English Dub Review: Sakugan “Fathers & Daughters”

Overview (Spoiler Below):

Memempu is a Worker in the underground city of Pinyin but dreams of becoming a Marker and going off to explore the wild tunnels known as the Labyrinth. On the night of a festival, the Marker duo Walsh and his daughter Lynda return, and Memempu receives a surprising gift. Will she finally be allowed to pursue her dream?

Our Take:

Well, that’s one way to start off a series. What seemed like a cutesy show about a father and a daughter learning to respect each other became something a little darker. We’ll see if it keeps up the dark tone or if that last little bit of the episode was just to set the mood and let you know things like that could happen.

The episode is titled “Fathers & Daughters” and that’s definitely the theme. You have the two main characters, Memempu and her father Gagumber. Then you have Lynda and her father Walsh who are “Markers”. Markers seem to be explorers but also soldiers kind of? Seeing the two father/ daughter combos and how differently they interact was really interesting. Especially with what happened in this episode.

It’s got a pretty cool hook that reminds me a bit of Made in Abyss. The labyrinth, cutesy characters, and dark tone, later on, are a few of the similarities. Did I mention there are mechs? You know how I feel about mechs, so I am really excited to see how that plays out. With how this was animated I kind of expected Trigger Studios to be the ones behind it. To my surprise it was Satelight. The animation was really crisp and the characters are really interesting looking so I am pretty excited about this.

The first episode did its job and got me to come back for the second one. I am really interested to see where it goes from here. The world seems interesting and I like the characters so far. I also really like a good father/daughter story, recently watched Kakushigoto and really enjoyed it. Hopefully this show can balance the cute stuff and dark stuff well cause that is really hard to pull off.