English Dub Review: Mushoku Tensei “An End and a Beginning”
Overview:
Rudeus’s strange guest recounts his future and reveals the cause of all his misfortunes.
Our Take(Spoilers):
I have to come clean about something: I might have fibbed a little when I said I didn’t remember things from when I read the light novel. I promise I didn’t think it was a lie in the moment! There are parts in the books called “Turning Points” where the craziest shit usually happens, and that’s no different here. I think that should have been the title of this episode instead of the last one, but that’s a whole different discussion.
There are two parts that I was looking forward to seeing animated from the novels. Since they’re so far into the series, I wasn’t optimistic that we would get to see them, but we just reached one, and the other one is coming up. I promise I won’t spoil it, but I think it’s going to be great if how they’ve handled everything else is anything to go by. One of the issues with the dub being behind the sub is that some spoilers are hard to avoid, so be careful if you’re in any anime groups. Since I’ve read the books, I wasn’t super upset, but if you’ve never seen it, you might be upset.
This was also one of the first times I paid attention to the ED. I’ve listened to it, of course, but I never really watched it before. It focuses almost entirely on Eris, and I have to say it’s pretty cool. Even in the novels, there are only a few parts that shed some light on what she was doing while away from Rudeus. There’s a manga that follows that time of her life, but it’s not very long, unfortunately. So it’s pretty cool to see some of that reflected here.
I love a good time travel situation, and this is no different, but I have to nitpick here. I understand that in a story where magic makes all these things possible, this shouldn’t bother me, but here goes. The old man version of Rudeus traveled back into the past, but because he wasn’t skilled at time travel magic and because it’s hard to pull off by its very nature, when he traveled, he wasn’t able to bring everything with him. What is implied is that he wasn’t able to bring his organs, so I’m wondering how he was able to have a fifteen-minute conversation with no organs. I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them, but that took me out a bit. Still a fantastic episode, but I’m not looking forward to seeing the awful things he described in the best way possible.
