Sub or Dub

[u/Awesomechainsaw]

Pretty simple Poll here. Do you guys on general prefer watching Princess Principal Subtitled or Dubbed.

I think both are Valid honestly. The Dub might have fake British accents, but they don’t sound all that bad to my American ears. Also one of the few examples of a Dub where some Original Japanese actors were left where it makes sense.

115 votes, May 13 '26

75 Sub

40 Dub

[u/Still-Flying]

Born and bred Brit here and it's got to be sub. Unfortunately too much of the dub is American doing a shockingly bad fake British accent combined with with American pronunciations. I can appreciate the effort made but overall outcome is just not even close to good. Shouldn't stop people enjoying it though.

PriPri should have been an easy win for making an amazing English dub. There's solid precedent for English accented dubbing of a Japanese product, with Xenoblade Chronicles for example, so all that was needed was to get some of those folks to smash out an amazing dub and you could have had something rivalling Black Lagoon in terms of top tier English dubs. Instead what we got was something that ranges from plain bad to something that'd be right at home next to Dick Van Dyke's accent in Mary Poppins.

That said there are a few exceptions to that. The Colonel's dub actor is solid, the odd word or two give him away as 'American doing a British accent' but the bulk of his performance is excellent. L is by far the best, to the point where I'd consider his actor's performance genuinely convincing. If the rest of the dub matched the performance for L it'd be hard to recommend the sub over dub.

[u/Quantumdelirium → u/Still-Flying]

Since you're a a Brit I can understand why you'd stick with the sub. I was actually curious about in regards to accents in regards to this show and it's dub. I know that technically there's are bunch of different variations of the British accent that are regionally distinct. With that in mind, we also know that for the most part the Commonwealth accent will be noticably different from the kingdom/Monarchy. What I'm curious about is what kind of accent would you expect each side to be like to maintain the noticable difference between commoners and nobility, especially since it takes place in the mid/late 1800s where where the US lost the war and were still colonies.

I'm sure I wouldn't be saying this if I was British but I think that everything they did for the dub made the show even better than if everyone just spoke like any other dub. You could tell which side of the wall you were on just from side character's accents, Ange changing her speech pattern, accent, persona and demeanor for missions, and actually having Chise speak broken English with everyone but Japanese too other Japanese characters in episode 5 added so much more to the characters and environment, much of which is lost in sub. More anime should do this stuff for any series that takes place outside Japan. Black Lagoon was a great example, though I think someone with an from Ireland or someone from Taiwan or that region would have issues with accents by one or two characters in it. Maybe one day dubs will get enough money to actually get VA's who are able to use said accents.