Anime Summer 2024: QUALITY ASSURANCE IN ANOTHER WORLD, Check and Check Again, No Matter What
Sympathy for QA people -- finally! The adventure series is now streaming on Crunchyroll.
How to find misteaks. And why it matters.
Quality Assurance in Another World
The first four episodes are now streaming on Crunchyroll. Subsequent episodes will debut every Friday.
QA jobs can be maddening. Quality Assurance people are relentless in their pursuit of bugs and other issues in computer software and websites; the idea is to find mistakes that may have been made by developers and programmers before any users find them.
As a longtime proofreader and copy editor, and now managing editor, I empathize entirely. That makes it easy for me to empathize with Haga, the protagonist in Quality Assurance in Another World. Although his true identity is cloaked in the trailer, by the end of the first episode, he is revealed to be a QA person who has been sent in to a fantasy adventure VR game to ferret out any bugs that need to be fixed, and then make a nightly report to the programmers so they can correct the mistakes.
The only problem? Haga is trapped in the game, and he can't get out.
He is not the only one. Haga and other QA people were sent into the VR game with the same mission, but for some mysterious reason, they are all trapped there, and have been for months. While the other QA people have resigned themselves to their fate and given up on their jobs, Haga doggedly persists, clinging to the hope that he will be rescued eventually.
Dutifully looking for bugs, Haga finds himself sympathizing with Nikola, a hapless peasant in a village that is fated to be destroyed by dragons, over and over and over again. Designed with a plucky, perpetually cheerful attitude, she appeals to Haga's beneficent side. They team up to discover the secrets that the world is hiding.
Based on a manga series written and illustrated by Masamichi Sato that was first published in 2020, the anime adaptation conveys different flavors in its first four episodes: deepening mystery, great adventure, comic joy, and then something deeper that truly caught me off guard.
Summary: Recommended. Solid, varied adventures.
