English Dub Review: I’m Standing on a Million Lives “This City I Hate So Much”

Yotsuya stumbles upon a log point that brings with it a past conversation between Shindō and Hakozaki. A revelation is brought to light that his crush, Shindō, would date someone who happens to have the exact same first name as him. Without being outright revealed, both hilarity and the beginning of an ongoing plot thread ensue as Yūsuke momentarily scrambles to figure out who she was talking about. Nice props to the video game inspired dialogue HUDs that appear during the girls’ past conversation and Yusuke’s amusing yet meta reference to a common anime trope that mirrors his current situation.                           

Stabbing his way through mindless droves and raising his rank at an increasingly faster rate during his solo training, a monotonous sequence/common series of animation stills of goblin slaying ensues that pales in comparison to the opening impact of the first episode with it’s suburb animation and visual aesthetic. It is layered with quick flashback sequences that painfully remind him of how alienated he felt by other kids when first moving to Tokyo. While Shindō  and Hakozuki look towards the future, to their careers, Yotsuya simply wants to keep the promise he made to his old childhood friends back at his small hometown (not unlike the one he’s trying to protect from the troll). These memories serve to lay the foundation for the meatier ones that later ensue and will act as the catalyst for Yotsuya’s further development. Fortunately, the entire sequence also happens to be a short-lived one which plays in its favor as it quickly transitions to the main conflict of this particular chapter. 

As he discovers the town in shambles, Yotsuya learns about Hakozuki’s frail physical condition and requirement of expensive medicine just to cope with it. Because she can’t do much extraneous activity as a result, she’s felt like a burden her entire life to those around her, especially her parents and most recently her friends. Luckily enough, her sickly state doesn’t apply to that of the new world but even so her lack of ability causes her to suffer and feel completely useless to her new companions. But even with all that, she wants to do everything in her power and stop at nothing to aid her friends. Like our protagonist self-awarely notices, one can’t help but sympathize for the precarious position of Hakozaki’s health. Yotsuya watches Hakozaki’s death at the hands of the troll that murdered Shindō previously all through yet another log point and dialogue HUD sequence. While they are very creative and uniquely in-line with the world (and also probably utilized because they are easy enough to animate), hopefully they won’t be relied upon as a crutch either. This would allow for more variety in how the communication of key exposition is executed. Inspired by her overwhelming strength and recollecting how he risked life for his past friends, he realizes must stop being selfish and put others first just like he did so many years ago.

After managing to level up and gain the new role of chef during his fight with the troll, Yūsuke frees his friends from the trolls’s stomach and takes the fight to the frog-hopping beast. While it seems that yet again Yotsuya got the short end of the stick in the job lottery, interestingly, it provides very useful assets. As the show progresses, the diversity and vast amount of abilities he gains will no doubt play a critical role in how he combats enemies and problems. It will be very intriguing to see how he uses the new powers he gains in tandem with his pre-existing ones as they are added to his repertoire. This episode also does a great job of showcasing his clever decision making skills by taking a seemingly useless light wind attack from Shindō and turning it into the finishing blow needed to kill the behemoth and complete their quest. Granting his wish for completing the quest, Yūsuke and his friends learn that they were chosen for this quest by people that they know very well. Themselves. The plot thickens as does the relationship of these three friends and their future.