English Dub Review: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest “Burning Light”

Overview

Hajime’s party reaches Ankaji. Hajime must perform multiple miracles to save this dukedom from certain doom before traveling to his real destination, the Grand Gruen Volcano, the next labyrinth on his list.


Our Take

This time around, Hajime accepted the Duke’s request to aid them but seems like there’s a troublesome road in front of him now. Also, The Volcano background animations are passable and usage of CGI remains decent, but the characters are doing a lot of stiff standing around when they’re in the frame now.

As far as I can tell, every episode with the gang altogether looks like a small competition, mainly romantically, yet rarely showed any sort of personality beyond lusting after the Hajime and catfighting. Why does that guy tolerate that crap anyway in the face of Danger? Also, I kinda felt bad for Kaori since she joined up with Hajime’s party, it feels like she’s being treated like a 5th wheel.

Overall, the plot of the show is moving forward so far I still haven’t happened anything relevant in the story as something important, but at least the pacing is much better I’m not very interested in most of the “Harem” aspects, so all the squabbling over Hajime is mundane to me. Having recently binge-watched the entire first season in combination with the previous episode, It would be kind of nice if Hajime actually struggled some times as well since he’s come a long way and ever since his massive upgrades, everything is almost a breeze to him at this point.