English Dub Review: ISEKAI QUARTET “Enjoy! Field Trip”

Amazing! It only took nine episodes to get to the beach episode!

Overview

The field trip to the beach has everybody having fun in their swimsuits, leading to exactly what anyone would expect. Tanya’s team (save for Viktoriya) to oggle all the girls around them. Cocytus sees them slacking off on their Gym duties and orders them to do push-ups. Darkness naturally complies, hoping that the men (who are oggling her) will violate her. Meanwhile, Tanya and Demiurge see Kazuma peeping on all the girls and temporarily blind him with Demiurge’s powers.

Later, Roswaal brings the team to the forest in order to give them their “test of courage.” It seems to just be a normal walk through the woods at night, prompting the students to wonder how this would be scary at all (considering that all of them deal with things much scarier in their home-worlds.) The students get separated into teams according to people they haven’t interacted with too much, leaving Subaru, Lord Ains, Aqua, and Tanya to be placed together. Halfway through the woods, Aqua mentions she’s a goddess who brought Kazuma to a new world, prompting Tanya to believe she is Being X. Tanya reacts with her powers, sending a shock-wave through the forest (which everyone feels.) She is about to attack when Lord Ains and Subaru convince her Aqua isn’t Being X. Tanya calms down, they all return, and she apologizes for her outburst. Lord Ains is impressed by Subaru’s intervention on Tanya.

Our Take

Beach episodes are never designed for substance, but it’ll always leave the audience hoping that there’ll be something in there that surprises the viewer. “Enjoy! Field Trip” didn’t really do much to entertain the concept of originality, as it’s exactly what everyone thinks it is going in. There are compliments to be made about tiny animation bits during the day part of the episode, but it’s pretty much fan-service based. Seriously — did 50% of the episode’s budget go into making sure Darkness’ boobs bounced in a higher frame rate?

The part where Kazuma was blinded by Demiurge was pretty fun, though — and for that matter, Tanya’s power surge sequence was a cool animation tidbit as well. Plot-wise, though, the episode didn’t really feel like it went anywhere — aside from outlining, “anime girl with titty is pretty.” It seemed like it was more of a set-up episode, hinting at something having to do with Lord Ains getting to know Subaru better.

It didn’t even get through all of the teams in the woods, but the best guess is that they felt like they had to make room for the beach shenanigans somewhere. It seems as though they even sort of rushed through the actual beach sequence of the episode, wanting to quickly move on to the plot. In which case, what was the point of even having it at the beach? They could have just made it take place in the woods, to begin with.

Thinking about it now, camping seemed like it would have made a better field trip. Less filler and less borderline sexual harassment.