A slice-of-life show about gaming and game development? I’m in! The funny thing is, I didn’t even see that this was a thing until a friend in my Discord server pointed it out to me. Of course, I’m talking about Let’s Play: Quest Darake no My Life. Typically, gaming shows are hit or miss these days. Sometimes, they promise to be about gaming only to be so for a couple of episodes before degenerating into mediocrity. Will Let’s Play be another one of those shows?
Let’s go!
First Episode Synopsis
A girl named Sam seems to have had a rough life, health-wise. She has numerous medicines and an inhaler by her side; however, you wouldn’t know that at first because we open with a fantasy battle scene inside of an MMORPG. After the party fells a dragon, their group (named Rare Spawn) moves up into the third overall rank.
When Sam isn’t gaming, she’s taking care of her dog Bowser, sometimes handing him off at a small café where it appears her guildmates work and congregate, and then it’s off to be a paper pusher at her father’s company, to which she is the heir and the next CEO. Talk about your cushy job! Despite her high status, it appears she is treated equally by her direct supervisor, Mr. Jones, who comes off as a strict, by-the-rules type of manager.
When a deliveryman drops off a package with Lucy, their receptionist, she gets a bit flirty. When the deliveryman goes to leave, he bumps into Sam and spills coffee all over her. This leads to a confrontation with Mr. Jones. In the meantime, we also learn that Sam is a game developer who has published her first game on an indie site. Her game is called Ruminate. It achieves an 8.4 / 10 rating from a lot of users, but suddenly, she can’t log in to check and see if her score went up any further. That’s when she is alerted that a ViewTuber named Marshall Law played and absolutely trashed her game on one of his streams.
Feeling completely defeated and as if her game development journey came to an abrupt end, her attention is grabbed by her dog wanting to go for a walk. When she steps outside, she notices that someone is moving in. She soon realizes her new neighbor is Marshall Law himself!
Worth Watching?
YES – I will start off with the biggest complaint that I have about the show… and that is the cringe-level humor. It’s mainly used whenever Sam interacts with her father. The humor is just very poorly executed and sticks out like a sore thumb. Thankfully, this is the only area where it’s truly used. The rest of the show comes off in varying degrees of cute to downright mean. There are serious moments, and some are filled with drama. It’s a mixed bag, for sure, which is probably why the humor feels completely out of place. One moment, you’re invested in a serious situation, then the next, it’s over-the-top goofball antics.
Again, the cringy humor is peppered. It’s not the focal point of the show. When you dial in on the actual point of the show, it has a lot of good to offer. Sam is an interesting character who busted her rear during college to learn how to become a software engineer. Then, during the evening, she would work on Ruminate. That feeling of seeing your first game do so well, only to be ruined by one online influencer, is a soul-crushing experience. You felt bad for Sam. Then, you discover that the two of them are going to be neighbors… it only adds to the drama, albeit in a predictable way.
What I also like is that there are multiple gaming aspects to the show. The first is the online MMORPG that Sam and her friends play. What is refreshing is that the show doesn’t fall into the trap that others like it do, which is to make the entire show about them playing the game together. In fact, after the opening scene, you don’t even see them play the game again for the rest of the episode, but yet, even though little backstory is given (but enough to give you how they bonded), the characters, while many, still play important background roles.
The show chooses to focus on Sam and her journey as an indie game developer, which is the other gaming aspect of the show. We even get glimpses of her game, and she even admits that Marshall Law ignored her instructions on how to play the game and was unfairly judging it by playing it wrong, but it’s no use when you’re saying that to yourself in your room to nobody.
The first episode had so many different layers and aspects to it that not even the terrible humor was able to stop me from enjoying it!
