English Dub Review: The Fruit of Evolution: Before I Knew It, My Life Had It Made “Black Dragon God’s Dungeon”

Overview:

Demons plant a bunch of teleportation spells all over. Artoria steps on one, which causes her, Seiichi, and Saria to get transported to the Black Dragon God’s dungeon. Artoria fights her way through the dungeon to ensure that Seiichi and Saria can get home safely.

Our Take:

Yep, this is a dungeon crawling episode. It starts out with Artoria continuing to proctor Seiichi and Saria. Seiichi can’t perform simple tasks, but he can do everything else right because every bland overpowered protagonist has to have at least one dumb flaw.

During all this, Seiichi runs into some demons who send a troll to destroy Seiichi. Naturally, Seiichi wins the battle without even trying. That’s fine because the demons’ goal was actually to plant teleportation spells and send humans to the Black Dragon God’s dungeon.

Later on, Artoria accidentally steps on one and the trio gets sent to the dungeon as planned. Artoria gives Seeichi a stone to help find the others in case they were to get separated. Seconds later, Artoria steps on a tile that causes a wall to cut her off from Seiichi and Saria. I’m now starting to see why she’s called “Artoria the calamity.”

She goes through the dungeon battling monsters, whereas Seiichi and Saria just walk down their path with no issue. Sure, they encounter a treasure chest, but Seiichi destroys with no effort. That shouldn’t be even remotely surprising at this point.

Meanwhile, Artoria battles the Black Dragon God. She puts up a decent effort, but Seiichi and Saria show up to save her just in time. The stone Artoria gave him glows red when a party member’s life is in danger, but it also proves to be useless when it comes to showing where that party member is. Therefore, Seiichi and Saria finding Artoria before she gets killed seems rather convenient.

It’s nice that we’re seeing a little more of the demon side since there’s supposed to be a war on the way. That being said, I’m not impressed with the demons. The goons are pretty standard goofy henchmen. I haven’t seen enough of their captain to form an opinion yet.

Artoria is still the strongest character, but one decent character isn’t enough. She’s a solid fighter at least, but I don’t find myself completely rooting for her.

Also, I am not impressed with the fight scenes here. The animation doesn’t look good and i can say that about non-fight scenes too. The bad animation might not be exclusive to this episode, but it stands out here more than it did in the previous three episodes.

The next episode will probably be the battle between Seiichi and the Black Dragon God. I can already predict how this will go and I’ll be genuinely surprised if the fight takes up more than five minutes of the episode.