English Dub Review: Let’s Play “Life is S-Rank”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Sam Young works at her father’s software company but has dreams of being a game developer, even having made her own game. But between antics with her workplace and people review bombing her game, life is on Nightmare Difficulty.

OUR TAKE

The comic site Webtoon has been helping new artists get their stories out there for over two decades now, and we have yet another turned into an anime with Let’s Play. Though even without the context of it being based on a webcomic, there’s a lot right off the bat that gave away that it was written by an American. It honestly gave me throwbacks to the anime-esque shows of the mid-2000’s like Totally Spies, Martin Mystery, and Code Lyoko (all of which were, incidentally, French made), though I don’t mean to say that derogatorily, just to say it had some tells about its origins. The story itself follows Sam Young, a youthful and pretty aspiring indie game developer who, at least based on this first episode, faces unfortunate life accidents and people underestimating her while she attempts to keep a cool head and stand up for herself. She manages to do with her boss when he threatens to fire her co-worker for causing a mishap (even though it was entirely that co-workers fault and she was aggressively flirting with a deliveryman to the point that, if the genders were reversed, I think the story would frame it a bit differently).

But the genre of this series is quite clear and that is romantic comedy. We have a fresh faced young woman who has a bunch of hot men around her with which she has oodles of sexual tension, one of whom being her British sounding boss who belittles her but seems to believe that she’ll grow from it, though I’m already pretty annoyed with him so I’d say he’s out of the running. The other competitor for now is one that Sam doesn’t even meet until the end of the episode, but is well aware of him because she watches his Let’s Play Youtube channel. And to her surprise, he plays HER game! But for one reason or another, he doesn’t play the game correctly and blames it for his mistakes, with his rabid fanbase wiping out all of the building buzz her game was getting. But even more shock, he’s also moving in next door to her?! Yeah, even if I’m not super familiar with Korean dramas, which this apparently takes a lot of inspiration from, I think I know where this is heading. Still, I’ll be here for the next few months, so let’s see what routes Let’s Play the series decides to take before it runs out of lives.