Quality Assurance in Another World

Episode 7

“The Boss” is an episode that has all of the ingredients to be a fine episode of Quality Assurance in Another World—and I'd say that it almost succeeds…though I still can't help but feel like the show is missing some key elements that would help it gel into something truly satisfying. The way Haga and Co. use game bugs to get out of sticky situations is still neat—and I appreciate the chemistry that our core party is developing—but this is just one of those anime that is struggling to add up to more than the sum of its uneven parts.

A lot of this comes back around to the show's middling production values coupled with its general lack of ambition regarding scope and scale. Here we have the group squaring off against an entire mob of nasty debuggers, which should make for their most dangerous adventure yet. Still, this final confrontation somehow ended up being the least thrilling part of the whole castle infiltration storyline. The conflict is mostly set in the boring main entrance area of the generic castle setting—and all of the Play Ing goons are too cocky and stupid to do anything except for spout lame villain cliches and occasionally take turns going around and attacking our heroes one at a time. Quality Assurance keeps insisting on how powerful and dangerous these mad debuggers are but they come across as threatening as a troupe of hammy community theater actors out on a day trip to the Renaissance Faire.

Their lack of personality does the Play Ing villains no favors. In addition to their completely anonymous character designs, every single one of them is written and performed as if the anime got confused and threw in a gang of those stock sociopathic school bully characters from every terrible high-school death game show that has been clogging backlogs for the last couple of decades. There is only one reason I even know Sakai and Kana's names: that's because of ANN's cast announcement article that I pinned to avoid referring to them as “Jackass and “Lady Jackass” for this entire review.

There are still some things to like here, though. Once again, despite the cheap-looking effects, I appreciated Haga's creative solution to deal with the baddies. Freezing them all in a failed loading void is appropriately grim for such an awful bunch—and the show even did a solid job of foreshadowing Haga's plan back when this mission first started. Also, Shacho is at least the kind of scumbag that could be interesting if Quality Assurance ever decides to do anything with him again. He's a douchebag, sure, but he seems like a human douchebag, what with the way he (kind of) apologizes to Amano for killing Lu and offers to team up with Haga. We need more characters like him in this series. Haga, Amano, and Nikola are a fun bunch. Still, if their only hope of salvation is finishing the storyline of this ridiculously buggy RPG, then it would benefit everyone involved (including us) if that story ended up being worth the time.

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.