Sub is almost always the way, because people in anime say a lot of cringe and stupid shit, and its slightly less cringe and stupid when you read it instead of hearing it.
In terms of good dubs and bad dubs, I can only think of a few.
FMAB has a very good one, I don’t think that’s controversial.
Jojo sounds stupid in both languages, the English dub is less iconic but still serviceable.
Chainsaw Man makes Aki sound like he’s 45 and not 20 in the dub. I way prefer the sub, because looking at Aki and hearing a divorced office worker is very upsetting.
Attack on Titan has a fucking terrible dub. I watched season 1 in dub, because it was the first anime I watched, and its so bad. The voice acting isn’t that iconic in the sub, apart from Erwin’s charge, but the dub is godawful. Anyway bad show don’t watch it
I watch with doms if they let me
THIS IS BAIT YOU HAVE TO INCLUDE THE WORD MAIN IN YOUR RESPONSE
Mainly I watch subs (I watch everything with subs, even English stuff), but if I’m doing something else (vacuuming, cooking, gaming) I’ll watch dubs with English subs because my nigongo (t/n literally sun origin language, meaning ‘Japanese’) isn’t good enough yet to fully let my attention wane and still understand more complex dialogue
Case by case is the only reasonable answer.
I don’t think there’s anyone who would say that Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is bad to watch dubbed, the dub as far as I can tell even has adjustments to preserve wordplay without it being awkward (think of how often “trump card” is used in anime) which is one of the hardest things to do with translation work. There’s some where both have merits, like early seasons of Jojo, part 2 was great dubbed but both part 1 and part 2 have tons of memes that are mostly from random English phrases in the original. Later seasons definitely sub only, literally what is the point of watching part 3 without ZA WARUDO? Why is there no Italian dub of Golden Wind? Also there’s very special cases like Ghost Stories.
I’ve found so many dubs to be overly simplified, poorly directed, filled with weird unnecessary jokes, skip over culturally relevant terms, misunderstand the dialogue, or otherwise use super duper weird “anime” voice like they’re dubbing a drug-induced kids cartoon, that I only trust subs now. Sometimes I’ll have both at once as a test, then inevitably realise how relatively fucked the dub is, then go back to subs.
I would love to enjoy dubs. And some shows, I assume, have good dubs, but I’ve not seen it.
