©Masami Sato/Kodansha/”This World Is Too Perfect” Production Committee
The episode “The Boss” had all the makings of a great episode. Quality assurance from another world——What I want to say is almost It worked…although I still can’t help but feel like the show is missing some key elements that would help it gel into something truly satisfying. The way Haga and company exploit the game’s mistakes to get out of trouble is still pretty neat – and I appreciate the chemistry our core group is developing – but it’s just one of those anime where the effort adds up to more than the sum of its unevenness part.
This is largely due to the show’s middling production values and general lack of ambition in scope and scale. Here, our team is battling a horde of nasty debuggers in what should be their most dangerous adventure yet. Still, this final confrontation somehow ended At least The entire castle infiltrates a thrilling part of the storyline. The conflict mostly takes place in the boring main entrance area in a generic castle setting – all the Play Ing thugs are too arrogant and stupid to do anything but spout lame villain clichés, and occasionally take turns attacking us here and there hero. Quality assurance There’s always the insistence on how powerful and dangerous these crazy debuggers are, but they come across as threatening as a bunch of hammy community theater actors taking a day trip to the Renaissance Faire.
They lack personality and do nothing good for the Play Ing villains. Aside from their completely anonymous character designs, every one of them is written and acted as if the anime was confused and joined a bunch of sociopathic school bully characters from every scary high school death game show that’s ever been In backlog. There’s only one reason I know Sakai and Kana’s names: it’s because of ANN’s casting announcement article, which I pinned to avoid referring to them as “Jackass and “Lady Jackass” throughout the review.
Still, there’s something to like here. Even though the effects look cheap, I once again appreciate Haga’s creative solutions to dealing with the bad guys. For such a terrifying group of people, having them all frozen in a failed loadout is pretty grim — and the show does a pretty good job of foreshadowing Haga’s plans even at the outset of this mission. Moreover, Shacho is at least the kind of person who would Quality assurance Again decided to do anything with him. Sure, he’s a jerk, but he looks like human Asshole, he (sort of) apologizes to Amano for killing Lou and offers a way to work with Haga. We need more characters like him in this series. Haga, Amano and Nikolai are an interesting bunch. Still, if their only hope of redemption is to complete the storyline of this deeply flawed RPG, it will benefit everyone involved (including us) if the story ends up being worth the time.
grade:
Quality assurance from another world Currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop culture, which can also be found in twitterhis blog and his podcast.
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