English Dub Review: By the Grace of the Gods “Clean-Up Duty, with the Slimes”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

After arriving in Gimul town and joining a guild, Ryoma takes his first job. It leads him to the home of Miya Catt, a cat beastkin who’s eager to watch him do his work. Since Ryoma has such high class abilities, he’s able to clean up the entire area in no time at all.

Everyone is impressed with his abilities, and so his second job is a lot tougher. He’s tasked with cleaning out the public toilets, which happen to be overflowing with poisonous miasma. While a collection of adventurers stand guard outside, Ryoma and his slimes go to work and manage to safely cleanse all of the stalls. When he arrives home, he’s touched to see all of the Reinhart family waiting to greet him.

Our Take:

I’ll say one thing for By the Grace of the Gods — it consistently finds new ways to get less entertaining. We are four episodes in, and the big hook that the series throws our way this week is Ryoma sanitizing a public restroom. If that sounds interesting to you, let me assure you that it is not.

Watching a little boy unleash his slimes in a communal outhouse is not something that i’ve ever seen in an anime before, and it’s not something I’m in a hurry to watch again. at least, since this is one of the blandest series I’ve ever seen, the act of cleansing itself isn’t too gross. It mostly amounts to a big puff of brown haze when Ryoma opens the door. Then he stands around monologuing while all the slimes scurry around the room doing the hard work. Five minutes later, everything is sparkling. Wish I had some to clean my house. Slimes over roombas, am I right?

If there is something interesting about this episode, it’s the introduction of new characters who could possibly be more entertaining than Ryoma and the Reinhart family — though that isn’t a hard bar to clear. While Ryoma is inside scrubbing the toilets, the guild leader hires a bunch of adventurers to stand watch outside in order to ensure no civilians enter. Because apparently nobody has ever heard of do not enter signs, and you definitely need at least a half dozen warriors to keep people out of a handful of public restrooms. It’s dumb and makes no sense, but seeing a cat, dog, and rabbit beastkin all hanging out together is the most this episode has going for it.

The vast majority of the episode is like this: scenes of Ryoma cleaning (or standing around telling the slimes what to do, really) and his fellows fawning over his abilities and hardwork. However, the end sees him returning home after three days of commode cleaning to find the entire Reinhart family waiting to greet him. Yup, even all three servants. It’s honestly kind of unintentionally funny, but the show tries to play it off as touching, as Ryoma flashes back to his days as a real worker who didn’t cry when his mom died. But these characters are so boring that there’s no use even trying to draw emotion from it.

While Clean-Up Duty, with the Slimes isn’t inherently bad or anything, it’s just so blandly inoffensive and pointless that it’s hard to watch. Ryoma continues his quest of becoming the most politely insufferable protagonist ever, the Reinharts still have nothing better to do that fawn over him, and now there are weird cat people. Maybe next week Ryoma’s slimes will gain a new skill called Excitement?