English Dub Review: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime “The Dungeon Evolves”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Rimuru loses a few days in work, only to reemerge and find that the Dungeon they set up for adventurers is having some more problems.

OUR TAKE

After last week’s premiere being a calm opening to the season with some sinister foreshadowing to the villains behind the scenes, I was really hoping that we would hit the ground running the following week, pick up the pace, find some new and fresh goal for our Tempest crew to pursue before the Mariabel makes her move. Instead, we’re still spinning our wheels on the dungeon they made for the festival, which is apparently so interesting that we are devoting time to Rimuru and friends trying to reset some of the higher level bosses before a surprisingly fierce group reaches those levels and…I dunno, files a complaint? You would think the obvious solution here would be to shut down those higher (technically lower because they’re going deeper in the dungeon but you know what I mean) levels for the time being and make up some smaller substitute challenges that customers can play. Mobile games and MMOs do stuff like “seasons” all the time where they alternate between different types of tasks and challenges for players so there’s some sense of variety, and in case something goes wrong with one thing, it doesn’t risk shutting the whole game down and risking impatient players losing interest. But apparently the idea that Rimuru (who I would bet real currency has played those types of games in his old life) came up with is for him, Veldora, Milim, and Ramiris to possess monsters for players to fight…before getting their asses handed to them on the 3rd level.

Look, I genuinely do think the idea of running a dungeon like an elevated escape room meets laser tag thing is a cool idea, and there are most definitely a ton of fun and funny ideas for a story about people trying to run that sort of business. Hell, I might just steal that! But in the context of this show and this current season, we have spent way too much time on this. The most relevant this was ever going to be, at least for the time being, was last season when it was a key part of the festival and the country’s reputation and normalization of monsters was on the line. What’s on the line now? A two star review on Central World Yelp? It looks like we’re gonna get more scenes with the antagonists next time, and this season’s going to be the longest yet so it’s not like we don’t have plenty of time, but we really need to give this dungeon stuff a good long rest.