The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Sasaki and Peeps

Even though Sasaki's droll corporate life is constantly filled with work, it leaves him tired and unfulfilled at the end of every day. In search of some companionship to fill the emptiness in his life, he visits a pet shop on a whim, not realizing he's about to change his life forever. After settling on an adorable bird and bringing it home...his new roommate reveals that it's an incredible sage from another world who promptly bestows Sasaki with supernatural powers as well as the ability to cross between worlds. All Sasaki wants to do is use these newfound powers to live in peace and comfort, but there are more than a few colorful characters who might get in the way of that...

Sasaki and Peeps is based on a light novel series of the same name by Buncololi and Kantoku. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

I was having a dandy old time with Sasaki and Peeps for a good while, there. The pacing was a bit slow for me, and I was disappointed that the titular Peeps wasn't a more fun and endearing character, but the magical bird still makes a cute foil for the beleaguered but well-meaning Sasaki—and I was interested to see what kinds of fun material future episodes might be able to mine out of Sasaki exploiting his access to modern-day technology to make it rich in the isekai world that Peeps brought him to. I thought to myself, “This was a pretty neat first episode!”, and I was getting ready to close out of Crunchyroll and get to work on my Preview Guide entry when the video player controls popped up and showed me that I was twenty minutes along…in a forty-eight-minute episode.

My heart sank. The sky grew suddenly overcast. A cold wind blew that chilled me to my bones, even though I was inside my house with the thermostat cranked up. “Damn you, Peeps,” I muttered, “Damn, you and your whimsical little bird face straight to hell.”

Here's the good news: By the end of those forty-eight minutes, Sasaki and Peeps managed to set up an unexpected and interesting story. I was predicting Sasaki to make it rich and start becoming proficient in otherworldly magic from minute one. But I most certainly did not think that this would lead to him ending up embroiled in an underground magic war between government agents and rogue “psychics” that has seemingly been plaguing Earth for some time—and also apparently has nothing whatsoever to do with his erstwhile isekai adventures. That's pretty damned fun! It also provides Hoshizaki, the show's one supporting character other than Peeps who feels worth paying attention to.

The bad news, though, is that nothing about this admittedly fascinating turn of events justified the episode's sluggish pacing and, frankly, boring atmosphere. You'd think that all of the extra runtimes would give the show the chance to fit in some more scenes of drama, comedy, or character development, but no, instead we just get so many danged exposition dump montages set to Sasaki's voiceover. It wasn't exactly excruciating to sit through, since the show looks okay enough and features a lead character that I don't actively want to smack in the mouth—but I almost certainly would have dropped this premiere halfway through if I wasn't getting paid to cover the whole thing. I'm glad I didn't because future episodes of this show could end up being a good time.

But for the love of all that is holy, the anime industry, stop it with these hour-long premieres for shows that have no business whatsoever being an hour long. It's killing us.

In this week's episode of I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too, our hero discovers that not only can he travel between worlds, but he can use magic in both, too—all while gaining the attention of the various women around him. As this is going on, he—

Wait. What do you mean I'm talking about the wrong anime? Oh! My bad. How scatterbrained can I be? In this week's episode of Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement, our hero begins selling cheap items in our world as luxury items in the fantasy world. This gets our hero on the good side of both traders and the nobility which—

What do you mean by “still the wrong anime”? Oh, I'm sorry. It seems that sitting through this double-length episode might have rotted my brain a little.

All joking aside, when diving into the isekai genre, most anime laser in on a single aspect of the archetypal story—twisting it in new and interesting ways. Sasaki and Peeps, on the other hand, feels like the shotgun approach to storytelling: unleashing a scattershot all at once to see what hits.

To put it another way, what is this story supposed to be about? Is it about building a financial empire in another world? Is it about the double life of a lowly office worker? Is it the tale of a psychic police force filled with danger and intrigue? Or is it the story of a Yandere schoolgirl in love with her middle-aged neighbor? The short answer is “all of the above” and the long answer is “I have no idea.” I've spent 48 minutes with this show and still have very little sense about where it is going.

On the other side of things, despite the massive runtime, the whole story still feels rushed—especially the scenes in the other world. If you need to constantly “tell not show” with hamfisted narration to keep things moving, you have a major issue with your story. I mean, I can't remember a single character's name in the fantasy world, and sure as crap don't feel invested in any one of them.

All in all, this is an anime that somehow manages to be both too much and too little at the same time. And if you can't sell me on your show even after forcing me to spend double the time watching it, you're not getting me to come back for more.

Early in the double-length first episode of Sasaki and Peeps, Sasaki asks if this isn't one of those isekai things. It kind of is – Peeps, the Java sparrow he adopts, is a reincarnated Starsage from another world, and one of the things he does after convincing Sasaki to take him home is to sweep him off to that fantasy realm temporarily. Why? I'm still more or less asking myself some variation of that about much of this episode, but in that specific case, the answer appears to be "to teach him magic so that the rest of the plot can happen." Surely, there was a less complicated way to do this.

That sums up most of my feelings about this episode: surely, there was a less complicated way to do this. The story seems almost admirably dedicated to combining several trends of the past few years into a single show: there's an old guy isekai (Sasaki is thirty-nine), formerly human familiar, sells cheap modern crap in a fantasy world for lots of cash, and mysterious government organization for magic users, all just tossed in the blender for our delectation. Add in a schoolgirl with a potentially unhealthy crush on Sasaki and a coworker whose workaholic tendencies make her practically deranged, and this is the equivalent of when an eight-year-old is left in front of the spice cabinet unsupervised and tosses as many weird ingredients together as they can. Even more baffling, none of these disparate tropes come together in a meaningful way, which sort of craps on my assumption that this was forty-eight minutes long to fully set up the main action. That still may be true, but not being able to see how after this feels like a serious storytelling issue.

Despite these problems, there are some solid elements here. Sasaki makes good faces, and his unfettered love for cute animal videos is very relatable. Peeps (or P-chan when you hear Sasaki say it) is adorable, and I love the little chirps and trills he makes. The schoolgirl is also an interesting character, although her plotline could get very creepy very quickly – likely on purpose, which feels like more than I can say about anything else here. Mostly, this is an exercise in telling rather than showing and just a slog to get through. I haven't read the novels, but I'm inclined to suggest that the story might be more enjoyable to experience that way.

This premiere really should have been half the length and moved at twice the speed. By the end of this double-length opener, the story has reached an interesting place and one that could potentially get me back for another episode. I wish we hadn't muddled through a slow, meandering slog to get to that point.

As tired as I am with everything to do with isekai, Sasaki and Peeps at least put in the effort to spice things up conceptually. Instead of stumbling onto another world on his own, our hero winds up with a bird buddy who's the reincarnation of some infinitely powerful wizard from Generic Fantasy Land #1839494, and they form a partnership to help improve both their lives. That buddy dynamic, along with Sasaki leading a double- and then triple-life when he gets embroiled with psychics on our side of the isekai border, could make for a nice twist on such an overly familiar setup. This average, amicable businessman getting embroiled in high-stakes espionage and otherworldly business ventures simultaneously is a funny premise.

Unfortunately, having an interesting idea doesn't mean much when the execution is this dry and slow. So many sequences in this show just drag out expository dialogue or repeatedly explain self-evident things. Sasaki feels the need to narrate every moment of his life, so every time he learns a new spell or meets a new person, he has to laboriously explain to us, "I learned a new spell!" or "I met a new person!" for the entire episode. Meanwhile, none of this extra time is used to build rapport with any of the characters, not even Peeps. In one sequence, Sasaki thinks about starting a restaurant, immediately meets a chef, hires him, and learns his entire backstory without the other man ever uttering a word on the screen. He is not a character, but a plot device with a face, and that goes for basically everyone else in Sasaki's two worlds. When he becomes a Psychic Cop, all of the pertinent information is explained to him off-screen by unnamed background characters and is then communicated to us solely through Sasaki's narration. So we wind up with an interminably long episode where it feels like we've just been reading a summary of Sasaki's life rather than experiencing it.

In the end, you get a story that could, theoretically, go to interesting places or have some novelty. In practice, however, you have an introduction that feels aimless and repetitive, with a very shallow reward for the amount of time spent on it. A genre mash-up on its own isn't enough to make something this lifelessly directed and poorly paced worth following.