English Dub Review: I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level: “A Minstrel Came to Town”

 

Overview: When the minstrel, Kuku (Tara Sands) comes to town to unleash her hard metal music much to listeners’ distaste, Flatorte (Amber Lee Connors) along with Azusa (Skyler Davenport) and the gang help the struggling musician in the hopes that they can reinvigorate her confidence and find her sound.  

Our Take: A new family member temporarily joins Azusa and her little family in that of traveling grunge musician, Kuku. With that, Killing Slimes delivers a very musically charged episode with not only her but most of the other cast performing their own little ditty. They can be a bit jarring only because the metal (from what I could understand) is performed in English but every other song is in Japanese. With that being said, each character’s own song is so charming, unique and eccentric to their personality that it can be overlooked. But as for the actual character herself, she immediately charmed the pants off of me (not in a dirty way). Tara Sands screams Kuku to life, both literally and figuratively, with dogged enthusiasm for metal and music but also her doubts and insecurities about her future in a musical career as a whole.  

Flatorte, surprisingly has a key role, acting as a unbeknownst mentor of the metal jams to Kuku throughout that was unexpected but very well executed. That is mostly down to how the episode not only establishes a meaningful mentor and student relationship with genuinely heartwarming moments between the two as Flatorte strives to keep her spirits up. It is also nice how the show does not seem to sideline the main cast and actually utilizes the entirety of them even putting Flatorte as one of the leading ladies. Besides that, this is one of, if not the most, compelling character drama so far because of how much more grounded it is. It is also the funniest it’s been with the good comedic timing with sound effects and hilariously quirky character facial expressions. The series as a whole would be so much stronger if it reflected the well executed heart and humor like that of this episode. 

“A Minstrel Comes to Town” is the strongest episode of the fantasy comedy by far. Led by a memorable new character in Kuku alongside some catchy songs, moving character moments along with utilization of the other cast members in the forefront and supplemented with more amazing humor that is at its best.