While the subs vs dubs debate in the anime zeitgeist will likely endure until the heat death of the universe, I am not tethered to such earthly things. I watch both when simulcasts are available for a show I fancy, like Daemons of the Shadow Realm. I’ll even prefer the English dub for the slang in shows like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and gut-busting romcoms like You and I Are Polar Opposites. Hell, I’d prefer the original language for shows like Tank Chair to the more stilted delivery that matches the lip flaps to the 3D character models of its English-language counterpart.
Sometimes, a “bad” dub, like the one in Ghost Stories, is the best thing an anime has going for it. But I never expected to be watching a milquetoast isekai like Overgeared solely because its English dub is pretty funny.
Isekai anime are a genre of fantasy or sci-fi shows where a normal dude, usually a loser in real life, gets teleported into a fantasy land where he has one cool gimmick that makes him the god-tier emperor and most important person in the universe that everyone wants to be or be with. I’m not a big fan of the genre. The power fantasy of a loser getting stronger by making the number on his RPG-esque stat sheet go up just doesn’t do it for me. Likewise, I find its oversaturation over the past decade in the anime scene, slightly echoing the premises of the shows that came before them, Polly Pocket-style, to be pretty whack.
Still, that hasn’t stopped sentence-long series titles that fit the entire synopsis of their shows from being immortalized in the Oxford dictionary. Nor has it stopped a flood of shows from attempting to breathe the rarefied air of juggernauts like Sword Art Online, Re: Zero, Overlord, Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, and our newest isekai-adjacent overlord, Solo Leveling. The last of which became so popular that an entire cottage industry has cropped up in its wake, riffing on its own formula of broken video game mechanics seeping into the real world. Overgeared is one of those anime.
Based on Saenal Park’s novel and animated by J.C. Staff, Overgeared follows Shin Youngwoo, a loser playing a popular VR game called Satisfy under the gamertag Grid. Whereas Solo Leveling saw its hero acquire a skill to grind and level up to get the edge over his colleagues, Overgeared sees Grid uncover a rare character class that lets him blacksmith legendary items. I got to check out the first episode of Overgeared ahead of its premiere at Crunchyroll’s Anime Nights, a theatrical omakase of sorts where the streamer showed off the first episodes of shows coming this season. I was not there for it. Overgeared was one of those shows I groaned at my friend for being another Solo Leveling clone, and I started to mentally check out until we got to the Firefly Wedding preview (and Black Clover season two, I guess).
I walked away from the subbed screening of Overgeared pretty certain I wouldn’t continue watching the show in my own time. That said, I did, in the very least, have three takeaways to write home about. The first being how ridiculous Satisfy’s giant mech-cockpit VR chairs were. It’s no wonder Shin’s mom—the only character with a lick of sense—gave him grief for being a bum. On top of driving up their electricity bills with his bulky gaming setup, Shin mooched off them for whatever money they had to buy items in his silly game. Another thing to note: the game’s economy was tethered to the real world’s economy. Whatever money players earned transferred into their own accounts. Like 2010s-era high schoolers watching Let’s Plays on YouTube, Shin’s refrain to his mom was that he’d make money playing his video game. (I can’t stress enough how justified she’d be in 86ing her son for that alone). The last thing was that the Japanese dub of the show tried to take the piss out of its premise with every immersion-breaking quip Shin made about his predicament.
There were plenty of jokes. Not enough to warrant more than a nostril chuckle, but enough to let me know the show was in on how silly its unlucky gamer hero was. On a lark, I came across a TikTok of Overgeared‘s English dub and watched it to see how its jokes landed with me compared to the mostly forced humor in the sub. I’m now completely caught up with the show. Why? Much like how Jessica Rabbit told Bob Hoskins’ Eddie Valiant she loves her kooky rabbit boyfriend because he makes her laugh, Overgeared got a good laugh out of me. More specifically, Shin’s English voice actor, Ricco Fajardo, referencing Jack Karlson’s iconic “democracy manifest” speech while being taken away by guards had me doubled over. I had to watch the show just to hear what other choices it made to localize the anime’s humor. I wasn’t disappointed.
The best compliment I can giveOvergeared‘s shotgun approach to localizing humor is that it turned my glazed-over apathy for the isekai into my guilty-pleasure show of the fall season. Much of that is thanks to the load-bearing, triumvirate efforts of Fajardo’s vocal performance, Emily Fajardo’s voice direction, and Tyler Walker and Jared Smith’s script adaptation supervision over at Crunchyroll. Thanks to their concerted efforts, I’ve gotten a laugh out of having the show on as I work during my week, with funny line reads that caught me completely off guard.
Key among them is Grid calling something ridiculous “crazy work,” saying he was hammering away at the forge like he did with someone’s mother last night, and not drinking the Kool-Aid over the show’s loli-esque sidekick by calling her a “fetus.” While a lot of the show’s bits aged terribly on arrival, I can let it slide because I can imagine a loser like Grid making a “deez nuts” joke unironically in the big 2026 without cringing. Plus, it’s very clear that Fajardo is having a lot of fun in the booth, delivering a barrage of funny lines as Grid.
While the show isn’t necessarily in the upper echelon of hilarious dubs like Ghost Stories or the heir apparent of gut-busting isekai anime, Konosuba: God’s Blessing on This Wonderful World, it certainly passes the bar by having a wacky, YouTube abridged series-feeling official dub making an otherwise milquetoast isekai an entertaining watch week-to-week. Which just goes to show that a funny English dub can make any anime worth watching.
Overgearedis streaming on Crunchyroll.
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