Re:Zero - Starting Life in another World

Score: 6/10

Recommendation: Stream it if you can find it for free somewhere

Summary: A series that starts off really strong before meandering aimlessly for the remaining episodes.

Review:

Wait, the studio that made Stein's;Gate is going to make another time-travel anime with unnecessary punctuation in the title?! SIGN ME UP! That's right, Studio White Fox is behind both Stein's;Gate and Re:Zero. Already having fan-boyed over Steins;Gate you know that I'm a sucker for a good time-travel story. Despite these similarities, I'll resist the urge to compare the two series as much as possible; however, it will take all my self control not to do so.


So Re:Zero follows a character who is spontaneously transported from Japan to a magical world with talking humanoid animals, attractive girls with weird colored hair, magic, and the whole typical anime shebang. What makes this anime stick out from every other anime with this plot line is that the main character, Subaru, has the ability to travel back a few days/hours if he is killed to try to change course and save himself and token anime hottie, Emilia.

So when I started Re:Zero, the first 8 episodes or so were AWESOME! Not kidding, they are really really good. The problem is that after a while, the story doesn't seem to have a destination that it's trying to get to. Every time a problem is solved, random life events happen, and then another sudden problem occurs. What's the point? I feel like I'm back in my first college Biology class where day 1 was migratory patterns of bees, day 2 was medicinal plants of the west indies, and day 3 was pollution and deforestation. There's no focus. It's like watching Napoleon Dynamite for 24 episodes. Then when the series does eventually does end, it feels pretty unfulfilling because there doesn't seem to be anything special about finishing the last arc, except that it took longer to resolve. The plot would be better served if it were building towards some sort of clear goal, like helping Emilia the become the queen or maybe destroying the Witch's cult. Each arc just has the goal of not getting killed. Which is a good goal to have, but not enough to drive a 26(ish) episode series that wants to be more than a monster movie.

Subaru is the quintessential "whatever the plot needs him to be" ultimate character. At first, Subaru is moronic. Really, the dumbest character ever. Subaru can't figure out that he can travel back in time after death until he's been killed 2 or 3 times. Then a few episodes later he's resolving political tensions through strategy with power hungry candidates for the throne? What? So wait, is he the persistent yet driven moron (Naruto-esque) character, or the strategic and manipulative politician (like Lelouch from Code Geass). I guess it depends on the episode.

One thing that Re:Zero does better than Steins;Gate (and there is only one thing... I freakin' love Steins;Gate) is that it dives even deeper into the trauma that being killed over and over and over again while watching your friends die time after time would have on the person. Re:Zero does an excellent job at giving this "Return by death" real psychological repercussions. This is kind of a big deal in the show and is by far the strongest aspect of the second half.

Overall, the fun that the first half of the series provides is almost forgotten by the mostly forgettable second half. The best thing that could happen to this series is for a second season to be released in order to wrap up the story and give it a actual end. If that happens I'm willing to change my score if done well. For now I can only award Re:Zero - Starting Life in another World with 6 little glass white whale figurines out of 10.

To see where it falls in my personal ranking of how much I enjoy different Anime. CLICK HERE