The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered

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Awaking to absolute chaos and carnage while on a school trip, Yogiri Takatou discovers that everyone in his class has been transported to another world. He had somehow managed to sleep through the entire ordeal himself, missing out on the Gift — powers bestowed upon the others by a mysterious Sage who appeared to transport them. Even worse, he and another classmate were ruthlessly abandoned by their friends, left as bait to distract a nearby dragon. Although not terribly bothered by the thought of dying, he reluctantly decides to protect his lone companion. After all, a lowly Level 1000 monster doesn't stand a chance against his secret power to invoke Instant Death with a single thought. If he can stay awake long enough to bother using it, that is.

My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered is based on a light novel of the same name by Tsuyoshi Fujitaka and Chisato Naruse. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Thursdays.

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James Beckett
Rating:

After waking from the sudden onset of narcolepsy that My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered induced, I'll admit that I began formulating all sorts of silly, hyperbolic analogies to encapsulate the many ways in which this show is a heaping pile of crap, but I've made it a standing policy to never put more work into writing about a show than the creators put in to actually making it. As such, I've asked my editors what the absolute bare minimum word count is for me to turn this thing in and still get paid. It looks like “350” is the magic number. I hope y'all brought those little clickers that teachers use to keep attendance on field trips, because here we go:

The main character of My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered is named Yogiri, and his deal is that he can kill whoever he wants with his mind powers or whatever—and also he has these stupid little hair flippies poking out of his head. That's his whole character. His friend is Tomochika, who is "girl." That's her whole character. Their school bus got isekai'd for reasons, and the magic lady who isekai'd them kills a guy and tells all everyone that they're going to have to do magic fighty stuff—also for reasons.

Did I mention that this entire premiere takes place either inside of this bus or in the featureless field that the bus is sitting in—and that getting through its first ten minutes felt like it took several hours?

Anyways, some of the other classmates who don't matter show up and decide for no particular reason to become murder-rapists. One of them is voiced by goddamned Hiro Shimono—which really pissed me off, because he's basically just the same character from The Fruit of Evolution, and if I sat throught that trash-fire just so Seiichi could cheat on his harem of sentient animal slaves, then by golly—

Wait, that's it. If we include this completely necessary aside that I'm typing right now, that makes for exactly 350 words. That's all this anime gets.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:
This first episode of My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered is a perfect example of the fact that how a story is told is just as important as the contents of said story—and by that I mean that this anime tells its story horribly.

I enjoy the My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered manga quite a bit and was looking forward to seeing it on screen. So I'm a bit baffled at the choices made here. I know it's right there in the title but why spoil the big reveal of his powers in the opening scene (by showing an event that won't be come relevant until much later) and then do so again immediately after by showing what should be the climax of the episode right at the start?

I mean, imagine this had happened instead: We start on the bus following Dannoura as the main character with Takatou just seeming to be a sleeping background character. Then everything is played straight with 100% seriousness: the classmates get their powers, abandon those with no powers, and the dragon attacks. It's got drama and tension, psychological horror and ultra-violence—then Takatou wakes up and kills the dragon hilariously easily (with it's death pratfall included). The sudden tone shift would not only show what kind of comedy this anime is going to be, but would also do so in a way that people would be bound to remember.

Instead, we get the events all jumbled together in a way that does away with both the tension and narrative impact. This show has all the pieces needed to be a fun anime to watch—if only they were put together in the right way. But as it stands now, I'll only be watching episode two because of my love for the manga—but if things continue this way, I'll likely bow out soon.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

God damn aliens made this show. I have to believe that because I cannot fathom how human beings with any sense of tone, atmosphere, or human emotion would make something that misfires this badly at everything it's trying to do. If a malfunctioning computer program didn't create this, the only explanation is that extraterrestrials are trying to sneak into human society by making terrible cartoons.

I really don't know how to describe what watching this premiere was like. If you just read the subtitle script, you'd think this was a grim, gritty take on the isekai formula, where an entire class of students get transported to Fantasy Battle Royale and immediately start murdering each other in cold blood. Seemingly, every character in this show is a stone-cold sociopath ready to kill, sacrifice, or posthumously molest their fellow students for no other reason than they can. Our hero is a blank-faced cipher who kills as easily as he breathes, and is more than happy to make humans and monsters drop dead if they irritate him even a little. Based solely on the script, you'd think this show was the most edgelord fantasy ever animated.

If you were to watch the episode without subtitles, relying only on visuals and audio, you'd think this was identical to every other isekai anime you've ever seen. The character designs range from bland to "Why does the male lead have those stupid blue hair sprigs on the side of his face?" The direction is as bland as you can imagine. There is not a hint of atmosphere or danger to anything you're looking at, and even when people are murdered in cold blood right in front of them, none of the characters even blink. The very first scene after the cold open is our hero and his big-boobed love interest having a wacky argument while two of their classmates' dead bodies sit 10 feet away, their blood still warm and soaking into the ground. A trio of anime bullies show up loudly proclaiming their desire to murder, re-animate, and rape said love interest, and our hero doesn't so much as grimace, and she just looks mildly scandalized that a fat nerd would want to touch her.

The result is a bizarre, unpleasant mess where every character is a horrible person for no reason, none of the jokes or action work, and I developed a bald spot from scratching my head for 20-odd minutes. I worry I'm making this sound more interesting than it is, but it's quite a mess that is only really engaging because of how baffling every creative decision is. I said this had to be the work of aliens, but that's only because thinking that something was put together with this little care, vision, or energy is way more depressing.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

There's nothing more painful than a paint-by-numbers series. As with many shows, that could change later for this one, but this is a definite slog as far as first episodes go. Taking the "entire class gets swooped up" approach to isekai, My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered takes a title that states the obvious and pairs it with absolutely nothing inventive. It is a little more overt about being a power fantasy isekai than many other series; the woman who summoned the entire busload of high schoolers actually downloads magic software into everyone's heads to give them their stat screens. While I wouldn't quite call her the Kyubey of isekai (that would be giving her too much credit), she may as well be wearing a t-shirt that says, "Hi! Don't trust me!"

One thing that this episode does do decently well is show how power can get in people's heads. Once most of the students have their skills forcibly downloaded into their brains, they immediately begin acting like a group of precocious Chosen Ones. The guy whose class is "general" immediately decides to throw the four students who rejected the program under the bus (or into the wyvern), because he's, like, powerful and stuff now. The rest of the class follows along with him, and it doesn't look like it's because they're afraid of him; they're just better than everyone else now. We see this attitude again when three boys come back to the bus with the explicit goal of turning Tomochika (powerless and thus presumed dead) into a sex zombie, because they can.

Still, any character development is left at that surface level. The protagonist appears to have had his instant death ability since childhood and has zero compunctions about using it. He's protecting Tomochika, but that may be at least in part because she pressed her breasts into his arm, so that's gross, and opens the door for more reciprocal actions along the same lines. More importantly, there's zero reason to care about any of these characters, and that's a major issue, at least for me. There's potential for this to be schlocky fun, but the setting is so devoid of anything new or interesting that I'm unsure if the story can overcome it. Add in lackluster visuals and clunky pacing; this just exists. There's better isekai coming this season (based on the source material, at least), so you'd probably be better off waiting for that.