What is this?
When Subaru Natsuki blinked his bleary, game-strained eyes especially hard outside the local convenience store one night, he wasn't expecting to see a whole new fantasy world appear right in front of him. All the same, he's not really surprised by it either. Subaru has spent his wholeotaku life waiting for this moment, and now he's ready to embrace his new role as this RPG land's chosen hero! Unfortunately, his magical powers don't seem to be manifesting, and a beautiful girl has not yet appeared to hand down his quest of destiny, but it's bound to happen sooner or later, right? The beautiful half-elf Satella seems like the perfect candidate for this trope, but less than a day after Subaru befriends her, they both get killed in a mission gone awry. Now Subaru finds himself re-awakening in the past every time he dies, at the cost of the new memories he makes with Satella. This isn't the magical legacy he wanted, but maybe he can still use these cursed powers to become a hero. Re:Zero -Starting Life in Another World- is based on a light novel and can be found streaming on Crunchyroll, Sundays at 2:40 PM EST.How was the first episode?
Nick Creamer
Rating: 1.5
One of the unfortunate downsides of reviewing each successive season of anime is that while anime fans tend to grow up with and then leave their shows behind, us reviewers keep hitting those same initial shows over and over again. It's not likely that fans will enjoy watching the same show about a self-aware otaku lead or magical high school harem over and over again in new iterations year after year, but that's not the intent - as old fans grow out of watching this one show, new fans grow into it. And so reviewers just stand like rocks in the river, as the same tired bottom-of-the-barrel shows rush past time and time again.
So it is with Re:Zero, a show whose only real point of distinction is that it actually combines “self-aware otakulead” and “trapped in a videogame world”... much like last season's KONOSUBA. But this one seems to be more of a played-straight adventure than a parody, and as far as adventures go, the only thing that really defined this one is that it has the audacity of starting with an incredibly dull double episode.
It doesn't start dull, though - it starts obnoxious. Protagonists who constantly comment on their own anime-like circumstances have become one of the worst recent trends in anime, and Re:Zero's lead is no exception. His commentary on the default fantasy world he's been transported to is as predictable as it is off-putting, offering no real glimmers of either personality or humor. The half-elf magical girlfriend he eventually discovers is no better, a rough jumble of prim affectations and slight tsun-tsun that marks her as basically one more palette-swapped Asuna. These two wander around for what comes out to about thirty minutes, slowly draining whatever goodwill the audience might have through their cliche character-type dialogue and lack of any engaging goals. A hook eventually appears, but it's not a particularly enticing one, given it really just means these flat characters will likely spend more long minutes reintroducing themselves to each other.
As far as aesthetics go, Re:Zero at least looks nice - its direction is somewhat dynamic, the backgrounds are quite pretty, and the animation is consistent throughout. It's clear there's a strong staff putting their all into this production, which just makes it that much more frustrating this is all the material they have to work with. You can only polish these inert light novel genre exercises so much; in the end, a turd is a turd.
Lynzee Loveridge
Rating: 3
Re:Zero is this season's entry in Japan's undying interest in shut-in protagonists transported into gamer fantasy worlds, and this time we get a bloated two-episode premiere! The show has a lot of flaws to unpack, but by the second half it seems to finally get on track to something worth watching despite its nothing less than insufferable lead.
Our hero is a hikikomori named Subaru who is transported to the fantasy world after replenishing his supply of instant ramen. Why and how he's transported there isn't elaborated on and for once I was a little annoyed at a light novel adaptation skipping its world-building info dump. I don't expect a thesis on the local capital's economy, but having the lead basically hallucinate himself into a world of dog and lizard people and just leave it at that doesn't cut it. Just as quickly as Subaru finds himself there, he also discovers that he's not the MVP of this “game” and the audience is pushed along before there's much time to question the whys and hows.
The next 20 or so minutes after Subaru's arrival are a slog. The episode goes through a rote “questing” plot that I'd expect to find during a date filler episode mid-season, not the 40-minute premiere that's supposed to pull me into the show. It doesn't help that Subaru is a giant dork, and the back-and-forth dialogue meant to establish a rapport between him and the suspiciously named Satella comes off really unnatural or is outright hard to follow. I'm still not sure what they were arguing about by the bridge or why Satella choosing to help Subaru is the quality of a person who “will waste their whole life.”
The duo's trinket quest eats up the entire first episode and part of the second. It isn't until the two-parter's second half that the plot finally reveals its gimmick and things get interesting. Subaru appears to be the only character that “respawns,” and his Groundhog's Day fantasy scenario opens up a whole 'nother avenue of possibilities for character development. We've seen what this fate did to Homura in Madoka Magica, and I'm more than a little interested to see how it affects someone as naïve as Subaru. I'm just not thrilled I had to sit through the first half of the premiere to get there.
Jacob Hope Chapman
Rating: 1.5
At long last, after years and years of watching anime series both good and bad, the industry has seen fit to animate My Own Personal Hell and force me to watch it for preview guide! It's even in double-length episode form. Welcome to the fantastical world of Re:Zero, where every single character is a humorless corrective pedantic blowhard for fifty minutes straight.
I feel like it's extremely important to reiterate that this show is not outlandishly bad or poorly-made, despite my barrel-bottom score. When I say "my own personal hell," I mean that in an absolutely personal way. The show has plenty of more universal gaping problems like a derivative premise, molasses pacing, and an almost embarrassingly precise rip of Sword Art Online's Asuna in its main heroine, who mirrors yesteryear's favorite waifu in everything from her appearance to her personality. However, none of those generic issues hold a candle to the thing about Re:Zero that really drove me up the wall: its interminable dialogue.
It is no exaggeration to say that every single conversation in Re:Zero revolves around either pointing out how genre-aware the protagonist is about every benign thing that happens to him (that's just like this trope! but this is like the opposite of this other trope!), or else it results in a back-and-forth of tedious hair-splitting correction when any new piece of information is shared. Here's just a quick scene breakdown to give you an idea of how much this approach pads every scene to death:
SUBARU AND SATELLA AFTER RETURNING A LOST CHILD TO HER MOTHER BECAUSE SUBARU SAID HE WOULD DO ONE GOOD DEED DAILY TO CONVINCE SATELLA TO LET HIM HELP HER LOOK FOR HER STOLEN INSIGNIA, WHICH ALL TAKES AT LEAST TEN MINUTES
"What benefit did you get out of stopping to help that child when we are already on a mission to find your insignia?" -- SUBARU
"It's simple! I helped her because now we can search for my insignia with clear consciences! What was your motive for helping that child?" -- SATELLA
"I could say that I just wanted to try out my magic skills (he does a coin trick to cheer her up), but that would be unconvincing, so I will say that it was so we could get back to finding your insignia, which will be my one good deed for the day!" -- SUBARU
"But helping that little girl already counts as one good deed for the day, doesn't it?" -- SATELLA
"Ah! That comeback was way too logical!" -- SUBARU
This goes on and on for a good while longer, which means that the inciting incident for this double-feature of painful pedantry only comes five minutes into the second episode. (The first episode has no OP or ED, so it's 25 full minutes of obnoxious roundabout chatter.) Oh, but it gets better. After Subaru finally experiences his first rewind, it takes him five more minutes to even realize that he's gone back to the previous day at all, then it takes fifteen more minutes for him to blaze past all the obvious warning signs that he's repeating history and die thesame way again, just having lived the day from a different perspective. The almost full hour of jabbering about nothing concludes with the very beginning of his second rewind, where he is shocked to discover that Satella doesn't remember him! How did we take that long to get here?
"Now is this a demon's nest or a snake pit I've fallen into? Since I am in a fantasy world, either one would technically be possible." -- SUBARU
Oh, right. That's how.
Subaru's must-describe-every-trope-that-floats-across-my-vision personality is absolutely insufferable, but it's clearly not just his problem. This obsession with irrelevant details comes through in the dialogue of every character he meets, making the whole experience as humorless as it is dull. I finally just lost it and started laughing when Subaru even decided to "well actually" someone's crude suggestion that he loosen up a little: (Guy: "Why are you so fidgety, kid? Are your balls chafing you that much?" Subaru: "I'm not worried about the position of my privates! And you shouldn't start our conversation with potty humor!") Re:Zero wasn't a terrible show in the more conventional ways, but it did seem engineered to drive me mad specifically.
So yeah, this is the most boring, awkward, and protracted treatment of the light novel D&D standard I have ever seen in my life. That extra half-point I gave it is just a credit to the show's pleasant and solid production values, but I can't imagine being trapped in a more unbearably annoying fantasy if I tried.
Rebecca Silverman
Rating: 3
Well here's a shock – Re:Zero is a story about an everyday guy getting pulled into a fantasy world filled with under-dressed beautiful women based on a light novel series! Honestly, its first double-length episode, divided into two separate parts by Crunchyroll, is practically screaming “LN adaptation,” which doesn't need to be a bad thing. And it isn't, really – it just isn't particularly good either, which its hero, Subaru, seems to understand. He's really lackadaisical about the whole thing, mimicking the show itself, which has the most lackluster world switch I've ever seen: Subaru is standing in front of the convenience store, his eyes go blurry, and suddenly he's standing on a medieval street filled with dinosaur-drawn carriages and animal people. “Oh,” he basically says, “I've been pulled into a medieval-style fantasy parallel world. Now I must have powers!”
Admittedly, I think this might be the reaction a lot of us have after so many seasons (years, if we count regular old fiction too) of consuming this particular genre; in fact, I'm positive that as a kid if a closet had actually let me out in another world, my reaction would have been something along the lines of, “About time!” So I can't fault Subaru for his assumptions or his accepting reaction, and he does keep an impressively cool head about suddenly being in a world where he's broke and illiterate. In fact, as I'm writing this, I really can't pinpoint anything that actively put me off me in this episode, apart from the cliché of sexy villainess Elsa with her perpetual sleepy smile, which is a trope I'm not fond of. The bigger issue here is that Re:Zero simply didn't do much to distinguish itself apart from the fact that whenever he dies (or gets a “bad end,” I assume the reference is), Subaru finds himself back at the fruit stand where he talked to his first resident of Lugunica.
That is an interesting conceit, one which suggests more of a “trapped in a game” storyline than the rest of the show would imply; it also introduces a failsafe by which Subaru cannot take the wrong path because if he does he'll die and simply have to start over again. By the time the episode ends, he's met three important women: Satella, a half-elf, Felt the thief, and the aforementioned Elsa. He knows that Felt will steal Satella's insignia and that Elsa will kill him (and Felt and Satella) if he goes about getting the insignia back the wrong way, and I suspect that he's about to figure out that he has to earn Satella's trust before he can get the insignia from Felt while avoiding death by Elsa. It's like he's in the book Heir Apparent and will keep getting reset until he makes the right choice. I enjoyed it when Vivian Vande Velde wrote it, so there may be hope for this version of the story too, as long as it doesn't get too bogged down in details.
It's that reset feature that is giving me hope for this story. Otherwise this feels very much by the book – which again, isn't a bad thing, but it also makes this feel pretty strictly like a genre piece which may not be worthwhile if this isn't already your genre.
Theron Martin
Rating: 3
Review: For the entirety of its first half Re:Zero looks like it is going to be just another bland “gamer transported to a fantasy world” series. Then it turns ugly – as in graphically ugly enough to require substantial censoring – and its gimmick shows, and suddenly it doesn't seem so entirely typical anymore.
The gimmick is, of course, borrowed from Edge of Tomorrow (or, if you prefer, its source light novel All You Need Is Kill): when protagonist Subaru dies, he resets back to a certain moment in time shortly after his arrival in the capital of Lugunica. He has a clear memory of what has happened before, but he is the only one who seems to remember. By the end of the episode he is still trying to put the pieces together on how that works (or even that the resets are actually happening), which leads to some very different results the second time around and looks like it is going to lead to a further major variation for the third time around. To use a game analogy, it's like he's automatically restoring to a save point, and I don't doubt that such a potential reference is intended.
The interesting advantage to this storytelling approach, as used here, is to progressively reveal different aspects of the Big Picture each time. The first time around Subaru was working with the half-elf Satella and her spirit familiar Puck to find an insignia stolen from the latter. Unfortunately for both of them, they wind up dead after stumbling on to a murder scene where the hidden killer is still present. The second time around he doesn't interact with Satella at all but instead encounters Felt (the girl who stole the insignia) and the giant shopkeeper Rom before Felt's client for the insignia guts the two – and this time Subaru gets to see the face of his killer. The third time around he goes after Satella right away, only to get some sense of why her familiar was startled by her giving that name the first time around: because it's also the name of an infamous witch who presumably is the sexy, silver-haired girl in question. Hence this is not, at this point, looking like events are just going to be repeated until Subaru finally gets them right, although I suspect that some of that will come along eventually.
Whatever the case, the story is most definitely taking itself mostly seriously. Too bad it's weighted down by some rather banal exchanges between Subaru and Satella, which make the first half of the episode drag in getting to the central gimmick. Partly compensating for this is a more ambitious than normal animation effort; in few other TV series will you see so much background movement in public scenes, and so consistently, as what you do here. Granted, a lot of it looks like it is computer-automated, but even so it looks vastly more natural and involved than what was seen in, say, Lord Marksman and Vanadis. The capital city's layout and spread of architecture and races is also interesting, if fairly fantasy-typical. The strong contrast between the cheerier lightly-shaded scenes and the grimmer darkly-shaded scenes almost goes too far, with the latter being too dark at times, but that, at least, also shows some extra effort.
I have doubts that the gimmick is going to be enough to entice in people who aren't normally into this type of series, but it has definitely gotten me interested. I look forward to finding out how it plays out.
This is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Accordingly, it is difficult to figure out when to end it. But then, this is dummy text. It is not meant to be read. Period.
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