Quality Assurance in Another World

Episode 8

It's a testament to how strong some of the core elements of Quality Assurance's story are that it can still manage to be engaging despite just how rough the whole product is. The animation here is some of the stiffest and least consistent that we've seen, and the pacing of the episode is decidedly languid, with the entire thing amounting to Haga and Nikola going on a shopping trip while Amano and Shacho go on a depressing trip to visit Luu's village. Even then, the episode managed to make me feel something that makes “Console Command” worth the time despite its faults.

If the episode has any “weak” link, it would probably be Amano's plotline, if only because it ends so predictably. It's not surprising that his Debugger Stone enables him to resurrect NPCs like Luu but having Luu not remember Amano is the most obvious tragic turn of developments imaginable. It's hard for me to explain why this particular story development still ended up working okay enough for me; I think it's because I simply respect the show's willingness to take Amano's character arc seriously enough to completely separate him from the crew and follow him on this side quest. There's a melancholy tone to the whole thing that sells Amano's sadness just enough for me to say, “Okay, sure, I'll go along with this.” It's no great masterpiece, but Quality Assurance is at least trying to tell a solid story within the bounds of its MMORPG trappings, even if it keeps making me ask a lot of questions about the consistent rules (or lack thereof) of this game.

Speaking of which, that's something that totally might have ended up souring me on Haga and Nikola's story. I was all about giving Nikola a proper Job Class, as it would greatly develop a co-leading lady who has mostly been operating on the sidelines since her excellent introduction. I get that the story can't necessarily make it too easy for our heroes. Still, I'm not clear how this NPC who has been possessed by an omniscient A.I. and granted a seemingly unique level of sapience and independence would be so limited by the fact that NPCs can't possess Jobs. For one, every MMO I've ever played has a ton of NPCs representing the specific classes you can choose from. While I get that a generic villager character is supposed to be its own thing, Nikola can also devour player-character items like the Debugging Stones and use magic Tesla powers, so there's some flexibility here. Also, why do some NPCs possess limited knowledge of the meta-mechanics of their world, like the shopkeep guy, while others think they're just regular people in the real world, like Nikola? Furthermore, the show has stopped caring about whether Nikola overhears the debuggers talking about being characters in a game but does she still not understand what any of that means?

…well, crap, I went on a rant about the anime's lack of internal logic again, and I'm trying to explain why I liked the Nikola story. There is some sloppy storytelling at play here but the core dynamic of Haga and Nikola is sweet enough to make it all easy to overlook. I genuinely felt sad for the poor girl when Haga realized she would never be allowed to take on the role of a thief like him and I was honestly quite excited when a potential bug allowed Nikola to bypass any of those dumb old mechanics so she can blow shit up real good with a magic cursed skull! It's a perfectly silly way to continue this part of the storyline—and it even offers an interesting wrinkle for Haga, too, when he decides to not report a bug for the first time so he can preserve Nikola's newfound sense of pride and purpose.

Sometimes anime is just like that: It can be a weird, janky, first-draft-of-a-story-that-got-rushed-out-of-the-door mess, and you will still have a good time when all is said and done. After all of the soul-draining and mind-rotting isekai trash I've had to sit through in my life, I am not about to complain about getting a show that is “Mostly Good Enough, and Sometimes Almost Kind of Great, If You Squint Hard Enough!”

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.