English Dub Review: Mission: Yozakura Family “Yozakura Ghost Stories; Spy License”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Futaba is scared of ghosts and Taiyo takes the exam to be a Bronze Class spy.

OUR TAKE

As you can probably tell from the caption, the first thing that came to my mind with the main focus of this episode was the Chuunin Exams from Naruto since, well, having a character go through some sort of rudimentary exam to obtain a rank for their super special fantasy job is incredibly common in shonen anime, including the likes of My Hero Academia, One Punch Man, and…probably others that don’t involve superheroes, and since Naruto is about ninjas, having spies do one in this more fantastical version is probably expected. But hey, I can’t give Naruto all the credit, since this trope goes at LEAST as far back as Hunter X Hunter, which predates Naruto by a year and had its own exam for Hunters that took up an entire arc, as did the Chuunin Exam. Though some of those recent exams have also condensed these exams to a single episode since they want to get all of that out of the way and get to the punching, so I guess it’s no surprise that Yozakura Family does that too. Heck, considering how far into the show we are, it kinda feels like having the exam was an editorial decision to make the series feel more like what readers would recognize.

But regardless, Taiyo is now a Bronze Rank license holder, which allows him to go on more intense missions, and that does play into the ongoing plot of him getting better at being a spy, so it’s not like it has NO place here. Again, it really feels like they just threw in something that was expected of the genre and so it does feel a little crammed in there, but I’m sure we’ll see him go for Silver before too long. The exam itself is nothing special, just kind of standard written exams and traps and stuff, followed by an actually active part of the thing that involves the group running from an exploding building, which then is shown to be the TRUE test of character as a weird flirty guy following Taiyo around turns out to be an examiner checking if he’s a good person, but also he now has a major crush on him like Ayako so we can add another to this weird unnamed love shape. Oh yeah, and also the oldest sister Futaba gets scared of ghosts so we get some character focus on her, which is nice. That’s all for this week!