English Dub Review: ISEKAI QUARTET; “Work Hard! Valentine’s Day”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Valentine’s day is upon us. The girls conspire how to give chocolate to the boys. The boys await the chocolate in various states of unrest. Surprisingly, nothing else happens. 

Our Take

It’s time for a topical episode, so February obviously means Valentine’s Day. The native denizens of the various isekai worlds must be briefed on this Earth tradition. The girls receive what is more or less correct information. You’re supposed to give chocolate to the boys you like. And also the boys you don’t like that much, but you do it because you work with them and it’s just a polite thing to do. Admittedly, it’s not an entirely unrealistic interpretation of the holiday; or at least the version of it that’s portrayed in anime.

Almost all of the female characters go on to make appropriately idiosyncratic but unnoteworthy jokes about this concept. The one person who takes this completely seriously and goes all-in is, of course, Albedo. Even seeing a glimpse of her in just this spin-off show, you could ascertain that her defining humorous characteristic is “hopelessly in love with Ains.” But while this is completely expected, what is completely unexpected is that they don’t actually do anything with this. She says all of her standard lines about love and stuff, but nothing else. The one joke, I guess, is that her chocolate looks funny. Nothing goes wrong and she executes her plan perfectly, which is decidedly boring. 

The “surprise” “guest character” this episode is Betelgeuse Romanee-Conti from Re:Zero, a self-proclaimed “apostle of love.” Though it’s never made clear, his idea of what love is obviously not the same as anybody else’s. I’m guessing it involves killing people, or something related to that. He’s there to help out Albedo with her chocolate but spends all of his time constantly introducing himself and ending his sentences with an unceremonious “Death!” That isn’t even an exaggeration either; the only reason I was able to write out his full name above is that he kept repeating it. They gave this character a bunch of dialogue and wasted it on a single, unrefined punchline. Fortunately, Sebas comes in to do the Lord’s work and summarily defenestrates him. 

Speaking of unrefined punchlines; the Imperial lads get together to talk about Valentine’s Day and quickly develop the wrong idea. Kazuma, despite knowing the right idea, gives them an even worse idea, suggesting that they beg for chocolate by sounding like an idiot. Only Weiss falls for this, though, and is regrettably attacked upon deploying this misbegotten tactic. This entire scene is as incomprehensible as it is unfunny. 

For an episode about Valentine’s day, all of the big, dedicated scenes had really poor jokes that were only loosely related to the holiday. Honestly, the jokes in the shorter, in-between scenes were more competent and relevant, though not by much. The number of quality laughs per episode in this show seems to be declining at a steady rate, which is a shame because it’s genuinely capable of them. I think this show does better when it takes starts with the cliches as a baseline and then goes off wildly in its own direction with them, rather than trying to stick close to the initial idea. 

The ending animation of this episode is different, specially made for Valentine’s Day: a pleasant, upbeat little J-Pop song. At least we get to end on a sweet note.