English Dub Review: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime “The Storm Dragon, Veldora”

Slimy is my middle name!

Overview (Spoilers!)

(NOTE: I refer to Great Sage using “they/them” pronouns here because, according to the wiki, slime monsters are androgynous. Go figure.)

Bombs rain down on a village, and a young girl has magically transported away.

In modern-day Tokyo, Satoru Mikami is an average 37-year-old man, although he’s a virgin and has never had a girlfriend. His friend Tamura introduces him to his new wife, Miho. Suddenly, a man with a knife hurtles down the street. Pushing Tamura out of the way, Satoru gets stabbed. As he dies, he complains about his condition, and a mysterious voice lists out skills that would render him immune to temperatures, physical attacks, blood loss, and pain. Satoru asks Tamura to wipe his hard drive, and the voice grants him electric current resistance and paralysis resistance as well. Satoru vows to “go on the prowl” and hunt down ladies in his next life, and the voice gives him the skills “predator” and “great sage.”

Transported to avoid, Satoru can’t speak or see. A flower dissolves when Satoru passes over it, because Satoru has been reincarnated as a slime! The slime wonders where that plant went, and the voice from earlier answers. Using the “predator” ability, the slime can ingest objects, analyze them, and gain their abilities, Kirby-style. This plant is an ingredient in healing salves, so Great Sage makes a ton of healing potions and gobbles up some Magistone Ore too while they’re at it. They accidentally fall into a lake, but they’re able to escape by drinking water and gaining propulsion abilities. They can’t feel pain, but they can take damage—fortunately, they can regenerate their body.

A dark shape hears Great Sage’s thoughts and offers to grant them vision if they promise to visit sometime. Great Sage is now able to see that the shape is Veldora, the Storm Dragon. Veldora explains that several “other-worlders” live here—humans who gained special abilities when they were transported to this world. However, no one else got here by reincarnation.

Great Sage wants to find these other-worlders, but Veldora begs them to stay. He explains that he once “sort of accidentally burned down an entire town,” after which a powerful hero defeated him and sealed him in this cave. Veldora has been bored here for 300 years, so Great Sage offers to be his friend.

Our Take

This show is hilarious.

I wasn’t sure about it during the opening scene. Satoru is so average that he just didn’t seem like he’d be an interesting protag. As intriguing as it is that an anime would feature a 37-year-old at the helm—I can count on one hand the anime I’ve watched that don’t have school-aged protagonists—the few personality traits that Satoru shows as a human don’t do much to endear him to me. His constant whining about how he doesn’t have a girlfriend is pretty annoying without more details—How is it that this normal guy has never even had a casual fling with a girl? What is it about him that repulses every woman he meets? I have a hard time believing he’s a perfectly normal man who just got unlucky. He must either be really shy and terrible at putting himself out there or a huge asshole. We learn that he makes kind of off-color joke, but even that doesn’t make me like him—his admission to having “crapped his pants” in elementary school is cringe-worthy potty humor. The request to delete is his hard drive is a bit cliché, considering we never find out why exactly Satoru is so adamant about that (Please show us! Even if it’s just particularly weird porn, I want to know!). And his friends from work? Even blander.

But when Satoru gets stabbed—in a shocking twist that comes out of nowhere—the show finally begins to pick up steam. The voice that dramatically misunderstands Satoru’s complaints and converts them into skills for his next life is both a fascinating premise and an amusing piece of dramatic irony. The visuals that follow are a wonderfully disorienting mix of psychedelic and electronic. Colorful splashes of light stand out against a black void. Vibrant galaxy prints appear behind Satoru’s eyes. Great Sage can’t see the plant they’ve eaten, so they visualize it as crayon-like child’s illustration of a flower. Great Sage can’t speak, and as they try, they imagine the peaks and valleys of an audio file shattering and breaking. And when they finally realize that they’re a slime now, their new slime body is depicted in hyper-realistic glory.

When it comes to dub work, Jason Liebrecht’s Satoru is boring to an extreme (perhaps on purpose), but Mallorie Rodak kills it as Great Sage. The utter delight in the slime’s voice as they leap around the cave exclaiming things like “So freaking bored!” and “Awesomesauce!” makes me share in their fun too. The scene is so funny and relatable—after all, if I found out that I’d been reincarnated as a magical slime, I’d probably eat everything in front of me and dick around with my new abilities for a while as well. And Chris Rager is equally funny as Veldora, the deep-voiced dragon who is surprisingly tsundere and reluctant to admit just how much he wants friends. I love that his biggest concern after 300 years of imprisonment is just boredom. Their whole interaction is pretty hilarious, and it’s nice character development to see Great Sage realize that not having a girlfriend isn’t so bad compared to eternal social isolation.

But yeah, this episode is great. It’s mostly exposition, and yet that information unfolds in clever, creative, world-appropriate ways that never feel boring. I love the video-game-like aspects of this world, the humorous dialogue, and even the way Great Sage moves (sometimes their body forms the shape of question marks or exclamation points, and it’s adorable). As Tamura dumps the Mechasoft Doors computer into his bathtub, a disclaimer appears above his head, warning viewers not to try this at home. I’ll heed their advice on that, but I sure will be trying out episode two of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime!