English Dub Review: Isekai Cheat Magician “Royal Capital Wennifix”

Overview:

A messenger comes from the royal capital.

Our Take:

I feel like my complaints this episode also stem from my complaints last episode: telling and not showing. Taichi and Rin finally find out why they were summoned to this world: to prevent a political struggle between two rival factions in the monarchy. In other words, they are sent to be potential allies, or potential weapons. Taichi gets extremely annoyed with the king as a result, stating that his drive for power ended up putting both him and Rin in danger, especially at the start. As Mueller points out, Taichi and Rin come from a relatively peaceful world, where at least in modern Japanese society, they don’t have to risk their lives on a daily basis. Getting thrown into the world was a shock to them and to be clear, Taichi isn’t wrong– he’s absolutely correct in getting upset about it.

The problem is, that the show never really took the time to show their discomfort in the new world. It took more time in showing their magical potential and power levels– in fact, the first episode ends with them having mastered the basics of magic. The most disorientation they felt was in the field with the monsters, and that as fairly short in comparison. Saying that they felt uncomfortable and out of place is more playing off what we the audience would expect, because of course we’d expect them to be disoriented. But none of that is explored on screen, not really, so we’re just expected to take their word for it. As a result, Taichi’s anger doesn’t have that much weight to it, not as much as it should.

The same, ironically, comes in how they’re relatively okay with staying in the new world. They say that they found friends in the new world, but who are those people? It’s kind of only believable that they’d feel that way about Mueller and Lemia, who they have interacted with significantly. They’re on good terms with the rest of the guild too, but we don’t see that. If information is told to the audience but not actually shown on screen, then it feels kind of cheap.

At least we realize who the enemy is, as the leader of Crimson Pact is shown to be the an archbishop that’s close to the princess. It’s no surprise that he knew about Taichi then, since he would have been in the know about the initial summoning. That the enemy is close is interesting– but doesn’t Rin know his face? How is that going to work…