Is It Wrong to Pick Up Girls In a Dungeon? Ep. 8: An adventure to nowhere

I know they want to make the minotaur seem all dangerous and everything, but the bad guy couldn’t sound any lamer here. Only adventurers will get the job done. Adventurers. Anyway, welcome to another installment of Crybaby and His Mommies.

— Bellri kicks things off by insisting that he isn’t strong. This sort of personality is so annoying when you encounter it in the real world. There’s the humble-bragging, which is already pretty bad. But you know Bellri isn’t humble-bragging. He legitimately thinks he’s weak despite all evidence to the contrary. And normally, you’d just say, “Well, the kid’s had it tough, so he has no confidence left.” Sure, you could say that in the first or second episode. But we’re two months into the season, and I still have to listen to this sad sack bullshit. This reminds of those self-proclaimed Nice Guys who try to invite pity on themselves by bitching and moaning about how utterly sucky they are. Nobody enjoys being around with someone with so little confidence.

— After the OP, we’re reminded that Syr still exists.

But she merely ropes our hero into helping her with the dishes. ‘Cause, y’know, it’s hard to say no.

— Bellri has a conversation with Ryuu about what it takes to level. Apparently, you need to do something big… like kill a minotaur, mayhaps? She adds that he has to be adventurous to get what he wants.

Syr is eavesdropping on them, and she looks all sad when she hears this. Oh lawd, someone needs to be adventurous if they want to win a crybaby’s heart.

— Afterwards, Bellri spars with Eyes some more, but it’s their last day. It doesn’t look like he’s improved much, but she’s impressed ’cause he counterattacked or something! Okay.

— We skip ahead even more, and everyone’s on some big expedition to scale the dungeon. They intend to reach the 59th floor or something. What’s up there? Shrug. What’s up on any of the floors? Shrug. We don’t know dick about the dungeon and yet it’s this all-important thing in the story. That’s funny.

— As always, Bellri and Lili find themselves wandering through some non-descript cave setting. Man, dungeons in anime suck. Dungeons in SAO sucked, dungeons in Log Horizon sucked, and dungeons here suck. And it’s the saddest thing because if you just focus on JRPGs, there are a ton of awesome dungeon settings throughout the years. Labyrinth of Amala, anyone? A fucking floating continent? Oh yeah, let’s literally go inside a giant robot. But in this anime, it’s just the same shitty caves over and over.

— Remember that lame-ass tree in SAO? And when they finally got inside, it was really just one long gauntlet of enemies attacking you? Dungeons in anime fucking suck, and it makes no sense. When you make a game, you have to create a battle system, do a lot of programming, so on and so forth. With these stories, you have more time to focus on the setting and yet… caves. Fucking caves.

— Anyway, Bellri and Lili run into the minotaur. The kid is frozen in his tracks, so Lili had to push him out of the way:

Great hero, mate.

— Now that Lili is all injured and shit, Bellri finally fights back…

I’ll just give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he can’t carry the girl and run away. I don’t know why I’m giving him that benefit of a doubt, but let’s just be nice for once.

— Still, Bellri’s having no luck, and Eyes overhears that the kid’s in trouble. Therefore, mommy to the rescue…

— But he can’t let her save him again! It would shame him too much! He’d just be the laughingstock at the tavern if he lets her save him again! So the guy pushes her aside and continues fighting the minotaur.

Why can’t they just fight together? Storywise, you can just assume that Eyes believes in him or some bullshit like that, so she’s going to let him prove himself. But if it had been us, we would never risk this. I don’t care if you want to prove yourself when failing results in, well, death. But hey, I’m not an anime character, so…

— Heh, this is an adventure, apparently. Fighting a generic anime monster inside a generic anime cave. Grand fuckin’ adventure.

— Due to newfound grit and determination or something, Bellri is doing much better against the minotaur this time around.

Thanks to that, the evil lady is literally having an orgasm as she watches the events unfold. Oh, her little boy is getting so strong!

— Like most crappy shows, the anime cuts away from the actual action itself just so we can hear the peanut gallery comment on the situation.

It saves the animators the trouble of actually having to draw a decent fight scene from start to finish, and it  also helps the slower viewers understand what’s going on by literally telling them what’s going on. Cool!

— Eventually, Bellri beats the minotaur and brutally incinerates its upper torso to… well, nothing.

But we don’t have to care ’cause it’s just a minotaur. I’m sure it has no real feelings.

— The whole fight leaves Bellri shirtless and stunned.

He’s just standing there, saying and doing nothing. I guess he’s going through a fighter’s high or something. One of the bystanders walks up and takes a gaze at his “status.” She notes that his abilities are now all super high:

Just in case you weren’t  payingvattention, y’know? Just in case you didn’t see the guy solo-kill a strong monster by himself. Let me just tell you exactly how strong he is.

— At the end of the episode, Bellri is passed out in bed as Mommy No.1 stays by his side:

The first page?! The first fucking page took 8 weeks to tell?!