English Dub Review: I Shall Survive Using Potions! “I’ll Use the Goddess’s Potions to Do Business!”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kaoru pushes off advances from Fernand again, then speaks with Roland and Francette in order to best distribute her potions to the poor. A rival country plans to capture her, but she has plans to retaliate.

OUR TAKE

In my many years working for this site, I’ve covered many shows of varying quality. Some that have felt like unsung gems that I needed to champion with whatever small platform I had, some that probably got plenty of praise but that I was glad to add my take to the discourse, and even ones that I was ninety-nine percent certain should never see the light of day and would probably be rightfully forgotten if I weren’t obligated to say something about them. With four episodes behind us and eight to go, I can now say for certain that I Shall Survive Using Potions is absolutely in that third category. It’s a derivative as dish water Isekai story that barely deviates from the typical formula in any meaningful way, its characters and world feel railroaded to make the protagonist look smart and everyone else look like total idiots (even when said protagonist is a total rube), and frankly, its ethics are just plain gross sometimes. I can’t, for the life of me, find a single character in the entirety of the series thus far who is likable or even all that interesting, and let me tell you, I have looked pretty dang hard.

Case in point, we seem to still require time for this recurring plot about Fernand, the prince who fell for Kaoru and still seems hell bent on harassing her at every opportunity. You would think the whole incident where she cut her own face to show she would rather bleed out than marry him would quench his desires, or at least make clear that there’s no material left in this bit (especially compared to Kaoru’s growing enterprises and underground network of poor kids OR her impact on regional politics), but NO! Once again he’s given a pass and they set up another appearance down the line. The OP makes it seem like he’s a main character, which could mean literally anything considering it has characters in it that only briefly appeared in the first episode, so…whatever, more incel Fernand, I guess. We also have the proper reappearance of Francette, who took an age changing potion to “make her more likely to get married”?! I don’t even have time to get into all of what’s wrong with that, so I’m just gonna wait until next week, where we get the show’s first big fake out death! Yeah, don’t get your hopes up that things are gonna get serious any time soon!