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

Righto. MP-draining loli dryads. Didn’t find those in the Monster Manual.

Overview (Spoilers)

A shadowy figure has appeared in the Oddjob office. He demands the elf princess Mia, but Satou isn’t in the mood to acquiesce. The baddie unleashes a psychic fear wave, and even Arisa’s magic can’t completely hold it back. Satou turns on his fear resistance, and the fight begins. Well, in the same way as “professional wrestling” fight begins. The two posture and threaten, but between the villain’s shadowy tentacles and Satou’s laser gun, the two don’t actually do any damage to each other. Reading his name plaque, Satou remembers that this was the same name as the sorcerer hero from the play they watched before. Arisa begins charging up a magic blast, so Satou rushes in with martial arts to distract the lich. He barely manages to put up a defense to protect himself, and uses the momentary confusion to drag Mia into a shadow portal. Satou jumps in after her.

He finds himself in a black void, where his map doesn’t work. Through sheer force of will, he breaks his way out of it, and straight to the shadow monster man’s throne room. He’s shocked, and a bit annoyed, so he sends Satou outside of the building. Now, our hero has to fight he way through two-hundred floors of monsters. Don’t worry, this isn’t Sword Art Online. We skip right to whatever scenes involve females. He skips a large number of the floors by meeting up with dryads, and kissing them to give them MP. In return, they teleport him up a whole bunch of floors. He also fights a boss fight against three homonculi and a glass jaw golem. He knocks one of them out and kills the golem, but the other two escape. After another trip to the dryad’s he makes his way back to the boss’s chamber. Zen the skeleton man tells Satou that he has yet to earn the “Hero” title, and must fight a bunch of homonculi and golems before rescuing the princess. Can he possibly win against these odds?

Skills Learned: Shadow Magic, Shadow Magic Resistance.

Titles Earned: Dryad’s Victim

Our Take

Well, this episode took a nosedive in writing. Have you ever played round-robin writing? Where you write until you get stuck, then pass it off to the next person? It feels as if this episode was where it got passed off, and the new writer was a dungeon master who had just discovered he got special feelings for girls. We have introduced the villain and pulled the hero out to where an epic battle can happen, then pulled him out so we can show off a bunch of girls before the big fight. In fact, the dryads add nothing to this episode. They pad stuff out with more lolis, but add nothing to the narrative. It seems like maybe the first battle with the homonculi has some plot importance, but are tainted by the need to focus on the jiggle physics. Not even that much jiggle… Really, the whole story about the inside of this tower is a waste of my time.

Let’s add onto that a bunch of logical and continuity errors throughout. So, if you had a skill called “Fear Resistance”, and you spent a bunch of point to max it out, would you turn it off? Yet, that is the exact state we find Satou in. He has to actually turn on his Fear Resistance. Then, we get to the villain, and the way he talks about the “Hero” title, it’s as if he can view titles in the same way as Satou. But, he claims Satou doesn’t have the “Hero” title when a big deal was made about it just a few episodes ago. And, beyond that, he could simply produce that mystical Sacred Sword that only works for the hero as proof and skip all this rigmarole. Even if he was trying to protect his identity, the only person to know would be the guy he was about to impale.

Animation and voice acting were lackluster, especially when it came to those homonculi. The shots we were given suggested that we were going to get an eyeful of bouncing boobs. We just got shots of boobs. One bounce. Now, I’m not complaining because I’m disappointed my lecherous desires aren’t sated. My issue with this is that if you are going to spend camera time for these purposes, make it count. If I wanted static pictures of anime breasts with poorly spoken lines, there are already plenty of websites devoted to the subject. Do it better. If you can’t spend the budget to animate them properly, then don’t bother. The homonculi are supposed to sound robotic. As such, they are written with clunky, unnatural lines. Problem is, those same lines come off more moronic than robotic. The voice actress doesn’t do much better with them. She’s so blah, I couldn’t care less.