English Dub Review: Re:Monster “Re:Use”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Gobrou returns home in his new form to many surprised reactions, finding out soon enough that he has long surpassed everyone else in strength, as well as gained even more attention from the women. He continues to go on more challenging quests, gaining more diverse abilities, more powerful treasures, and even replacing the arm he lost to the bear with a mechanical one. On one such quest, he meets a seductive Dryad, who he proceeds to screw all night. When he comes back, the massive amount of hickies on his neck makes all the women jealous, though apparently the only issue they have is that he hasn’t screwed THEM yet. So, he does.

OUR TAKE

Ahhhh, what an episode that was. You know, it’s nice when we can look back on where, or when, a giant monster to properly defend themselves at the bank so they can be examined and studied for the next generation, as we see Gobrou do for his fellow Goblins here. Not so nice is when the entire episode can be basically boiled down to “and then I did this OTHER cool thing, I fought a bunch of cool monsters, I slept with all these ladies, I got all this cool treasure”, etc, with nothing else left to it other than that. It can be fun to watch characters do cool things, but when all you’re doing is just watching them run through it all like a rote list, it doesn’t really feel like much of a story. We’re not learning anything about Gobrou as a character through these actions, or what about these choices is highlighting aspects of his personality that will make him stronger or weaker in certain situations later. The episode really can pretty much just be summed up as “I did this, then I did this, then I did this, and it was all really BADASS.” And that’s just not super compelling for me.

I’ve recently been rushing through a binge of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, and a lot of the early episodes of that reflect my issues here, so that’s another similarity that can connect these two shows. It was just “Rimiru gets a new power, Rimiru makes a new ally (who is sometimes a sexy lady), Rimiru gets a new political edge”, on and on and on. The only key difference so far is that Rimiru never sleeps with any of his allies, where as Gobrou kind of just dives on in. If my theory that Slime took influence from Re:Monster is correct, maybe that was just the one unpalatable thing they wanted to avoid. It was also not until LATE into the first season that some actual character work happened for Rimiru, but I’m really hoping that we won’t get to Episode 20 by the time Gobrou gets some development. Dude, it’s great that you get to go on a bunch of Gary Stu adventures getting tons of loot and banging lots of monster women, but I’m here to watch a story. GIVE ME A STORY. You’ve got nine episodes left, use them.