English Dub Review: Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody “Deeply Held Attachment That Started with a Death March”

Dude, Satou. You don’t need any more women.

Overview (With Spoilers)

Satou arrives at the Undead King Zen’s chambers at the top of a two-hundred floor dungeon. Again. Before he can challenge the lich, though, he has to beat seven homonculi and three giant golems. Did we mention at all that Satou is OP, and this isn’t much of a challenge? He destroys the golems with no trouble at all, even with all their buffs. The homonculi are far more agile, however, and have intelligence enough to fight cooperatively. He still manages to beat them, stopping just short of killing them. As he does, he tries to convince them that they shouldn’t be fighting for a man who views them as pawns. They reveal that they aren’t the pawns, he is. Their master has a wish, and if they are to die, they would like Satou to grant that wish. Well, that sounds like the beginning of a monologue right there, doesn’t it? The “evil” lich reveals his sad sob story. He lived one life that was utter garbage, and was reborn into this universe as the sorcerer Zen. He fell in love, but a nobleman wanted the same woman. So, he framed Zen for a crime and… Wait… This is Sweeny Todd! One slight difference. Zen got executed for his false crime. As did the rest of his family. Even the woman he loved was killed. But, the “gods” of that universe raised him back up as an undead skeleton to exact his revenge. He then turned the corpses of his family into zombies, and visited hell itself on the nobleman. Unfortunately, being such a powerful undead, he himself could not die by his own hand. Only with the Holy Sword Gjallerhorn in the hands of a hero could he die. So, he hands the sword over to Satou and our hero gets his stab on. Strangely, two giggling blobs of darkness float away from his corpse. Of course, no giant dungeon with high-level boss would be complete without the whole thing coming down on their heads. Despite Mia being an elf, she can’t disable the self destruct, but there is an emergency escape teleport built into the chamber. Satou assembles the homonculi and Mia together in the circle and sends them off, but there’s one other thing he has to do. Homonculus No. 7 is still down on level eighty where he left her. He sends the girls off and runs down to rescue her. Using the teleporter nymph, the two escape to just outside the building.

Unfortunately, the method of self-destructing being used by the Cradle is going to cause other problems. You see, it’s converting all of the 2000+ foot tree’s mass into loose salt. As all that salt rushes out, it forms a giant, solid tidal wave. You get hit by that, you’re dead. Satou gets running, carrying No. 7 on his shoulder, but the wave is gaining. That’s when he comes up with a plan. Ahead of him is a lake. Using fire magic, he throws the water up to intercept the salt. It’s super effective, but he needs to throw up a lot of water, so the amount of fireballs her throws is enough to give him the Master of Hellfire title. After surviving the ordeal, he reunites with the others. The homonculi decide since he went out of his way to save them, and they don’t have a master anymore, that he is their new master. That’s right, he now has a grand total of thirteen slave girls AND a girlfriend. Oh, and a princess escort quest, so there’s that. Fortunately, seven of the homonculi have decided they are going on their own to bury Zen’s wedding ring in his wife’s grave, so they aren’t a part of this quest. Before he leaves, Satou heads off to give Zena the earrings he bought for her a while back. However, her brother just inherited control of the family, and she needs to stick in town until spring. So, while everyone is off to take Mia home, she promises to join them as soon as she can. We still have three episodes left people, so get ready for another mini-arc!

Skills Learned: Sense Danger, Weapon Destruction, Sword Catching, Off-Road Running, Water Striding

Titles Acquired: Undead King Slayer, Cradle Explorer, Pyromancer, Master of Hellfire, Conqueror of Despair, Survivor, Friend of the Elves

Our Take

This show doesn’t know what they’re doing. While it markets itself as a iyashikei (calming) slice-of-life with the theme of an isekai (alternate world). However, it also tries on occasion to play out the action of its poorly defined isekai setting. It rarely does so properly. The biggest problem with this is that our main character is overpowered in the extreme. His only limits at current are his limited spell list. That it. He currently possesses several legendary weapons that he doesn’t use and has maxed out more skills than most people knew existed. And, where we already had hints of a harem anime in the slaves that he had, we are now left with a situation where he has a harem larger than most actual harems. Like his weapons, he isn’t interested in any of them, opting instead for the girl that is a member of the nobility. So, is it an iyashikei? An isekai? A fantasy? A harem anime? Nope. It isn’t really any of them. Everybody in this production needed to have a long sit down to decide what the original story was trying to get across and focus on that.

A bunch of the plot elements from this episode comes from the bits and bobs dropped throughout the last few. I say dropped. More like laid at the feet of neon signs. The scenes had little narrative purpose for the events going on, and when brought into play in this episode, there wasn’t much of a purpose behind them. Instead, they felt like they had been left there to do something with, then shoehorned in because the writers couldn’t figure out a better way to use them. An entire scene was devoted a couple of episodes ago to explaining that water expands into steam when it gets hot. How was it used here? So he could think to blast water up to stop the wall of salt. Thing is, with all those fireballs he was shooting, he could have stopped the salt wave directly, so the whole thing was moot. After that, another scene was devoted to characters handing him a bag full of seeds. That scene had been set up by a scene in the episode before, where he gave them food so they would hunt him down in the middle of the woods to give him seeds. What do these seeds do? They give him the passage from floor eighty to the entrance. However, the nymph still needed to slurp up his MP, so what was the point? And what is the point of taking his MP? Even after he lost most of it, he still had enough MP to unleash high-powered fireballs like a living machine gun. No, the entire point was to have him kiss a loli, and see her flower bloom. No that wasn’t a euphemism, at least not from me. They may have meant it that way, though. The whole thing is an exercise in trying to be something, but not quite getting there. It wants to be relaxing but keeps throwing action sequences in there. It wants to have a layered plot that sprinkles hints throughout but is far too heavy-handed in its approach to those hints. It wants to have an interesting alternate world but wastes all its time with finding excuses to work on its underage fetishes.

This episode also highlights the rapidly degrading animation. There are shots with good animation, but they are horribly directed, and quickly snap to another shot. There are so many instances where characters were drawn without looking at the model sheets, anatomical references, or… the paper. In the early combat sequence, the homonculi get mutated from shot to shot to the point that they don’t even look human in some of them. Satou’s face gets beaten with a completely different ugly stick every time you look at him. So many shots look unfinished or downright bad. The best animation is often the wagon and horses. Those are CG. That’s bad. When the series started with common animation, it only has so far to fall. If it gets any worse, I could pay elementary schoolers to do better. The voice acting is hit or miss. David Wald played as the lich and puts a surprising amount of effort into his monologue. On the other hand, most of the girls sound robotic, like they are reading their lines in a vacuum, and with each line recorded separately. None of those lines flow properly.