English Dub Review: Shangri-La Frontier “Remnant of the Divinity: The Aberrant Loser”

Overview

Sunraku manages to stave off his attackers and reach Thirdrema, where he and Emul then travel back to Rabituza. Emul then takes Sunraku to the Vorpal Colosseum where he’s pitted against 10 opponents to further his training.

Our Take

As Animalia’s takes both herself and Arthur out of the game from the previous episode‘s proceedings, it understandably shocks the other assassins so hard, that Rakuro immediately bolts to the land Thirdrema. Meanwhile, Rei is left starstruck that Rakuro briefly spoke to her, but blames the assassins for cutting her desired conversation shot, kicks their asses. Arthur later on takes her loss in a good-natured way and invites Rakuro/Sunraku to talk later in the post-apocalyptic game, along with his other online friend Katzo. Rakuro teleports to Rabituza to begin playing the unique scenario. For his first training session, he is forced to fight a series of unusual creatures to prove his worth.

After her recent encounter, Rei decides next time she meets him again in-game, she’ll attempt to send him a friend request. But later on, after dying seven times in a row, Rakuro/Sunraku figures out how to take down his opponents as they grow progressively stronger, encountering some of the most original and otherworldly designs imaginable. The results only promote him to level 31 due to the reduced experience points of the vorpal collar. Vysache turns up to watch the tenth fight against a monster he caught just for for this match, the “Aberrant Woodmage”, a montsterous tree-type sorcerer so strong Vysache’s only condition is to “survive for 5 minutes” to win the round…

Overall, this was a good setup for a new story-arch. My only minor gripe with the fight montage near the end is the way it was setting up a series of seemingly tough challenges, but rather than show us the fights of the monsters he’s faced, it just glosses over most of them anyway mostly with still images. Why not just have 2 or 3 obstacles to clear and end up with the same result? At the very least, it seems like the last-stage monster will have some relevance later in the story. I guess we’ll wait and see…