English Dub Review: Restaurant to Another World “Fried Seafood / Melon Soda Float”

Whoa. Those mugs are as big as your head, bro!

Overview (Spoilers)

Guilhem and Garm are a pair of dwarven dudes on a quest to make their living in making alcohol. Guilhem is a brewer, and Garm a glass blower. Guilhem brings his buddy to the Nekoya, and after tasting their fried seafood platter, beer, and whiskey, they are inspired to build a waystation in the mountains where they found the door.

In the second part, Shareef and Renner are royal half-siblings from the Land of Sand, a nation with a huge territory, but little in the way of economic power. To make up for it, they have the best magicians. Shareef has used his time in the Nekoya to invent a way to make iced coffee using magic. He’s also spent his time pining for Adelheid. Renner tries to push him to talk to the noble princess, but he is far too flustered. Until he can, he has to make due with trying to improve relations between their two countries.

I am disappointed. In the last couple of episodes, it felt like we were finally starting to go somewhere. We built on existing characters and deepened them a bit. This episode… is back to introduce more characters. On one hand, we seem to be exploring even more of the other world. On the other, as big as that world is, it’s really shallow. You can give us all the exposition you want about these cultures, but until you sit us down in them and let us experience those cultures, it’s just a talking head. We need to connect to these characters and places more. While this series is really relaxing and beautiful, it suffers from its format. By constantly introducing new characters, and rarely going past that, we have no chance to get a foothold for the story.

Our Take

Let me propose another way to handle this. Episode one was fine. Episode two should have been a bit more about Aletta learning to be a waitress, while simultaneously having to deal with Altorius, Tatsugoro, and Gaganpo until Sarah shows up. Later in the episode, Tatsugoro leaves to meet with Heinrich and give him his sword. The episode ends with Heinrich arriving, but we have no backstory as to why. That’s handled later. Instead of slapping our viewpoint on to a new character every half episode, the camera starts with Aletta, then moves with patrons as they leave and return. This gives us an ebb and flow to the story and a reason why we meet up with these characters. It also builds Aletta up as a character we can identify with and root for. It does mean we spend more time in the Nekoya, which is admittedly a confined space, but creative storytelling can actually expand the characters. Who’s to say Altorius can’t tell his story with illusion magic turning the place into a holodeck? Why can’t Tatsugoro hold up sumi-e paintings of his experiences while he narrates them? Or, why not have the characters burst into lively bardic bar songs while Aletta imagines the stories they tell? There could be an entire episode about how each person tells the same story differently. This way, the characters get deeper, along with the universe, and we get a bit more about the Nekoya as well. Instead, we get essentially the same thing over and over, twice per episode, expanding a universe more shallow than a kiddie pool. And these settings are worth getting deeper with. I actually like the idea of the Land of Sand. It reminds me of Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic.  Though seriously, how many times can you say “sand” in one exposition?

Despite the format getting stale, the dwarves were entertaining to watch. Yes, they were overblown. Screaming at the top of their lungs over fried fish is not something people would do. Unless they were already drunk… Oh, they just had a mug of beer as big as their head, they might have been on their way. The writing let the characters subtly shift from sober but spirited to drunken and rowdy. They were never out of control, though. Lesser writing would have made it a bit more obvious, and have them start to show their inebriation immediately upon starting in on the larger beers. Where the writing felt awkward was in the second half. After spending so much time on exposition about the Land of Sand, the actual scene with Shareef is rather short and ends abruptly with Renner giving up because her brother is too shy. This is a case where it feels like their “tell” is getting way more billing than their “show”, and the episode just feels janky because of it.

The animation was of high-quality today. It didn’t bother with showing a lot of action or swooping shots but instead focused on doing the stable, down-to-earth shots right. No errors, everything smooth. Seeing as this has been the third episode along that is this good in its art, I’d say they realized their animators were getting lazy and kicked them into gear. I liked the detail they put into the beer and sodas. They looked almost real and definitely tasty.

The two dwarves were well acted in today’s episode, and it moved with the writing’s portrayal of their intoxication properly. I’ve grown to enjoy Monica Rial’s portrayal of Kuro. Her voice is soft and gentle. Working alongside Jill Harris’ peppy-but-confident Aletta and Christopher Sabat’s professional-but-personable Master, the Nekoya has a warm, salubrious air. If it had wifi, I’d be a regular. I really want more time in the restaurant and more time getting to know its existing characters. It’s a shame that these voice actors have built such great sounds and performances, but don’t get enough screen-time for me to enjoy it.

While the animation and art seem to be improving, and the voice acting is just rock-steady, the writing is getting to be too much of the same with a focus on breadth instead of depth. Having a big world isn’t a problem, but you have to make it alive. I give this episode five giant beer mugs out of ten.