©Masami Sato/Kodansha/”This World Is Too Perfect” Production Committee
With its deceptively simple story, moody atmosphere and confident direction, the first episode Quality assurance from another world This is one of my favorite premieres this summer. The next two episodes are…not great, I admit, but I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression! Quality Assurance Still a very smart show that puts some refreshing spins on the tired “stuck in a VR game” premise. It’s just that execution is lacking in some key areas.
Let’s start with the positive: In all three episodes, Quality Assurance Played with some very interesting ideas involving Hagga’s work as a debugger and tester who has been stuck in a virtual game for the past year. His enthusiasm in persuading poor little Nikolay to let her run with her cheeks against the ramparts all day to check for flaws in the crash detection and whatnot is the show’s funniest joke. Whatever the situation, Hagga’s simple, honest, and single-minded approach to getting the job done can bring many benefits. If hitting every wall and exploiting every artificial intelligence mode of his enemies even has a chance of freeing him and his friends from this prison, then by golly Hagga will teach Nikolai to be the most damned person ever Wall breaker.
Speaking of Hagga’s friends, I love the different cruel fates that await them when they dare to disrupt the destabilizing divine power of the debug board. A guy gets sucked into space, another girl repeats the same infinite death/rebirth cycle for a year, and there’s a very unlucky bastard stuck face-up and ass-up in the middle of the solid Earth. In fact, it’s likely that all these doomed debuggers still exist conscious Just the horrific icing on the trauma cake. When you combine all of this with the hilariously grim NPCs that Haga and Nikola found stuck in classic T-poses, it’s clear that the author Masamichi Sato Know a thing or three about video games—both as an art form and as an industry. I can’t disrespect that.
However, as much as I love these ideas Quality Assurance is running, I hope it matches them with more consistent engaging visuals and storytelling. Animation has never been the show’s focus – even in the premiere, which I gave a five-star rating – but it’s starting to slip away from that fine line between “simple but effective” and “just a little awkward-” dangerous blade. Scenes like an evil debugger playing darts with the broken skulls of a bunch of NPCs should be downright disturbing. Still, the show has lost some of that wonderfully ominous atmosphere it had in the premiere, and now scenes like “grisly murders are staged as a sport” aren’t as popular as they should be . So does the reveal of the artificially intelligent Tesla – who possesses Nikola’s body and urges Haga to take out debuggers who aren’t unusually obsessed with the minutiae of their work. It’s not the most exciting twist ever, but it still could have had more weight and gravitas than it ended up being.
Have enough solid base materials Quality Assurance able to withstand my nitpicking of its lackluster performance. I’m more concerned about the long term. After the premiere, I was convinced that this could be the next great loser isekai anime. However, as of now, it seems like the show may just be content with being “pretty good, all things considered.”
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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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