The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Headhunted to Another World: From Salaryman to Big Four!

Dennosuke Uchimura is just an ordinary Japanese salaryman until he's sent to work in Vietnam, where he dies in a hit-and-run accident. Uchimura is reincarnated and summoned to another world by the Demon King, who offers him a new job–as one of the Four Heavenly Kings of his army.

Headhunted to Another World: From Salaryman to Big Four! is based on the manga series by writer Benigashira and artist Muramitsu. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

I've been really flopping back and forth on what score to give this episode: 3.5 stars or 3. From the start, it's easy to see that this show is certainly better than most of the endless stream of isekai anime we get each season. While pretty much every isekai story has some twist on the formula, the one we see here is better than most—and the show uses it to its full extent instead of falling back on the endless stream of tropes associated with this particular fantasy sub-genre.

Simply put, this entire anime is built around the not-so-hyperbolic idea that we've gotten to the point where an evil Demon Lord is a better boss than what you typically get in corporate Japan. It's a solid joke—and, as a person who has both worked in corporate Japan and knows people who have worked in more than a few Japanese companies that exploit their employees, I can tell you it's one of those dark humor jokes that are “funny because they're true.”

But more than just a punchline, this first episode really works to expand on the concept through its main character. Uchimura is a person who has learned through experience how hard work and understanding can get a job done. He understands that cultural context is important and that arguments can arise between even those acting in good faith. Thematically, it works well and shows that this anime has something to actually say about the world we live in.

The reason I've been going back and forth on the score is the simple fact that I don't really like Uchimura as a person. While I understand his trauma, I find his overdramatic reactions to not only his current situation but also his past insecurities annoying rather than relatable. However, this is something I expect will change over the course of the season as he becomes more comfortable in his new role and is truly appreciated by those who work with him. If nothing else, this first episode has done enough to let me give it the benefit of the doubt, and that's why I've ended up giving it the score I have.

One of the ways I have started to immediately sniff out the heinous isekai crap from the merely serviceable ones is how much time we spend getting to know the main characters before they get run over, or have a heart attack at their desks, or whatever else sends them to their generic fantasy afterlives. There has been a distressing trend over the last couple of years where shows don't even pretend to care about giving us a main character that is worth a damn and instead just through their anonymous do-gooder into the reincarnation wringer before the opening credits are finished scrolling. Headhunted to Another World is, at the very least, patient enough to spend a few minutes establishing our main guy Dennosuke Uchimara as an actual human person with a life before he is abruptly run over by a scooter and sent on his merry way to Isekai Land. Is he a great protagonist? Dear lord, no, but he has recognizable goals and the bare essential internal conflicts that allow us to recognize him as more than a lazy bundle of cliches and copy-pasted fashion accessories (though, at this point, I am desperate enough to take whatever I can get).

Here's another thing that Headhunted to Another World has going for it: The show is actually about something! Again, I won't pretend like it is saying anything revolutionary or complicated about the way that 9-to-5 workers are exploited and undervalued by their jobs in Japan, but dammit, I'll take a thimble-full of substance over nothing at all. I actually chuckled at the joke of Dennosuke's new Demon Lord boss being exponentially more humane and reasonable than his previous human overlords—and the show mines some decent gags out of the ways that this guy has to use all of the mundane skills that have been taken for granted all these years in order to accomplish feats like brokering peace with monster races.

The show even manages to inject just a smidgen of personality into the requisite romantic elements of the story. Ulmandra is a dragon-lady who complements Dennosuke well by filling the role of the typical “surly-but-secretly-a-big-softy” gal who ends up partnered with our well- meaning but doofy hero. They're a pretty cute pair, all things considered, and I could see myself checking in on them every week or two just to see what sitcom scenarios they have to figure out next. Headhunted to Another World isn't going to change anyone's life or launch a million-dollar franchise, but it's a decent isekai comedy that stands out amongst its many, many mediocre competitors. Consider checking it out, if you've got some extra space in your seasonal watchlist.

If you look past the dark color scheme and awkward animation and, for some people, the fact that this is isekai, is there anything to enjoy about Headhunted to Another World? Somewhat to my surprise, the answer is yes. Oh, don't get me wrong, this is still fairly standard for its genre and subgenre (isekai and summoned, respectively), but it has enough little quirks to make it more entertaining than you might expect.

Chief among those is the use of context. Our protagonist, Dennosuke Uchimura, gives the impression of being utterly downtrodden. His work life was a series of cruel decisions made by bosses who considered his strengths without ever bothering to praise him. The overall impression is that the company he worked for knew how talented he was, but since he was also easygoing and not prone to complaining, they kept moving him around and dumping assignments on him. Every success simply meant a worse task: a successful negotiation with a foreign business got him sent to a foreign country to build up a warehouse, for example, without a single word of praise. To Dennosuke, it looked like constant punishment for doing his job. That's what makes the fact that he's scouted (possibly after death; I wasn't entirely certain) by an actual evil overlord so delicious. I love the implication that his bosses were rotten but would remain nothing but bad people because a true master of evil knows how to use his people and make them feel valued.

The fun of this episode is watching the Demon Lord make Dennosuke realize that he's actually good at his job. His “entrance exam” appears to be more designed to prove to Dennosuke that he's good enough. Yes, it also convinces spitfire General Ulmanda, but that almost feels secondary. Watching Ulmanda be absolute garbage at negotiation helps Dennosuke to realize his own worth. That's at the expense of Ulmanda, of course – her inability to realize that a pile of straw isn't garbage to a minotaur, a half-human, half-ungulate hybrid, doesn't make her look that good. But there's a strong suggestion from the opening theme that she and the other two busty lady generals are there for comedic and/or eye-candy purposes, which is too bad, but par for the course. Unfortunately, there's something very amiss with the way the characters move, which drops the enjoyment of looking at Ulmanda down a peg or two, and the art isn't great on the whole; the poor Minotaur has teeny tiny legs that don't look capable of supporting his body, and the Demon Lord appears to have two faces (one on his chest and one on his head), which kept distracting me.

Still, this has some potential. No one's voice is screechy so far, and the pink-haired bartender possibly being a figment of Dennosuke's imagination is an interesting feature. I doubt this will blow anyone away, but it still could be a fun time.

There are two wolves inside me: one says Headhunted to Another World deserves three stars because it was competently executed. The second says isekai slop doesn't deserve that level of consideration. The first one retorts that the second is biased against modern-day isekai, and the second one replies that all reviews are inherently biased and the first shouldn't make pretensions of objectivity. Meanwhile, I'm staring at a document with nothing but the word “Rating:” blinking at me.

Well, it turns out the first wolf won, because all-in-all, there were enough things I liked about the episode and only a few things I disliked. There was a bit of a victim mentality, since Dennosuke was clearly extremely competent at his job and was disregarded by his boss for seemingly no reason. However, as someone who worked her ass off in a difficult position at work only to be rewarded with being laid off recently, I did sympathize with him more than the usual Melvins standing in a corner and crying, “Everyone is so mean to me for no raisin.” He has real skills, not just video game stats, hard-won from years of work experience in challenging environments. The official interesting or unique thing was Dennosuke's izakaya dream state, creating a space for him to reflect and connect his past experience to his current fantasy situation.

This is not to say the episode was free of sin. For some reason, every single fantasy adventure series is a harem now, with a single male protagonist surrounded by sexed-up female party members. At first, two of the other three generals look like they have cool designs, but the theme song reveals that there are, in fact, sexy ladies underneath the cloaks and lumpy fabric. The one we spend time with in this episode, Ulmandra, is a classic tsundere, refusing to believe in Dennosuke and his ability as a negotiator until he draws on a similar situation to smooth things over. It's alienating and frustrating that, as usual, women only exist in these fantasy worlds as objects of desire and paper dolls.

On the other hand, Akio Ōtsuka is the Demon Lord, and it's always a delight to hear from him.