Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu - Memory Snow (original) (raw)

What a fun OVA! This made me so happy, I won't lie.

This is just an incredibly chill, fun, relaxing, humorous spin-off of Re:Zero, set in-between two episodes from the anime.

It feels less like Re:Zero - with its high-stakes action, violence, and existential horror - and more like, funnily enough, some direct-to-VHS Winnie the Pooh Christmas movie... but for me, as someone who loved that sort of shit as a kid, that wasn't a bad thing at all! Just a fun little break from all of the action of the anime.

This has immaculate vibes. The characters are all just being somewhat exaggerated goofy versions of themselves,... hanging out and having a good time together.

There isn't much in the way of story; it's just a very simple plot. Puck is on his magical-being equivalent of a period (no really! They jokingly call it a "mana-struation") which causes his magic to go all crazy, and everything gets super cold. Everyone goes out and has fun in the winter together. That's about it.

There's a whole lot of quick humour and really fun character interactions throughout, such as Emilia speaking extremely fast when talking to Subaru, trying to act super over-the-top cheerful in a pathetic attempt to not come off as suspicious, fooling absolutely no one.

Or Ram just being incredibly pissed off - even more than usual - for much of the OVA, due to her freezing her butt off in the sheer intensity of the bitter cold. Meanwhile, her sister Rem is completely unaffected, cheerfully dancing about like she's the happiest woman in the world because she's just so darn happy to be here with Subaru.

The animation looks really nice, looking much like the anime, but just with a slightly higher budget to polish things up and add some more frames to smoothen things out a little.

Small thing, but the facial expressions are great! There's several jokes in this OVA that land and are genuinely funny, simply because of the perfection of the faces that the characters make. I genuinely laughed at how pissed off Ram gets, and it's largely her face that sells it.

There's not much in the way of fanservice, or even really violence or anything like that, apart from some very brief (<5 second) mildly-violent flashbacks from the anime. There is a little bit of fanservice, I guess, but it's "tasteful" and very tame. I'd go as far as to say that you could *probably* show this OVA to a kid without exposing them to anything inappropriate, really. And that was actually kind of weirdly refreshing - it just made the whole thing feel even more chill.

There's not much else to comment on, really. It's just a really fun little OVA. If that sounds good, check it out!