The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time

Not even a hero, Takumi Iruma gets accidentally mixed in with a group of heroes chosen to be summoned to another world. As compensation for the mix-up, a goddess offers him the right to choose any skill he wishes for. Hoping for a peaceful and quiet life with nothing to do with fighting or going into battle, he chooses a seemingly boring creation skill. However, it turns out that "alchemy" is the most powerful skill that allows him to create everything, from a holy sword to flying ships. This cheat skill he unexpectedly acquired turns him into a wealthy merchant, making him undefeatable in battles.

Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time is based on the Someday Will I Be The Greatest Alchemist? light novel series by writer Kogitsunemaru and illustrator Hitogome. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

So much of this episode feels like it's just going through the motions. We have “the hero's meeting with a goddess” (who explains the plot) and then “the hero rescuing a random girl from danger” shortly after his rebirth. The rest of the episode is just an extended amount of time with Takumi figuring out how the magic system works—which is, of course, based on video game status screens. It's lazy, boring, and is all the more egregious because it has no obvious twist—no new take on the formula—to separate it from the myriad of other isekai stories.

Sent to another world due to a goddess messing up? Seen it! Accidentally summoned and not the true hero? Might as well be a staple at this point. Reborn with crazy alchemist skills? Check that one off. Totally overpowered? I mean, that's kind of a core facet of the entire sub-genre. Cute animal companion that will almost inevitably turn into a sexy waifu at some point? Goes without saying.

But what actually upsets me about this premiere is that there are moments where something genuinely interesting happens—only to cut back immediately to the same old boring cliches. What is it about the Empress and her empire that is so sinister? What do they actually want the heroes for? Why did Nolyn give her blessing to the summoned female hero? Why did Nolyn send Takumi one year into the past?

There are clearly hints to a whole second story going on here with Nolyn and the empire battling it out. And I'm not going to lie, the fight between a goddess and a human empire sounds like it could be a really cool story—especially as Nolyn has to act through proxies while the empire can act out in the open. But instead of focusing on that, we watch a bog standard protagonist—one so unremarkable he doesn't even have a backstory beyond “was a company employee”—faff about with magic for 22 minutes. And honestly, I don't need more anime like that in my life.

We've officially reached the point in my career where the only way for me to continue writing about all of these goddamned isekai anime is to break out of the box with some experimental avant-garde nonsense. I recognize that you, my dear reader, may not have read every single preview and review I've written over the last ten years, but seeing as I have to live with the memories of these hundreds of spitefully mediocre episodes until my faculties are blissfully eradicated by the ravages of time and age, we're going to have to get a little weird with it every now and again. Now, could I have simply taken the easy route and run with one of the dozens of obvious jokes that this anime set up for itself with that stupid title? Sure, and Lord knows I was tempted! I am a proud critic, however, and I detest the idea that a show might get the better of me by virtue of boring the skill and experience out of my brain. So, instead, I attempted an experiment in synesthesia. If my eyes and ears were physically incapable of processing the featureless slop of nothing that Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time presents itself as, perhaps my other senses could kick into overdrive and make up for that failure.

Back in 2016, in an article for the AV Club, Mike Vago wrote about that most damning of British culinary inventions, the toast sandwich. He described it as “an extravagance of blandness,” which is a perfect description for most of these crummy isekai anime than I could ever devise. So, upon finishing the first episode of Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time, I went to the kitchen and made myself a toast sandwich. My reasoning was this: “If I can no longer imagine a world where it makes sense to watch the animated equivalent of 'plain' being shoved into your mouth over and over again, perhaps I can eat my way into understanding this phenomenon.”

The Wikipedia entry for the toast sandwich notes how the original 19th-century recipe included the helpful advice that “this sandwich may be varied by adding a little pulled meat, or very fine slices of cold meat, to the toast…” Let's be honest, though. Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time isn't the kind of anime that is concerned with adding things like “flavor,” “protein,” or “nutritional value” to its list of ingredients, and so I went without any such niceties in my own concoction. Given that the anime doesn't look or sound like complete dog water, I did opt to add exactly one teaspoon of butter to one side of the middle, toasted slice of bread in my sandwich. That barely noticeable hint of fat and salt is a good enough representation of the bare minimum of effort that Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time puts into being a functional television show, I reckon.

For comparison's sake, if I were making a Fruit of Evolution sandwich, I would have been forced to dip the toast into the most recently filled corner of my cat's litterbox. Thank God for small favors, I suppose.

So, what was the result of my grand experiment? Well, to be honest, the sandwich wasn't terrible, since I at least used a decent quality of bread. It was, however, utterly lacking in flavor, devoid of any human warmth or personality, and honestly rather depressing to consume. It was a plate full of carbs and empty calories that exists only to fill space inside of the stomach and kill time in between proper meals. This matches with my experience of watching Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time, with one significant exception: The toast sandwich, for all of its unforgivable mediocrity, still provided my body with a little bit of the fuel it needs to stay alive. It won't be doing my waistline any favors, certainly, but if we're being really technical about things, the sandwich still afforded me a few more hours of time on this Earth with the people I love. Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time did nothing of the sort. All it did was steal my precious time, and insult my intelligence at the same time. For that reason, I have to knock a full star off of the rating for the anime.

The sandwich was alright, though.

I admit it: the cute giant poison spider won me over. Sure, Maple/Kaede (the name changes based on the language you watch in) doesn't come in until almost the end of the episode, and yes, she looks like a poor man's version of the protagonist of So I'm a Spider, So What?, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for an endearing arachnid, and goodness knows that this first episode doesn't have a whole lot else going for it.

Probably the biggest strike against Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time is the general lack of creativity behind it. There's a fantasy world named after Norse mythology, a summoning ritual that catches up with our hapless hero, and theme songs that show said hero surrounded by lovely fantasy ladies. Takumi's accidental death due to a forbidden summoning ritual gone awry nets him the blessings of Lady Nolyn, a goddess with skeletal wings, and naturally, that comes with untold powers. Meanwhile, three high school kids turn out to be the intentional summoning targets, and I think Akemi is on the right track when she says that Empress Elizabeth is up to no good.

The look of the episode is similarly unimaginative. When Takumi tells us that he's hot now, it's nearly impossible to have made that determination on our own because his character design is so bland. As I mentioned, the spider's design is remarkably similar to that of another, more famous spider, and there's a distinct lack of details in the visuals. Like many other shows, this one makes the mistake of using stat screens in lieu of elaboration in either worldbuilding or backgrounds. The animation isn't as stilted as other shows that have aired thus far, but it's still on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to fluidity. The one detail that's worth noting is that the blonde who shows up at the very end of the episode looks like she may have had her elven ears clipped, which is significant because Takumi can help the spider regrow a leg. (After he tames her, mind you; that may not be a good sign.)

With this dearth of innovation, it's at least a little baffling that this show is getting a simuldub. It's good enough that which you prefer will come down almost entirely to your language preferences rather than one cast being stronger than the other. I do think the Japanese voice actor for Elizabeth does a slightly better job of sounding mildly sinister, but apart from that, the casts are very well-matched, and I applaud both Afumi Hashi and Jessica Peterson for keeping Kaede/Maple's voice out of the ear-piercing range. Oh, yes, that's the other notable difference between dub and sub: in Japanese, the spider's name is Kaede, while the English dub translates it to Maple. I'm not sure that was necessary, and it's one of those little details that gets more annoying the longer I think about it.

Right now, it may be worth giving this another episode to see why Lady Nolyn sent Takumi back a year before his summoning. That and the potential clipped ears on the blonde could indicate that this will get better as it goes. But that may be asking a lot, even for a show with a cute giant spider.

Recently, there's been a lot of chatter about how Netflix is instructing its showrunners not to write scripts that require a lot of audience engagement to follow or to have characters describe what they do as they do it. It made me think of all the light novel adaptations where the protagonist narrates incessantly, listing every action they make as they make it. Since Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time premiered with an English dub, I decided to try something: if I put it on and laid in bed staring at the ceiling, would I still be able to follow it?

Yes. Yes, I was. A few things weren't immediately obvious, but properly watching the Japanese version indicated that I had inferred everything correctly based on genre awareness. The performances ranged from good to high school drama class, but the script made it crystal clear what was happening at all times, no visual cues needed. In fact, the visuals failed to add much at all, with the dull world design and bland character designs – though I did like the goddess' skeletal wings (something interesting or unique, check!). The experience was about as dull as watching paint dry, and my second viewing, where I could see as well as hear everything that was happening, was not much more interesting. After all, it's like almost every other chill isekai ever. After a conversation with a goddess, Takumi gets transferred to a world where everything is accomplished via game-style menus with skills and levels, including things like “intuition.” He encounters a village of people who are ever-so-kind, friendly, and helpful.

To its credit, there are little hints at more friction than there initially appears to be – for some reason, Lady Nolyn has chosen to plop him down a year before the people he was accidentally summoned alongside. He amasses levels easily enough, but not always in the areas he wants to, and it's a struggle to keep points allocated to his desired skills. It's something, but it didn't keep me from groaning out loud when I checked the timestamp and realized I was only halfway through the episode. This is possibly the most boring anime of all time.