having missions hidden as video games and having him work through that is an interesting method. Takes the pressure off of thinking they’re real with actual consequences and presents them in a way that makes it easy to connect to for him as a teenager who probably loves video games. All in all, not a bad teaching method, though I imagine eventually he’s just going to need to know that missions are happening for real and simply deal with them.

The other new character introduced, who arguably gets more focus than Shion, is Ayaka Kirisaki, who ends up obsessed with Taiyo and later Mutsumi. This part of the story establishes a few more things about how Taiyo is getting slowly more involved in the assassin world. First off, he now has a bounty against him, showing that he is starting to make a name for himself, even if that means he’s probably going to be facing more threats targeting him. Another is that his information was allowed to be taken and targeted by Kyoichiro, though you could look at this a couple different ways. The more obvious is that Kyoichiro and his weird jealousy allowed this to get Taiyo taken out, but you could also say that he may have allowed this as a test of Taiyo’s growing abilities. I’d like to assume the latter, since it plays into my theory that Kyoichiro is giving him a growing and begrudging respect, but who knows at this point. Anyway, Ayaka is obsessed with both Taiyo AND Mutsumi by the end of this episode, so maybe she’ll be a closer ally in future events. Only time will tell as we wrap up the first quarter next week!