English Dub Review: Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?, “Didn’t I Say Surprises Should Be Kept Secret?!”

 

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Jealous of how Mile’s old friends celebrated her birthday, Reina decides to throw her own party for Mile.

Our Take

The Crimson Vow are holding a birthday party for their innkeeper friend when Mile reminisces about a party her old friends threw for her. Upon hearing Mile recount this, Reina gets very jealous of them and feels the need to show them up. 

There seems to be no good reason why Reina feels this way. The only natural reason I could think of for her to be this jealous is if Reina deeply loved Mile, which she does not. Their friendship is fairly solid at this point, but not to point of near-obsession. Otherwise, this is just Reina being incredibly pedantic for absolutely no reason. And unfortunately, this is the plot of this week’s episode.

Reina wants to contrive an occasion to celebrate so that she can show up Mile’s old friends. Pauline wracks her brain and discovers the 200-day anniversary of the formation of the Crimson Vow is coming up soon. Thus, the three girls take on quests to raise money for the party and the present. 

However, they decide not to take Mile with them on any of these quests and explicitly exclude her without telling her why. Their rationale is that they want to fund this party without Mile because they really want it to come entirely from them. This seems like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. I’m almost certain they already split some of the money from their quests for personal funds. And if not, why don’t they just skim off the top of the money from these quests and give that to Mile?  

Unfortunately, the three girls do a very poor job of blowing Mile off and Mile interprets her exclusion from these quests as ostracization. Suspicious of why they’re doing this, Mile believes it might be because of all the horrible things she does to them why they’re asleep. These misdeeds are intended to be funny, but instead, come off as needlessly asinine and mean-spirited. 

Her suspicions devolve into delusions, as she starts thinking that they might be kicking her out of the group because her breasts are too small. These delusions even lead to her strong-arming their innkeeper friend for information. She tries to give an excuse but ends up awkwardly blowing Mile off like the other three did, sending Mile into a further spiral of pointless despair. 

Now to the point where she’s crafting figurines of the other three girls making shocked and regretful faces, Mile tries to earnestly think of honest reasons why they would blow her off like this. Sincere as this moment tries to be, it does not work because it comes at the tail end of a long line of stupidity. Reina and the others also try to have a sincere moment of their own, but the result is similar; their obvious selfishness does not justify their indignant behavior.

The three girls get into trouble fighting a monster when Mile somehow senses they’re in danger and goes to rescue them. And by “somehow,” I mean for no visible or discernible reason. But I won’t question it because it means the episode ends faster. 

Thus, Mile finds out they were doing quests without her and now the other three are facing down the barrel of the gun. They relent, telling her why they did what they did, and everything resolves itself exactly as one would expect. Except for the part where Mile absent-mindedly self-destructs by telling the other three all the bad things she does to them while they’re asleep. A shallow plot capped off by a shallow joke. 

After the poor showing from last week’s episode, this anime really didn’t have to do much to improve its standing. But, with this week’s blisteringly unoriginal results, this show has clearly discovered that it can drag the quality down even lower. There are only two episodes left; will they take us on an upward trajectory, or will they bring us closer to rock bottom?