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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