English Dub Review: By the Grace of the Gods “Monster Hunting, with the Slimes”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

After their trip into the abandoned mines last week, the duke and his family decide to send the Adventurer’s Guild into the caves to clear out the remaining monsters. Ryoma and his band of merrymakers venture down the tunnels and easily clear away the cave creatures they encounter.

However, bats aren’t the only things living inside the mine. A settlement of over 500 goblins has also been discovered, and they aren’t going to be beaten as easily as the mindless animals inhabiting the mine. Luckily, Ryoma has plenty of weapons in store, including his amazing sound bomb ability. Even when the goblin commander is awakened, Ryoma is able to help his friends defeat their foe.

Our Take:

By the Grace of the Gods has never been a show that survives on thrills, but this week’s episode, Monster Hunting, with the Slimes, is one of the most action packed outings thus far in the series. Ryoma’s journey into the abandoned mines last week was pretty low key, with easy training montages and unimaginative monsters that pose no real threat. This week’s adventure certainly poses more serious challenges on the surface, but do the more exciting situations add up to much more excitement in real life? Well, not really.

Working together with the adventurers, Ryoma is able to clear the mines of monsters easily, no matter how many there are. Even when there are a whole colony of cave bats (which Ryoma is somehow able to detect, of course, thanks to his three years of living in the forest), he uses his sound bomb technique and immediately knocks all of them out in a single moment.

I was hoping the addition of a group of adventurers to Ryoma’s posse might inject some life into the proceedings. The kid has been around the Jamil family for pretty much every episode until now, so this was a chance for the show to shake things up a bit. Unfortunately, however, the members of the Adventurers Guild are about as toothless as every other character in the show.

Not literally, of course, because a good number of these adventurers actually do have plenty of teeth, since they’re beastkins. But when it comes to personality, they’re all defined in only the very basic strokes: the leader, the cute cat girl, and the mature member who doesn’t kid around. What’s worse, they act basically the same as the Jamil family does around Ryoma, fawning over his every move and asking plenty of oddly interested questions about his slimes. He does have 4,310 slimes now, which admittedly, is pretty impressive.

A weird twist happens when the gang learns of a goblin settlement buried deep within the mines. Expecting around 300 goblins, they go on the offensive and wind up slaughtering over 2,000 of the goblin townsfolk. It’s such a strange change of pace for the show, to go from a sweet boy who innocently tames slimes, to a war criminal who wastes thousands of goblins without really explaining or questioning why. I was fully expecting Ryoma to pull out some kind of sleeping spell or friendship magic, but no, he just straight up kills every goblin they encounter.

And it’s not like the goblins were bothering anybody — Ryoma and the adventurers have to venture deep into the mines just to find them. Obviously, this is a show that leans heavily on genre cliches, and everybody knows goblins are made to be killed. But when it’s a kid doing the killing, and the goblins are obviously somewhat intelligent since they wear clothing, it just felt oddly off-putting to see Ryoma turn into a killing machine

The end of the episode leans into a different turn of direction for the series, as Ryoma announces to the Jamil family that he would like to continue forward under his own power, and break his ties to them and their support. Eliaria is sure to be disappointed, but we’ll see if Ryoma sticks with his plan.