The Spring 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Chillin' in Another World With Level 2 Super Cheat Powers

The Magical Kingdom of Klyrode summons hundreds of heroes from other worlds every year to fight in their war against the Dark One and his army of powerful demons. Banaza is one of those heroes, summoned from the Royal Capital Paluma, but something's not right—Banaza is only an average merchant. He has no magic, no fighting ability, and his stats are abysmal. Rejected as a hero and stranded in another world, abandoned to the far reaches of the kingdom by a cruel king who just wants him gone, Banaza's fate looks pretty bleak. But then the failed hero candidate finds himself with super cheat powers once he hits level two...

Chillin' in Another World With Level 2 Super Cheat Powers is based on a light novel series written by Miya Kinojo and illustrated by Katagiri. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

I will say this for Chillin' in Another World With Level 2 Super Cheat Powers, it does have at least three points I found novel and enjoyable. The first is that while Banaza has been isekai-ed to a fantasy world, his original one was also a fantasy world. The similarities between this world and his cause more problems than if the worlds were dramatically different. He is left assuming that everything he knows is wrong even when 99% of what he knows is still valid. This leads to a constant state of misunderstanding.

The second thing I enjoyed was that this new fantasy world is better off socially than his former. The racism against non-humans so present in his home world is largely absent in this new world—making him a better fit for it in an objective sense. Meanwhile, the third little twist is his job as a merchant gives him a different perspective to the usual high school boy protagonists we're used to (even if most of them seem to become merchants eventually).

Unfortunately, anything new or interesting about this show is overshadowed by… well, everything else. When it comes down to it, this is just your run-of-the-mill isekai first episode. We've got overpowered skills, game-like status windows (complete with AI voice), an adventurers guild, and a group of fantasy women surrounding him. It's all just so paint-by-numbers that it hurts.

If this show had gone all in on its twists to the formula it could have been something special. Instead, we're left with something mediocre and instantly forgettable. Unless isekai anime is your obsession and you feel the need to absorb every single one of them like a sponge, I can't see any reason to watch this one based on what we've seen here.

Readers, you have no idea how upset I was when I realized that Chillin' in Another World was about some jabroni from a generic fantasy world who suddenly gets teleported to another, only slightly different fantasy world. When I got to the scene where Banaza had his godforsaken RPG stat menu revealed to him, I had to pause the video and take a five-minute walk. Here we were, doing the same old soul-crushingly boring routine yet again, and yet this show has the gall to half-ass coming up with a vaguely unique spin on the premise like this? There was one second—one solitary, beautiful, damnable moment—where I thought to myself, “Oh, wow! The generic RPG world was just our starting point? That could mean that wherever this guy is going to is going to be extra weird and novel, to properly contrast the original—”

No. Nope. Not at all. We could have gotten isekai Planescape, or isekai Pandora, or isekai Discworld, but god forbid we actually try, around here. Instead, it's just the same damned “Let's do D&D/Dragon Quest/The Elder Scrolls but with the serial numbers filed off!” crap that we've been getting for god knows how long, now. The only differences that seem to matter revolve around how the anti-demihuman racism in this new world is better than in Banaza's old world, which…okay. Who cares? Banaza wasn't even a fantasy-racist in the first place, so it isn't like this change in status quo means anything to him. And of course, being a “cheat skill isekai protagonist”, the only options for personality traits that are apparently allowed are “Reprehensible douchebag” or “Vacant human-shaped homunculus that says and does the exact bare minimum to advance the plot.” I can't even say that I'm glad that our main guy wasn't bigoted before he got teleported to wherever the hell he is—because at least then he would have had some kind of growth or conflict to work with.

I hated this, man. The funny thing is that things have gotten so dire these days that I'm usually willing to give at least two stars even to creatively bankrupt nothing-shows like this one—because I can't act like I'm surprised anymore when I watch one of these premieres and can actively feel it ripping what remains from my soul out of my body. Chillin' in Another World seems to be under the impression that it's doing something different, though, which either makes it tragically lacking in self-awareness or somehow even more malicious in its attempt to grift people out of their time and money. So no, Chillin' in Another World, you don't get the extra half-star. Go sit in the corner than think about what you've done.

Congratulations to Chillin' in Another World for clearing the absolute lowest bar of isekai and having a protagonist who isn't immediately and nonchalantly pro-slavery. It's kind of depressing that's where the bottom of the barrel is, but at least we're not scraping it.

Thus concludes all the positive things I have to say about this series, which is otherwise as cookie-cutter an isekai introduction as one could imagine. About the only twist is that Flio, formerly Banaza, was teleported from a different magical fantasy world to his new one, where seemingly the only difference is that this world has traded in demihuman racism for stat screen. Stat screens that Flio spends basically the entire episode conversing with, leading to the show's one and only joke: Flio has literally infinite power, but he doesn't know what the infinity symbol looks like, so he thinks he's just a normal guy. It repeats that punchline enough times across 22 minutes that I'm pretty sure Flio accidentally used magic to distend time itself.

Other than that, there's nothing here to grasp onto. The world is flat and boring. The characters are cardboard cutouts, from the constantly smirking blond guy who everyone thinks is the hero for his paltry 999 stats to the corrupt king who immediately wants to murder Flio in the most roundabout way possible for the crime of having 9 STR. The rest of the cast is a party of anime girls who exist to a) accuse Flio of being a pedophile before b) getting attacked by a super-powerful monster that he has to save them from. Flio's entire personality is "clueless nice guy," and he never wavers so much as a toe outside that incredibly banal box.

It's a parade of all the most tired, uninteresting ideas in modern isekai, without even a discernible gimmick to tell it apart. Heck, it's not even the first show like this to have the word "Chillin'" in its title! What are we doing here, man?

Banaza, renamed Flio halfway through the episode, will not be chillin' anymore than Rishe was living a carefree life last season. Not that there's much comparison between the two series beyond that, but it seems worth mentioning because this doesn't look like isekai iyashikei, as the title implies. So, what does it appear to be? It's a show that takes well-worn tropes and attempts to fit them into something at least slightly new, with mild success.

Probably the most interesting elements of the story are the dual facts that it's inter-fantasy isekai (as in, Flio goes between his fantasy world and a new one) and that the kingdom he's summoned to as a potential hero wants nothing to do with him once a better hero shows up. The former makes it smoother on the world-building front, which is a mixed bag: Flio can just say, "Oh, it works like that in my old world," and avoid pesky explanations for things seasoned viewers will be perfectly comfortable with, like bottomless bags and guilds. But it also feels like just as much of a cheat as Flio's new powers, an easy way for the story to establish its world and magic system without putting in any actual work, making it feel pretty darn dull. As for the latter, it's once again something we're pretty familiar with at this point in genre saturation, with this feeling closest to The Other World's Books Depend Upon the Bean Counter without the BL. Flio's been summoned; he's useless to the kingdom at first blush, but they're embarrassed that they can't send him back. Of course, the king in this story is the sort of twit who tries to kill the embarrassment, but that, too, lines up with plenty of other isekai tales. Still, it frees Flio to do his own thing and explore the idea that he's not thrilled with what happened to him but is still basically a good guy at heart.

And he is a good guy, as we have hammered into us from the very first scene when another merchant is whipping demihumans while Flio (as Banaza) offers them money to have a nice dinner. The one thing he likes about his new world is that humans don't appear to discriminate against demihumans, although he still sees plenty of things he disagrees with regarding how people are treated. That's what lands him in the mess the episode ends on, in fact, he offers to take a little girl "home" when no one else will, except that it turns out that they had a pretty solid reason for refusing her.

But despite any efforts made, this is still very bland. It's got stat screens, magic system voices, and what looks like the start of Flio's personal harem of hypercompetent warrior women. It has mediocre visuals and about as much panache as a banana. It may not be terrible, but it could certainly be better.