by Eleanor Walker, Okazu Staff Writer

From ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight for an Ordinary Life with My Love and Cursed Sword! streaming on Crunchyroll: “Flum wasn’t chosen for her strength—she has none. No magic, no skill, only an ability called “Reversal” that even she doesn’t understand. So why did God place her in the hero’s party? After being betrayed and sold into slavery, Flum is abused and eventually thrown to monsters for entertainment. Now faced with death, Flum must choose: be devoured or take up a cursed sword said to kill its wielder.”

I’ve had the original novels for this series in my Bookwalker library for a while now, and didn’t really know much about them other than they were incredibly violent and gory, but the anime offered an easier way in. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that underneath the fairly generic “kicked out of the main hero’s party” premise, there are enough stand out elements to make this show worth watching. The first and most obvious of these is that our main heroine, Flum, is female. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a connoisseur of the genre, so there may be others out there, but the only other series with a female lead which comes to mind is the excellent Sexiled series by Ameko Kaeruda, which you should definitely check out if you haven’t already. Roll Over and Die definitely has a very different tone to Sexiled though, which is much more light-hearted and takes more of a parody angle.

I’ve heard complaints floating around the Internet that the gore has been toned down for the anime, so I did read the first part of the first volume of the novel to compare, and some of the more gruesome moments have been either cut completely or made much shorter and less vivid. However, we do still see Flum being branded on the face very early in the first episode as well as people being eaten by ghouls so it’s definitely not for the faint of heart whichever version you pick. I will give the anime credit though as although the gore in the novel sometimes felt like gore for gore’s sake, the show manages to straddle the line of setting the scene but without overdoing it. It’s very clear that no one in this world is on Flum and Milkit’s side and the very obvious slave branding on Flum’s cheek immediately marks them as lesser once they escape.

They head to the Adventurer’s Guild in the slums of the city, as by becoming adventurers they can earn money from completing quests which will enable them to survive. Unfortunately, the nice man at the guild is also a bit of a bastard, and instead of sending Flum and Milkit on a quest to kill an F-rank monster, they’re tricked into going after some D-rank monsters instead. However, thanks to Flum’s no longer useless ability and cursed sword, the girls are able to kill the monsters and claim their prize, and more importantly, an adventurer’s license from the guild, much to the annoyance of the man who sent them into what he thought was a death trap.

Character-wise, Flum and her companion Milkit are the main protagonists we follow here. Milkit is a slave who Flum rescues from the same dungeon which she was trapped in, and the two begin to work together to survive in a hostile world, and are definitely developing feelings for each other as well. It would have been nice to have a bit more time with them together exploring their feelings when they’re not just trying to survive. This is however one of the other main aspects which makes this show distinct from other “kicked out…” power fantasies. So far, revenge doesn’t seem to be Flum’s main motivation. She just wants to survive and protect Milkit as well. Unfortunately, these first 3 episodes don’t tell us much more about either of them, other than that Flum was chosen by the deity Origin to join the party which would defeat the Demon Lord. One gaping plot hole I couldn’t ignore here is that the Origin just let Jean (another member of the party) sell Flum to the slave trader and didn’t intervene. Maybe this is all part of the grand plan, maybe there’s more going on than we realise.

The character I am most interested in though is Cyrill, another member of the party who is initially friends with Flum due to them being similar ages, however Jean has designs on her and it is implied that one of his reasons for wanting rid of Flum is so that he can pursue her. Flum and Cyrill’s relationship is definitely portrayed in a way that could suggest they were more than just friends, and I would like to know more about them as well as seeing if they reunite further down the line. What Jean also doesn’t realise once he’s got rid of Flum, is that despite her seemingly useless stats and zero magical ability, she helps the party out in other ways, like cooking. Once she’s gone, he’s not getting his food prepared how he likes it and he sulks like the big baby he is. I am looking forward to him getting his just desserts (pun absolutely intended).
In episode 3, we meet Sara, a seemingly pure-hearted nun who has a brand on her neck similar to Flum and Milkit. Sara’s backstory is the most interesting so far, and I hope we get some similar level of detail for the other characters too. She is from a pagan village which was destroyed by the demons and forced to absorb into the Church, including banning pagan rituals such as the use of herbal medicine. (As a personal aside, I’ve been reading about the Scottish witch trials recently for work, and there’s a lot of parallels to be drawn here but that’s probably an article in itself)  Even I, as someone who’s not overly familiar with this genre, have a suspicion that maybe the Church isn’t all it seems to be…

Regarding the art and animation, there’s not really much to make this show stand out. The colour palette is pretty dark, whether that’s an intentional design choice or a saving money choice isn’t really clear, it could just as easily be a bit of both. It does mean Sara’s white robes act as a nice contrast to everyone else’s dark outfits and that the symbolism is incredibly obvious. The character designs are pleasant, although Milkit does remind me far too much of Ren and Ram from Re: Zero.

Overall, I enjoyed this much more than I was expecting to. Whilst there are definitely a lot of generic elements here, the setup and execution is interesting enough for me that I will stick around and see what comes next. If you don’t mind quite a bit of gore, and a well trodden basic premise, you could do a lot worse than this show.

Ratings:

Art – 6. Character designs are pleasant, animation is meh.
Story – 7 There’s enough here to make it stand out from the hundreds of other kicked out of the hero’s party shows.
Characters – 7 There’s a lot to explore here, how I feel about the rest of the show will depend how well this is done.
Service – 8 if you enjoy gore, 5 if you don’t care for it.
Yuri – 8 When the first thing Flum buys for Milkit after they get some money from completing their first quest is a maid outfit…

Overall – 7