After more than four years of
waiting, and after getting delayed last spring by the ‘Rona, the much anticipated
second season of Re:Zero – Starting Life in Another World is finally here! The
first episode came out a few days ago.
However, did you know that a Director’s Cut of the first season was
released earlier this year which you could watch to prep for the second season? After all, again, season one aired four years
ago, and unless you are a super fan who rewatched it a couple of times since
then, you might be like me who had already forgotten a couple of parts of the
plot and needed a refresher. So, yeah,
before jumping into season two’s premier episode, I first binged the Director’s Cut.
The Director’s Cut is basically
just season one, but the original twenty-five 25-minute episodes are edited
into 13 one-hour episodes with some revisions.
To summarize, the show follows 17-year-old Subaru Natsuki, a stereotypical tracksuit-wearing
otaku shut-in, who is suddenly transported into a fantasy world after a trip to
the convenience store. Almost
immediately upon his arrival in this new world, he meets and falls in love with
a half-elf girl named Emilia, and discovers that he has a remarkable ability
which he names “Return by Death.” “Return
by Death” sends him back at a specific point in his past whenever he dies –
similar to how a “save point” works in a video game – with the memories he
gained from that previous life/timeline remaining intact.
Whatever new things are in the
Director’s Cut, they are rather subtle. In
fact, for someone like me who prior to this had only watched the first season just once, these changes are unnoticeable. These
are mostly enhancement of the animation quality, tweaks on the lighting, minor
altered shots, and a few corrections to some animation inconsistencies in the
original (which were negligible flaws in the first place). There’s also less censorship with the gory
visuals, and nuanced alterations with the direction of some scenes (e.g. lines
get delivered slightly differently, scene unfolds a few seconds longer, etc.).
Now, there’s one major scene that’s
been added to serve as the season’s epilogue, which legitimately completely changed the
feel of the first season. This could
have been a big deal. But this scene was
repeated at the start of the premier episode of season two, losing much of its
impact for season one.
Nevertheless, I can’t exactly put
my finger on it, but those subtle adjustments in the Director’s Cut somehow all
add up into making season one a more immersive experience than how I initially
found it. In my original review of Re:Zero, my main takeaway is that it’s enjoyable, but it’s nothing special. Oh, how wrong I was! Watching the Director’s Cut gave me a better
grasp and appreciation of this anime. It
made me realize more potently – possibly because of its better execution and
aesthetics – the awesome things that were already inherently there the first
time around.
I guess I didn’t consider Re:Zero to be great before since I
watched it just a little later after KonoSuba
(both came out in the same year).
While I had seen many other anime that have the “characters from our world
being transported to a fantasy world” premise prior to these two, they were my
first exposure to isekai as we now know it. To me back then, someone who didn’t even know
the word “isekai” yet, the two anime series were fundamentally similar – only
one grittier than the other, and the other significantly more comedic. And since I found KonoSuba to be the superior of the two (and I still do), it had a detrimental
effect on what I felt about Re:Zero. Hence, though I liked it, I undervalued it. But after recently re-watching it in its best
and definitive version (i.e. the Director’s Cut), on top of having seen so many
isekai and having gotten familiar with how saturated and derivative the isekai
genre is since my first viewing of it, I now believe Re:Zero is one the best isekai series ever and an outstanding anime in general.
Seriously, what other work of
fiction is out there that manages to sell convincingly a situation where, in
one timeline, this girl (I’m talking about Rem, by the way) tortures and brutally
murders the hero, but in another timeline, the same girl falls head over heels
for him, and these two radically different scenarios are equally plausible outcomes
that can stem from a common crossroad?
That’s terrific writing right there.
Nevertheless, I won’t exactly start
calling Re:Zero a masterpiece now I won’t go there yet, although I now have a much higher opinion of it. But let’s see after season two.
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