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

Double, double, toil and trouble. Learn to make potions, but they’ll burst your bubble.

Overview (Spoilers)

Satou and his harem-mobile is still on the road, this time in regions with actual towns! Needing a bit of time away from the gaggle of girls, he steps out to the nearest tavern. He uses his considerable wealth to end what could have been a brawl by buying everyone drinks. This moves the waitress to show him the other business the tavern has… a brothel. When he returns to the wagon the next morning, he’s met with a bunch of angry ladies. They  return to their travels, but they run into a scheezy nobleman who broke a peasants arm for getting in his way. Satou uses one of his stock of healing potions to heal the merchant, to Arisa’s objections. If he hands them out like candy, they won’t have any when they need them. This inspires him to start learning how to make potions and magic tools. Though it all starts off pretty basic, he uses his power to level it up to get pretty good. Only issue with this is that the potions he creates will spoil unless kept in a special bottle. He heads in to town to buy some. The nasty nobleman comes out of the potion shop just as Satou and Liza go in. It appears he bought out all the bottles of that type, and all the shopkeeper only has scrolls available. The price for these scrolls is a bit on the legally gray side, so he returns under cover of night to gain access to these useful spells. But why?

One aspect that worries him about this region is the number of patches that are covered with the fog of war. Not wanting to worry the girls, he heads in to map them out surreptitiously. As soon as he enters one of these zones, called the Forest of Illusions, he is beset with animated armors and a witch’s apprentice. He tries to explain he means no harm but ultimately has to defend himself. The witch arrives, but not to fight him. She sees the bell at his hip and recognizes him as a friend of the Bolinar Elves. That makes him welcome there. The witch and her apprentice have been hard at work making a slew of three hundred potions to pay off a viscount for providing them with protection from brigands. In exchange for teaching him how to make the potion, the witch asks him to take a letter to a nearby forest giant. The next day, he attempts to acquire the bottles in another way, but something is wrong. The apprentice is riding hard to the town and is being chased by some mean types. Though the gang tries to defend her, the apprentice ends up wrecking her cart, which is full of the shipment. Half of it is gone, and the viscount is not being forgiving. Neither is the scummy nobleman, who is his henchman. Satou figures out the truth: The viscount doesn’t want the deal to go through, because he’s planning to take over the forest for himself. With the special bottles all bought out, how can they possibly make more?

Skills Learned: Formulation, Transmutation, Magic-Tool Crafting, Metalworking, Magic Manipulation, Overload, Wind Magic, Presence Perception, Invisibility, Concealment, Tiptoe, Tracking, Zoology, Earth Magic, Earth Resistance,

Spells Learned: Blow, Sonar, Signal, Shield

Titles Acquired: Moneybags, Doctor, Alchemist, Magic-Tool Designing, Magic-Tool Engineer, Agent of Destruction, Forest Seeker, Unseen Pursuer, Proud Dog-Tamer, Cool-Headed Negotiator

Our Take

A nice rise in activity from last week’s episode, I feel like this may be too little, too late to be a compelling plot. This series has spent more than the necessary amount of time merely building up the main character’s harem for no purpose. Now, it’s bringing up a plot about corrupt politicians, when the next episode is the finale. Is that really how you plan to end the story? It isn’t even that inspiring. The Forest of Illusions feels like any other cut-and-paste fantasy setting, and the land plot is one you’ve seen a hundred times. This feels like a story arc that should have happened long ago to build up Satou and the others, leaving the action of the Cradle as a conclusion of the series.

The main character has become a groaner for me. Yes, he tries to play himself off as a good guy. He wants to look like he’s the pure-hearted hero. He isn’t. We’ve discussed in previous episodes how he isn’t really a gentleman. However, what we see here is that while he complains a bit about the

I’ve also reached a conclusion about the small notifications we get about his skills and titles. While it was nifty early on, the writers have laid on it like a crutch. Rather than try to make each episode loaded with rewards through character development, they pump these achievements into the episode. Rather than have things happen, they fill whatever space doesn’t have inner monologues with montages with achievements. It’s filler, especially since much of these notices have no real content to them. If this were a video game, the creators must have coded achievements into every frivolous thing. I’m surprised he didn’t get one at the start of the show for breathing! a good chunk of the skills he “learned” in this episode were ones he already used several times. They’re sloppy and meaningless, where they could have been used to highlight important events or make certain actions far more dramatic. As it was, I found myself getting a bit frustrated with my commitment to documenting those acquisitions because they were flying at me so fast in this episode, I found myself having to stop the stream over and over in order to keep up.

And Zoology? Seriously? Did you throw that one in just so you could have a picture of him with a squirrel?

Though the episode had some beautiful moments, these were primarily done with automated filters, and not real animation. They feel cheap, and end up ruining the moment. The little bit of action we get isn’t poorly animated, but they were short and without much of a payoff. The voice acting didn’t give me much to enjoy either.