English Dub Review: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest “Omnibus: The Great Orcus Labyrinth”
Overview
Rather than moving on with the plot, this episode is not episode 6, but rather, episode “5.5” — a recap episode. That’s right — a recap episode, for a show that only has five episodes dubbed thus-far.
The episode recants how Ehit (the world’s God of Creation) summoned Nagumo and his class as the chosen ones destined to save humanity from destruction. In this world — inhabited by humans, demons, and beast-men — the demons and humans had always been in a cyclical battle until the demons learned to control beasts (monsters), which tipped the scale in their favor. Nagumo and his class were all granted special DND-esque classes, went into the labyrinth, etc. etc. then the rest of the episode just recapped everything from episodes 1-5.
Our Take
…Really?
Fans of the Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest books already waited a long time to see its anime come to life. Now, some of them are literally paying Funimation money to see the series waste its time on an unnecessary recap? This show already had a bunch of problems, but at this point, it’s about time that somebody called shenanigans.
Why on earth would there need to be a recap for the first five episodes? In fact, why would there need to be a random recap at all? It would be one thing if the show packed itself with enough content that warranted a small recap at the beginning of every episode, but because of how downright embarrassing the show’s pacing is, it makes no sense that there would be any recap whatsoever.
Come to think of it, it’s a wonder if they felt like a recap was necessary because of the show’s embarrassing pacing. We could almost hear the conversation between producers:
“Hey, we’ve been cutting out a LOT of the source content on this show, and a lot of main plot points aren’t really adding up because of how poorly paced everything has been — what should we do about it?”
“Well, instead of using our budget to put in more source material, or expand on pacing, we should just dedicate an entire episode to really highlight those main plot points we’ve thrown at the audience.”
“So…a recap episode?”
“You brilliant son of a bitch.”
…Or, more likely, there wasn’t even a conversation about the sanctity of the plot. It was 99.999% more-so a cheap trick to save money. There’s really not much to say about this episode, other than the fact that it was a total disrespect to the fans. They could have used that time to develop characters, relationships, and story lore, but nope!
Of course, there is one shred of original content in this episode: we got a sneak peek of the new fan-service character! Looks like we got the worst of the show bundled into one episode: horrible pacing, and unnecessary objectification of female characters.
If they keep this up, this show is going to be known as Arifureta: World’s Worst Anime Adaptation.
Hi Ashley, thank you so much for reading and we love the feedback. Note that on that day we had 14th posts go up and only ten posts show on the front page, so it's possible the preview had already been archived by the time you got to it. One recommendation would be to add our RSS feed to your favorite news aggregator service like Feedly, this way you get all of the latest posts!