English Dub Review: Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?, “Didn’t I Say the Four of Us Would Be a Party?!”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Mile begins her lessons at the academy and finds that her roommates are the same three girls she had met the day before. As they grow closer as a team, they also grow closer to finding out the origins of Mile’s secret abilities. 

Our Take

In the first episode, all of the members of Mile’s adventuring party were more or less just there so we could recognize them later. Now that it’s later, we get proper and more detailed introductions to all of them. How they get introduced is the source of this week’s amusement. 

This episode is entirely just one joke; Mile’s abilities are overpowered and she doesn’t want anyone to find out, but she fails constantly. This joke is repeatedly reiterated, with Mile being put through a series of slightly different situations. It is in how the 3 other characters react to Mile’s antics that we learn more about them. 

Reina is a serious, straightforward little girl. Most of her lines are just overreactions to Mile constantly overachieving and trying to sweep it under the rug. She comes across as a mix of both generally inquisitive and kind of jealous of Mile. On her own though, she’s just an uptight brat, so she needs to be contrasting Mile to avoid being uninteresting. She’s the character who needs the most development. 

Pauline is the girl who seems innocent at first but is hiding something a little sinister. Her primary gag is that she wants to become the archetypal pure healer, but since she’s from a merchant family she can’t help but see things from a more miserly perspective. Almost all of her dialogue ends with her whispering under her breath some permutation of her wanting to exploit Mile’s talents for profit. The contrast is amusing at first, but it grows thin over time. 

Mavis is the slightly oblivious, simple-minded older girl. She does catch on that Mile is more than she appears, but isn’t as intensely curious as the other girls are. She seems to be the only character with a specific goal that doesn’t revolve around exploiting Mile. She simply wants to become a knight and a great swordsman. 

This sounds like it would be boring, but I find Mavis’ scenes to be the funniest. Since she doesn’t really question the origins of Mile’s abilities or motives, she ends up willingly getting wrapped up in her little schemes. A lot of the jokes involving Mavis are what I like to call, “jokes that have gone on slightly too long.” These types of jokes sometimes work because they venture into the realm of the ridiculous and absurd. An example from this episode is that Mavis wants Mile to train her, so Mile becomes Master Roshi and they start a brief Dragon Ball style training montage. It’s incredibly stupid; stupid enough that it becomes funny. 

The heroine herself, Mile, feels like a character beholden by the plot. All of the conflict and humor revolves around her and the basic premise of the show; not wanting to be found out and live a normal life. As a result, she is terribly simple, all of her actions falling in accordance with this one concept. The only time we see her move beyond this is when she broaches the fourth wall and/or makes references to other anime, such as the aforementioned Dragon Ball inspired scene. This type of humor is only good for a quick and easy laugh and adds nothing original.

Thus far the show seems content with just spinning this one record. Even in a comedy, the story and characters should exhibit some form of development. But it is only episode two, so there could still be a lot more waiting around the corner. At this rate, the sooner something big happens, the better.