Quality Assurance in Another World

Episode 11

Well, that Gaydle subplot didn't amount to much, did it? Bringing down the poor kid before he could do any more damage was a conflict that nearly brought Haga and Akira to blows but the episode doesn't even do anything with that potentially juicy friction before having the party head off to their next checkpoint. The drama between Haga and Akira is dropped entirely once Gaydle's village is in the rearview mirror. We skip over an entire month of the group just trudging along to meet Akira's companions in Sai. Outside of the cheap attempts at pathos, it seems the only real point of this divergence was to hammer home the same points about the dangers of using debug mode and to knock out Nikola so we could give our heroes a new goal to work towards.

The stuff in Sai isn't all that much more compelling, either, since the rest of the episode functions mostly as a table setting for whatever this Alba storyline is going to be doing for the final stretch of the season. The new debuggers we meet from Akira's company are…fine, though they don't make much of an impression beyond the strangely intense makeout scene that we get between Akira and her boyfriend. Come to think of it, when you combine that with the uncharacteristically brazen fanservice shots of Akira in the mixed-gender baths later on, this whole episode cranks up the Horny Dial a lot higher than is usual for Quality Assurance. Odd.

The most interesting development of this episode by far is the reveal that Sai's resident god-mage, Alba, is Tesla's younger “brother” who serves as another of the regional A.I. directors for this game. The notion that there are a whole bunch of freaky computer deities like Tesla for our heroes to deal with is something I wish had been established sooner and explored even more. There's no doubt that it would end up feeling a lot more satisfying than whatever that story about Gaydle and the giants was supposed to be.

Unfortunately, unless I spent an undue amount of time complaining about how cheap Quality Assurance continues to look, I don't have much more to say about “Alba”, whether we're talking about the character or the episode itself. At this point, I just hope that the series hasn't wasted all of its best ideas already, since it would be a shame for the season to peter out with a dull whimper of a finale.

Rating:

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.