Reviewed by Alicia Glass
After poor Nikola was killed by a demidragon and revived under the eye of a mysterious adventurer called Haga, Nikola comes to realize Haga is an infamous Seeker, a member of a special unit formed by the King of Bayle sent out into the Kingdom to observe and report on strange inexplicable phenomena.
Except, well, even that’s not entirely true. Given the adorable old-fashioned style the anime is drawn in, reminiscent of the old Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings cartoon films (to my mind anyway), it comes as a severe shock when it turns out what’s really going on behind the scenes. Did anyone besides Moxie out there watch, and absolutely love, the gut-wrenching anime series called .hack? How about Sword Art Online or Log Horizon? Because that is where we’re headed folks, to games with glitches that get the players absolutely stuck-in. Grab your debugger stone and let’s get into this!
So it’s been about a year or so now, since Haga was sent into the video game King’s Seeker Online with a group of other debuggers, to yes, hunt for bugs and glitches and issues inside the game, only to find themselves unable to logout when the work was done. Since then, the other debuggers with their debugger stones which basically grant them god-like powers as far as the NPCs inside the game are concerned, have taken to reveling in the sins of greed, and wrath, and yes, lust too. After all, these are just Non-Player Characters, who cares if the imprisoned debug team repeatedly rape a few dozen of them, or dream up new and horrific ways to execute as many of the NPCs as possible – they’re not real, after all. Right?
But not our giant nerd Haga, no, he’s a good man who still wanders the conflict-torn Clayborne island hunting for bugs, dutifully reporting all the strange things he finds to the game developers. Sometimes they get fixed, sometimes they don’t, sometimes there are entire system upgrades, and sometimes the bugs are so bad they’re easily exploited by entire gangs or even the unaware NPCs themselves. Haga soundly refuses to use his debugger stone in any way other than what it was intended for, often causing him to run around like a madman when investigating game glitches in-person, but he clearly takes his role as a Kings Seeker quite seriously. It doesn’t help that most of his former debugger crew have formed a gang of villains all their own, using their god-like debugger stones to dive into all manner of vice, that’s actually starting to send glitches throughout the game world-wide!
It actually gets even more complicated when, after Haga starts trying to explain to his new mini-Seeker-in-training Nikola that her whole world is actually just a totally buggy game, they visit an Advent Altar and Nikola gets taken over by the games Meta AI program called Tesla. The game AI roundly informs Haga he has a new most serious Seeker task – find the other debuggers, steal their debugger stones and give them to Tesla so they may be destroyed, thus revoking their debugger status entirely. Who knows what will happen to them after that, the point is to deal with their debugger stones first and foremost.
The immersive nature of RPG video games, and also that idealized subgenre of anime called isekai, is on full gorgeous display in the show, where the cute animation style clashes rather jarringly with the horrific nature of the story being presented. And hey, that’s makes it really great, and very unique among other isekai anime that have come out. No real nudity to be concerned with, but there is an astonishing amount of violence for such an adorable-looking anime, like watching Pooh Bear literally bite Eeyore’s head off after he finished lamenting, “Thanks for noticing me.”
Continue the hunt for glitches, bugs and villainous debuggers with world domination plans with Haga and Nikola in Quality Assurance in Another World, on Crunchyroll now!