Quality Assurance in Another World

Episode 10

I have to say, one of the things I've missed the most in Quality Assurance in Another World is the cool and creative monster designs. Those weird-ass dragons from the premiere were genuinely creepy, despite being so doofy looking, and their impact has stuck with me ever since. The show hasn't bothered to do anything quite so interesting in the meantime, and the giants connected to Gaydle's backstory are a perfect example of the show failing to live up to its potential. They're your everyday big boys in loincloths; there's nothing special about them at all. Sure, there's something to be said about the uncanny effect of Gaydle being a giant man with the voice and mind of a tiny boy, and the fact that the villagers feel the need to kill the kid before he can cause any more damage with his freakish strength. Still, I can't help but wish there was something more to chew on.

“Gaydle and Yamanaka” is still a pretty solid episode. Akira remains a great addition to the cast, especially with how nonchalantly she approaches the “brutally murder a traumatized mutant child” part of the gang's latest quest. It makes sense, too, because this is still supposed to be a game, so it's not like Akira is a sociopath for wanting to engage with a battle-oriented RPG on its mechanical level. Unless, of course, these characters really are meant to be sentient and self-aware artificial beings who can fear death just as authentically as any living human — in that case, there's no end to the horrifying crimes that have been committed in this horrifying hell pit of virtual murder!

Then again, debug mode can reverse the deaths of the NPC characters who only sometimes seem able to respawn on their own, so maybe death means nothing for these characters? …good lord, the rules of this world can be confusing. The point is for as much fun as it can be for Quality Assurance to riff on all of the gaming in-jokes, it's nice for the party to have at least one character that can provide some friction by her being good at killing stuff like a true RPG hero is expected to be.

This episode also brings back the inherent threat of abusing debugging power with Yamanaka's side of the story. If nothing else, it is funny that the story could have gone with the angle of Yamanaka being an elusive meddler who is playing god with his dark debugging experiments, only for the show to reveal that Yamanaka is genuinely just a well-meaning idiot who didn't think of the consequences of messing with Gaydle's destiny before he got himself stuck as a ghost trapped in the limbo of free-camera mode. It also means that the Gaydle storyline feels a lot more dramatic since it boils down to Haga and Co. cleaning up after another dummy's mess. I can also appreciate how it brings the story back to those unintended consequences that Haga is always warning about.

At this point, I have to assume that getting the debuggers stuck in the game like this wasn't even an accident, because giving a bunch of tech nerds access to impossibly dangerous and godlike powers within this virtual world feels like the perfect setup for a nefarious social experiment. Whether or not Quality Assurance will go down that road remains to be seen, but I'd sure love it if we got some hint about what any of this is building up to before the season is over.

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Quality Assurance in Another World is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.