English Dub Review: ISEKAI QUARTET “Come Together! Quartet”

Put ’em all together and what do we get?

Overview

Kazuma, Aqua, Megumin, and Darkness from KonoSuba discover a mysterious button that manifests itself from out of nowhere in their home. Megumin presses it, and the characters are transported somewhere. Meanwhile, Ainz Ooal Gown and his Overlord gang keep hearing about this mysterious button appearing in random places. One button coincidentally appears right under Ainz as he sits — activating it and transporting the cast. The KonoSuba and Overlord characters are teleported to a high school, where they meet Tanya from The Saga of Tanya the Evil, who had the button appear in her hand during military testing. They all sit in a classroom when Subaru and his Re:Zero gals show up late. Each main character has their own internal/external monologue about the other characters in the room, who speculate about why they’re there.

The mysterious principal seems to be orchestrating their out-of-canon high school experience, for reasons not yet known.

Our Take

What happens when strategic marketing meets anime? Well, this. ISEKAI QUARTET is a crossover between several light novel series published by the Kadokawa Corporation. Main characters from KonoSuba, Overlord, The Saga of Tanya the Evil, and Re:ZeroStarting Life in Another World have combined together to create a chibi comedy series featuring the AU nobody ever wanted: “What if these characters…went to high school together?”

Did anybody ask for it? No. Did we get it anyway? Yes. Yes we did.

It’s easy to see why combining four anime series into one would be profitable, but it’s also easy to see why some people would love it and some would hate it. Fans of any of these series could be delighted over the prospect of these characters meeting one another and being silly. Fans could also hate the “randomness” of the series and condemn the mere premise of having these casts be in the same room. At the end of the day, though, it’s only fair to measure ISEKAI QUARTET as its own animal, and not based on the quality of the series which make it up.

Starting with the animation, so far…not good. Just because something is chibi in style doesn’t automatically mean the animation quality has to be low, but ISEKAI QUARTET seems to have missed that memo. The voice acting is truly the element that carries all aspects of the show so far — comically and narratively, it just wouldn’t be engaging without it. There are times when the voices can be grating, though, and even hard to understand. Aqua’s voice lines, for instance, are so loud and speedy that it’s hard to understand what on earth she’s saying half of the time.

The dub itself isn’t even fully dubbed or subbed. There are no English translations for the opening or ending credits of the show, and even speaking parts in the beginning theme haven’t been bothered to be at least subbed.

ISEKAI QUARTET isn’t trying to be a masterpiece. It’s simply trying to be a fun thing for fans to enjoy. In that sense, it’s true to itself, but hopefully there’ll be an actual narrative (and actual comedy) soon to come.