English Dub Review: Quality Assurance in Another World “Isora Amano”

Overview

Haga and Nikola stumble across a buggy forgotten village in the remote reaches of the country. There, they meet an interesting character by the name of Isora Amano who has some alarming information on the other debuggers…



Our Take

Continuing the adventures of Haga and Nikola, the two encounter NPCs being stuck in their T-poses and floating. It certainly looks funny for a village and its people to be stuck in that position. Haga assumes his debugging analysis. Haga and Nikola complete their work in a day, and the bug is fixed, but the Seekers themselves need to verify that the bug has been fixed. Isora Amano (The avatar is a cat creature called a “fether) realizes that the T-posing bug has been fixed and confronts our two leads and explains that he was once part of Play-Ing’s group, but left due to how casually cruel they are instead of doing their jobs.

Amano later explains that he’s been stuck there for six months, looking after a young bedridden girl named Luu, writing manga and entertaining her. And if ever given the chance, Amano would want to stay and care for her all his life as a storyteller. But given what happens at the end, Amano sadly doesn’t get to make that choice…

Overall, this is a surprisingly good episode despite the major tonal shift, yet it effectively works. However, the biggest plot hole to me is that if gaming bugs are getting fixed, and if the biggest bug everyone is suffering from is not being able to log out, shouldn’t that be a bigger priority to fix? And if the devs are capable of fixing them, why aren’t they also doing anything about the rogue testers themselves? Also, the ending while pretty brutal and shocking helps establish possibly another person in Haga’s team since their new goal now is to take down these bad beta testers who seem to be abusing this game world in abhorrent and twisted ways. Hopefully, we’ll get more answers later on…