English Dub Review: Death March to the Parallel Word Rhapsody “The Catastrophe That Started with a Death March”

This is what happens when your work/life balance is wonky.

Overview (Spoilers)

Ichiro Suzuki is an overworked programmer for a video game company. A recent resignation has put the whole team behind, and to complete the project on time, they’ve been having to work late nights. Sometimes, they’ve even had to sleep over in the studio. This is called a death march, and it sucks. This is all fine with Suzuki. He’s a complete loner and nobody loves him, so what does he have to do at home? He’s got two games he’s working with: Warworld and Freedom Fantasy Life. Both have a ton of bugs and aren’t ready to ship. One issue he’s run into is that many of the beta testers say it’s too hard at the beginning of the game for players who are new to MMORPGs. His solution, at least for now, is to have people gain a map and a trio of AOE spell items when they make their characters. They get a special achievement if they beat the initial area without using the items. His boss is pleased enough. Next problem is an item duplication glitch, and that’ll make any programmer nutty. He’s working into the wee hours and decides to get some sleep on the floor.

Courtesy: Funimation

He is no longer in Kansas, Toto. At first, he thinks he’s dreaming. However, this dream is replicating a whole bunch of aspects of the MMORPGs he’s been working on. Even down to the bugs! That’s when he spots a bunch of high-level enemies running right for him. Worse yet, a bug made it so he spawned without gear! Fortunately, it seems this game implemented his fix, granting him three Meteor Rains. With a single one, he wipes out the enemies, leaving a lone survivor with minimal HP. With a thrown sword, he kills the baddy. A low-level player killing that many high-level enemies in one shot are certainly game breaking, especially since he still gets all the XP. Next time he looks at his stats, he’s level 310! He’s also got a ton of loot. Using his map, he heads to the nearest settlement. Unfortunately, a wyvern he scared away is now heading straight for them! He runs into their rescue. Most of the soldiers and mages are only level 7, and only the mages can even phase it. One high-level soldier, Zena, knocks it flying. However, she ends up launching herself in the process. Suzuki, now fully wrapped in his player persona of Satou, instinctively leaps to catch the beautiful warrior maiden.

Skills Learned: Shiga Language Skills, and a whole bunch they didn’t translate.

Spells Learned: Meteor Shower

Titles Acquired: Demon Slayer, Scalekin Slayer, Calamity of Scalekin, Natural Enemy of Scalekin, Wyvern Slayer, Dragon Slayer [Lesser], Dragon Slayer [Infant Dragon], Dragon Slayer [Mature Dragon], Dragon Slayer [Elder Dragon], Dragon Slayer [Many Different Named Dragons], Natural Enemy of Dragonkin, God Slayer

Our Take

Let me start by saying I love shows about MMORPGs. Especially ones where the characters are stuck in them. I dug.Hack, and the first half of Sword Art Online season one was a delight to me. In fact, I could have watched an entire series of the story of that half season. Oh, wait. There’s Log Horizon! The show my friend refuses to watch with me because the main character and I think alike and I spoil the plot for him. I like that show a lot. So, here we have a new show, and it seems like a blend of SAO and Knights & Magic. I enjoyed both shows for different reasons, and I hope we get to see those aspects here. However, I am already seeing a few issues of each show replicated in Death March. For one, most of this episode is Satou’s inner monologue. With the exception of the battle scene in the middle and end, he spends the rest of the time thinking. Thinking about his crappy life, thinking about the game mechanics, thinking about the environments. All that time with nothing really happening. This is one of the problems that Knights & Magic had. Most of the series was just talking about the technological advancements they were making and wasn’t enough actually happening. However, I don’t think the rest of the series will be like this. This episode is the introduction, not only to Satou, but to the universe he’s in, which seems to be a fusion of the two games he was working on. Because of that, we have a lot of ground to cover in the first episode.

The other issue I can see will likely haunt us is one from SAO: Marty Stu is OP. Our main character, by a contrivance of plot, is granted an insane level at the outset, and now blunders through this new world with god mode active. For comparison, he is now just under three times the level cap of World of Warcraft. That is way overpowered by someone just starting out.  We are going to be stuck with this guy for the rest of the series, and he’s already beyond epic. Nothing will be able to touch him for a long time, and that makes it a bit difficult to give us a likely challenge. Take a quick look at the situation that brought him to this state, though. The game tosses a boatload of high-level enemies at a starting player who has no gear. N00Bs complained, so his solution was to give them a trio of nuclear bombs. Another solution? Switch those enemies out for more appropriate enemies, perhaps? I don’t know, I’m not a professional game designer, but that seems like the more obvious solution. Although this was a bit more subtle than other shows have been about their plot railroads, this is still pretty apparent that the game’s bugs were created by the writer specifically to give the main character INFINITE POWER.

On a more technical note, this anime is almost on the level of SAO and Log Horizon in its visuals. It’s pretty, and the characters are well animated. We are given a bunch of different environments to look at, at least for brief bursts as Satou zips through them. All the mook soldiers and lizardmen we see are done with CG, and they are at least good enough to be believable as game assets. However, with the actual characters and the environments being hand-drawn, these CG mooks are a bit out of place. The voice acting is just fine for now. We really only have a handful of characters. Justin Briner is the voice for Satou, and he did solid work during the episode. He’d have to since he was the only voice we heard for most of it. He actually made the real world Suzuki sound older than Satou, and gave both sides of the character a good amount of emotive detail. In fact, the only note I have for the ADR team is more of a minor thing and has nothing to do with the voices. I wish they had gone in and translated all the tooltip popups that litter the screen. He jumps over a river, and we get a tooltip. Was that talking about the environment, or did he use a skill? I have no clue. Because of that, the popups are largely useless to the English audience. I know that covering over the tooltips with English text would be a lot of work, and is a slippery slope into the infamous territory of Dragon Ball Z‘s “HFIL” edit. However, we could have done just as easily with a subtitle, or a note just under the popup in English.

Score

Summary

This show has a good amount of promise. But, with that also comes some glaring downfalls from other shows of its ilk. I want to believe. Until then, it gets seven Meteor Rains out of ten.

7/10