English Dub Review: ISEKAI QUARTET; “Challenge! Part-Time Job”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Visha has been working lots of jobs after school. Then, everybody else gets jobs too. There’s no such thing as a free lunch after all. 

Our Take

Every day, right after school ends, Visha is seen leaving immediately. Everyone makes pithy comments about it, but nobody bothers sticking around long enough to question it. Subaru and Kazuma leave with their respective harems; this is played up as a joke, but what it really does is call into question where everyone goes home to in this world. I guess everyone from the same franchise lives in the same house?

The next day, Subaru comments that he found Visha on the way home working at the butcher’s shop. Ains and Albedo say they saw her at the convenience store, and Kazuma says she was at the supermarket. As we can see, Visha gets around and takes on a lot of part-time jobs, which is probably the most admirable thing anybody has ever done in this history of this show.

For some reason, Tanya decides to hold an impromptu meeting to gather all of the places everyone saw her work at and consolidate this information. She receives a wide variety of eyewitness accounts that place her working at a hilariously large amount of stores. Of note among them, Cocytus says he saw her at the arts and crafts store. This leads to an offhand remark regarding Cocytus’ latent crafting ability, a topic that goes criminally unexplored and is definitely, unironically worth more attention. 

They confront Visha, who is immediately forthcoming with the truth. As for why specifically, it’s because the school cafeteria has a lunch special that costs 30,000 yen, which is ~$280. I’m not sure a student could afford that, especially since apparently all but one of them don’t even have a source of income. 

With that said, all of the other characters decide to take a page from Visha’s book and take on part-time jobs themselves. Observant viewers will notice that all of the various places they work at are operated by the same guy with a mohawk, whose name is evidently Tough Guy.  This seems like just a visual gag, but it does actually come into play later. 

Ultimately, everyone else isn’t doing this because they’re interested in the lunch special, but rather so they can have some spare pocket change themselves. This episode really does call into question the specifics of how these characters subsist in this world. If they all live somewhere off-campus, how do they pay rent if they don’t have jobs?

The moment of truth arrives and Visha orders her long-awaited, ostentatiously expensive lunch special. Who else emerges from the kitchen but Tough Guy with a gigantic platter of various dishes slapped together. Everyone else scoffs at Visha, but she sees no problem with this and happily digs right in. You may scratch your head as well, but if you spent $280 on food, you’d probably try to eat it all too. I know I would. 

This episode isn’t really a hit, but it’s definitely not a miss either. There are a handful of great jokes in here; some played to their fullest capacity, others left with untouched potential. It’s also an unintentional half-assed attempt at some world-building; at least if you read a little too much into it.