English Dub Review: Sasaki and Peeps “Real Life and Fantasy”

Overview:

Sasaki is an office worker who gets a pet bird. Little does her realize that this bird will change his life.

Our Take:

Sasaki works a dead-end office job and he’s barely scraping by. He loves cute animals and he decides to stop by the pet store one day. He gets a Java sparrow, who just so happens to be a reincarnated starsage from another world. The bird’s name is Piercarlo, but Sasaki calls him Peeps instead. Sasaki doesn’t believe that Peeps is from another world until he’s transported there.

Sasaki starts trading goods from his world with a trading company in the other world to make more money. Peeps also teaches Sasaki how to do magic. Sasaki uses an ice spell against an attacker and lands himself a new job dealing with paranormal cases.

This is an interesting first episode. It’s a double-length episode, so I figured it would have something neat to offer. It doesn’t disappoint as it does pique my curiosity. Isekai have been commonplace on the anime calendar for a long time now, but reverse isekai aren’t nearly as common. In fact, I don’t think I’ve watched one since The Devil is a Part-Timer! It’s a concept that’s usually more interesting to me personally and I would like to see more anime take this approach to the genre.

I like the main characters so far. Sasaki is a down-to-Earth guy. He’s friendly, but he also doesn’t like to take risks. There isn’t anything special about him per se, but he’s still likeable. Peeps is an enjoyable character too, but we still don’t know much about him. I’m interested to learn his whole story.

We meet some other characters, such as Sasaki’s kouhai at the office. He looks up to Sasaki and he wants him to join his new company. Hoshizaki is Sasaki’s co-worker at his new job. She seems like she could be a fun character moving forward. The girl who lives next to Sasaki kind of intrigues me since it seems like she doesn’t have a great home life. However, there’s also one scene that raises a little red flag. We’ll see if that goes anywhere, but I honestly hope it gets dropped. Finally, there’s the chief at Sasaki’s new job. He seems shady, so I definitely want to keep an eye on him.

The visuals are pretty standard, but not bad by any means. Peeps is absolutely adorable, so that’s a plus. The voice acting in this first episode is also good. As a whole, this is good start to a reverse isekai slice of life series that seems promising. I don’t really know what to expect from it, but I’m looking forward to finding out.