English Dub Review: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest “The Monster of the Abyss”

This is what happens when you split up the party.

Overview

Nagumo is a young monster fighter with the power of transmutation. He attends a school specifically designed to train people to use their abilities in order to fight monsters. However, during a mission with his team, he wakes up alone at the far lower level of the Great Orcus Labyrinth — the 67th level, where especially powerful monsters live. He, as a rookie, is nowhere near their power level, and immediately has to fight for his life against a bear demon — who graphically rips off his arm and eats it. He escapes into a cave but passes out from blood loss.

Miraculously, he wakes up alive. He’d coincidentally been laying under a Holy Crystal — which had dripped holy water into his mouth while unconscious. He struggles to remember the events that separated him from his team in the first place but decides to focus on survival. He manages to use his wits to trap a wolf demon. He kills and eats it, but monster meat is poisonous and nearly kills him. However, since he’d chased it down with holy water, he lived — and additionally, discovered that eating monster meat gives the consumer the power of the said monster.

He gets more powerful and hardened, killing the bear who took his arm. He slowly remembers that his team captain had blown him off a rock bridge into the depths of the Labyrinth — in what looks to be a murder attempt.

Our Take

Fans of the original light novel have already gone off on the pacing of this episode. Even from the perspective of someone who has only seen the show, it was obvious there was something off. There seemed to be little detail about the school itself, or what the purpose of it is other than slaying monsters and looting labyrinths. For all the showing this show likes to do, there was a lot of unnecessary telling (for example, when Nagumo would explain certain items or abilities to no one except the camera.)

The other thing of note is how oddly edgy Nagumo got by the end of the episode. While the suddenly violent, kill-or-be-killed attitude was obviously spurred from his will to survive, he doesn’t even look or sound like the same character by the end of the episode (not just because eating monster meat gave him white hair, either.) The change just seemed very sudden, when in the light novel, things were probably paced a little more properly over the days Nagumo had been stuck there.

Aside from this, though? The plot is easy to digest (pun intended) and easy to catch onto. The world mechanics are easy to understand, and also easy to love for D&D fans. Seriously — this show is pretty much D&D: the anime. The fear of survival easily sets in with the viewer once Nagumo has his arm ripped off. This is clearly a show that isn’t gonna hold back.

Hopefully, the pacing issues don’t continue, because the amount of “showing” the narrative has is refreshing (even though it has quite a bit of exposition, too.) This has the potential to be something really great — because the story itself already has a great setup.