Quality Assurance in Another World

Episodes 1-3

With its deceptively straightforward story, moody atmosphere, and confident direction, the first episode of Quality Assurance in Another World was one of my favorite premieres of the summer season this year. The following two episodes that have come out are… not quite that good, I will admit, but I don't want to give anyone the wrong impression! Quality Assurance is still a very clever show with some refreshing spins on the tired “Trapped in a VR Game” premise. It's just that the execution is lacking in some key areas.

Let's start with the positives: In all three of these episodes, Quality Assurance plays with some very fun ideas concerning Haga's job as a debugger and tester for the virtual game he's been trapped in for the past year. His enthusiastically convincing poor little Nikola to run with her cheek grinding against the city walls for an entire day to check for flaws in collision detection and whatnot was the show's funniest joke. There's a lot of mileage to get out of Haga's simple, honest, single-minded approach to doing his job no matter the circumstances. If punching every wall and exploiting every enemy A.I. pattern has even a chance of freeing him and his friends from this prison, then by golly, Haga will teach Nikola to be the best-damned wall puncher that ever lived.

Speaking of Haga's friends, I love the different cruel fates that awaited them when they dared to mess with the unstable godly powers of their debug slates. One dude got sucked away into space, another gal has been repeating the same infinite death/respawn loop for a year straight, and an exceptionally unlucky bastard got stuck face-first and ass-up in the middle of the solid earth. The fact that all of these doomed debuggers are likely still conscious is just horrifying icing to top the trauma cake. When you combine all that with the hilariously grim NPCs that Haga and Nikola find stuck in the classic T-pose, it's clear that author Masamichi Sato knows a thing or three about video games—both as an art form and as an industry. I can't help but respect that.

However, as much as I love the ideas that Quality Assurance is running with, I wish that it could match them with more consistently compelling visuals and storytelling. The animation was never this show's key focus—not even in the premiere that I gave a five-star score to—but it has begun to slip off of that precarious knife's edge that separates “simple but effective” and “just kind of awkward-looking” artwork. Scenes like the Evil Debuggers playing darts with a bunch of NPCs' crushed skulls should be downright disturbing. Still, the show has lost a bit of that wonderfully ominous mood that it showcased in the premiere and now scenes like "gruesome murder being played off as a sport" don't hit like they should. The same goes for the reveal of Tesla the A.I.—the one possessing Nikola's body and urging Haga to take down the debuggers who aren't freakishly obsessed with the minutiae of their jobs. It's not the most mind-blowing twist ever but it still could have been given a little more weight and gravitas than it ultimately was.

There is enough strong foundational material for Quality Assurance to be able to survive my nitpicking over its lackluster presentation. My bigger concern is for the long-term. After finishing its premiere, I was convinced this could be the next great underdog isekai anime. As of right now, though, it seems like the show might settle for simply being “pretty good, all things considered.”

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.