Kara Dennison
September 6, 2024 
Quality Assurance in Another World is a new spin on the full-dive MMO isekai. Haga and his coworkers are trapped in a game with no way out. The twist? They’re still debugging! Or, at least, Haga is. While other debuggers have gone rogue and turned on god mode, he’s convinced he can get home by finishing his job.
When you’re trapped in a buggy fantasy world with power gamers chasing you down, you have a lot to worry about. But for us, these are the three chief worrying questions about this season’s most plugged-in adventure comedy.
If you die in the game…
… then what? The stars of Quality Assurance in Another World have been trying to figure this out. Haga believes that, at least in certain areas, dying will lead to a respawn. It’s still not something he wants to risk, since the game feels extremely realistic. However, what about outside encounters? Could getting PKed potentially force a logout and send players home?
At least for now, we don’t know. Of the two potential PKs we’ve seen onscreen, one wasn’t necessarily a kill (more on that in the next section) and the other player cheated death with a rare item. It’s still possible that in-game death could leave a player comatose in the headgear. Speaking of which…
What if you glitch?
Don’t forget, Quality Assurance in Another World takes place in an extremely buggy game. A whole village is populated by T-posing NPCs, and Haga and his party can make their way to off-limits areas during an encounter. And those are just the harmless glitches. Factor in debug stones—special items that let play-testers subvert the mechanics of the game—and there are even bigger problems.
Early in his journey with NPC Nikola, Haga encounters old friends who have glitched through floors or are falling eternally. And they aren’t the only ones who get fully stuck in the game world. The dubious death mentioned earlier? He could just be falling out of bounds forever. Are they conscious while frozen or falling or stuck in the landscape? It’s creepy to think about, but we can’t help wondering.
What about Nikola?
Ultimately, the point of Quality Assurance in Another World is for Haga and the rest of the debuggers to get home. But then there’s Nikola: a buggy NPC who didn’t die when she was meant to. While Haga does all he can to avoid giving her meta-knowledge and potentially corrupting the game even further, it’s clear she’s outside her normal operations. Even so, we receive constant reminders that she’s “just a villager.”
We’ve already seen one example of an NPC’s memories being reset. And while we know Nikola isn’t a “real” person, we love her just how she is. She loves manga and dreams of being a thief. Will all those aspects of her go away once the debuggers get home? Could she even be permitted to live as the character she’s become?
For more isekai fun, read up on No Longer Allowed in Another World!
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