English Dub Review: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! “I Had Fun Over Summer Vacation…”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
It’s summer vacation!…and that’s the plot, just the characters enjoying their break from school and everyone trying to find time with Catarina while having her be completely dense as to their feelings.

OUR TAKE

I guess the plot being about a vacation apparently meant the writing team thought they could do the same because there’s not really much of a story to speak of here. I do understand that it can be refreshing to have some downtime episodes here and there, but this isn’t exactly a series that was very serious to begin with. And even then, there are so many other ways to utilize a break from the main plot, like building up character relationships that aren’t given as much focus. And it turns out the reason that this episode feels like empty calories is because it is actually filler! One would wonder why we would need filler episodes in a twelve episode season with so much material to adapt, but apparently this first season is only covering the first two books, which leaves a lot of space…somehow. Didn’t seem to be a problem for Goblin Slayer, but alright.

But okay, let’s try and pick this episode apart as best we can and find something substantial to talk about. We do notably get more focus on the Ascart siblings than we have in the last couple of episodes, which is a bit refreshing since they have a lot of potential story worth digging into. Well, them and Prince Alan, who looks to be getting left behind in the dust in terms of screentime. Also should be worth mentioning that there’s been a couple mentions of Sophia, Nicol’s sister, having a couple parallels with moments Catarina has had in her previous life, which I’m guessing is happening too much to be a coincidence. Where that’s headed and what it means for the romantic endgame of the story is…hard to say right now. Still, we have a whole other half of the series to go, so I can’t imagine this is the last we’ve seen of it.

And since we’re AT that half way point, I should probably give my impressions of this half as a whole. As I’ve probably stated before, the premise is plenty novel on its own, but we’ve spent a bit too much time on the prologue and then spun our wheels when getting to the main story. I can only hope the other six episodes prove to show some considerable progress to something satisfying. Still, I can’t in good consciousness say that this is a BAD show by any means, just that it doesn’t seem to know how to hit the lofty goals it seems to set for itself. Let’s see what the back half has in mind.