English Dub Review: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime “Misunderstanding”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Hinata and the other Great Saints continue their battle against Rimiru’s forces, but some quickly learn that their worry about Tempest was caused by misunderstandings and manipulations. This doesn’t reach Hinata in time, as she and Rimiru commence a powerful battle, ending with Hinata using her most powerful attack that Rimiru manages to absorb. This seems to calm Hinata down, but then a huge blast shoots out, with Hinata pushing Rimiru out of the way at the last second.

OUR TAKE

And that’s the end of the much hyped up battle! Ten whole weeks of waiting just for it to be over in a few minutes! So, why am I not all that mad about it? Well, I actually rather like it when battles can be resolved through character driven and consistent negotiations when possible. Now don’t get me wrong, I grew up on Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, and all the big flashy anime fights of the 90’s, so I definitely know the appeal of them. But there’s a time and a place for those fights and there’s a time and place for characters bothering to talk things out, especially when there’s no real bad blood between anyone involved in the battle. The Saints who followed Hinata like Leonard are only there because they were tricked into thinking they needed to protect her, but once it became clear that no one on the Tempest side was really itching for a fight if they could avoid it, a lot of that aggression melted away. Similarly, Hinata’s only real issue with Rimiru was that he seemed like a potential threat to the Holy Western Empire and that he seemed like he was connected to Shizu’s death, but now the former has been debunked and the latter will probably be too pretty soon.

As for why this isn’t getting a score higher than a seven, that’s more to do with the fights in this show not really being the most interesting. A lot of the higher level combat involves characters throwing out a lot of fantasy jargon about such and such legendary weapon or this or that unique omega super technique, but aside from inferring what exactly the attack does based on the overly complicated naming conventions being used, none of that really means anything to me beyond “this thing they’re doing is really super duper strong” and I need something more tangible than that. Even Bleach has its moments of going over the top with its powers and techniques, but for the most part, they manage to make everything happening feel tangible and easy enough to keep track of, which I haven’t seen much of from this show since the early days. But yeah, anyway, it looks like the initial fight with the saints is over, but there’s still trouble on the horizon, which will probably kick off another battle against a more committed antagonist, so hopefully we’ll see more of that next week. And if not, I’ll just give every future episode a score of one out of ten!