‘The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.: Reawakened’ comes with awful dub voice cast, fans call it an ‘embarrassment’
Adapted from Shūichi Asō’s popular gag manga series of the same name, 'The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.: Reawakened' rolled out with six new episodes on Netflix and franchise fans are happy to see their favorite pink-haired psychic boy, Saiki K., back.
The new reboot also marks the return of his mysterious classmate Nendou Riki, the chuunibyou Kaidou Shun, perfect girl Teruhashi Kokomi and former delinquent Kuboyasu Aren. Written and illustrated by Shūichi Asō, the new episodes from the manga series are broken into smaller five-minute premises. While the storyline seems gripping, one thing that has managed to piss off viewers is the constant discord between the subtitles and dubs.
"The subs are an embarrassment. It reminds me of the occasional fansubbing attempts made by foreigners who speak neither Japanese nor English and try to make do with google translate and guesswork. Many lines are straight-up not subbed. Except this is done by a billion-dollar company. It boggles my mind how they can fund an entire anime but can't hire a translator that at least speaks English as their first language," one fan posted.
One comment read, "Or one that, at least, understand what's being talked about. How the hell do you cut 'Dark Reunion' out of Kaido's lines about Dark Reunion?" and another said, "The French subs aren't much better. A lot of sentences are skipped and the timing of the encoding is slightly off."
"Do they sub everything in this? I tried watching the other seasons on Netflix but a lot of the written jokes weren't translated (e.g. the future plans survey)," one fan posted and another said, "It took me a long time to start watching season 2 because I was so accustomed to the season 1 dub and I was holding out hope that they'd do one for it eventually. When I clicked on Reawakened, I was pretty happy to see that there was a dub for it, but then my elation evaporated as soon as I heard the new Saiki. Nothing against the new guys, but you know, the old guys' performance really endeared me to the characters and seeing them replaced is a major a bummer. Will watch eventually."
True to fans' complaints, only Season 1 of the original series is dubbed, and while there's a new dub voice cast for Reawakened, the subtitles for the reboot are of terrible quality. The series premiered on Netflix on December 30, 2019.
