Just one look at the trailer and the key visual and you can already tell that Loner Life is going to be another run-of-the-mill isekai. I'd be willing to bet you can even tell where its strengths and weaknesses lie as well.

To be fair, the music isn't bad, and neither is the background art. The OP's actually a bop and its animation is pretty sleek for what it is. And okay, having your main character ride a giant wave on a surfboard to defeat a dungeon's giant fish monster is so stupid it's kind of awesome. Yet a lot of the flaws from other series of its kind are so present here that I almost feel like I could have stolen a line or two from some of my previous reviews and dumped them here. I can be pretty lazy, but not that lazy.

The animation ain't exactly painful on the eyes, but it's still as flat as you'd expect it to be from a show like this. This doesn't translate well in its fight sequences--I've made barbecue bacon cheeseburgers that had more spice. Seriously, there's a sword fight between our main character Haruka and a skeleton where Haruka's hair is moving more than the fight itself. The isekai fantasy setting is generic stuff filled with perfectly-walled towns, dark dungeon crawls, and baddies like goblins and cyclops and a lot of the other things you've seen a thousand times before. The show's RPG mechanics force Haruka into picking the low-tier abilities for his loner class, but outside of that there's no further twist on the usual “level up and gain abilities” shtick. Speaking of Haruka's class, get this folks: our main man is a classless loner adventurer in this world, meaning that he is, wait for it, a NEET. Absolute madness!

But what makes this show stand out? Simple: our main character Haruka never becomes a loner as the title implies, because he quickly earns a Subjugation skill that causes some of his fellow isekai'd classmates to form a harem that constantly follows and supports him. In other words, Loner Life is basically the isekai edition of 100 Girlfriends. Albeit the slimmed down Diet Dr. Pepper variety of it.

Loner Life introduces this concept within its initial few episodes, and the moment it does is the moment it cannot stop being an imitation of 100 Girlfriends. That's not inherently a problem, since I enjoy the gags and hijinks of 100 Girlfriends enough that I don't mind seeing its vibes replicated. So long as they're done right, of course. What is a problem is that unlike the girls of 100 Girlfriends, no member of Haruka's harem has any real personality to them. They all exist as moeblobs, to the point where the character closest to Haruka, the class rep Touka, still just exists for the sake of existing. It's a shame that this mob of moe is pretty uninteresting, because a part of me actually likes their designs. At times, they have some mildly cute and funny facial expressions, and if this were a better show, I'd have no problems making this shot right here my desktop wallpaper. Even chibified Haruka occasionally makes for a good frame.

There are opportunities for making Haruka, Touka, and the harem more interesting, especially considering there's a schism that happens early on between the jocks, delinquents, and girls that were isekai'd from Haruka's school into this world. While not the most fleshed-out plot point ever, it's enough of a catalyst that it could have been used to progress the story and characters. But despite a minor plot twist midway through the series, there's still not enough substance in Haruka, the harem, or the aforementioned schism to make for anything witty or compelling. Still, even if Touka and her squad of anime girls simply exist for the sake of having a harem, Loner Life manages to create a chemistry between them and Haruka that is at least plausible. I think it's because the anime realizes how equally stock Haruka and Touka are, so there's at least a feeling of “birds of a feather flock together” between the two. The anime also attempts to dial its harem-ness down by having Haruka ditch them a few times to live out his loner life. There are some moments of levity here and there to appreciate--I'll admit that one particular gag of Haruka abandoning his harem and meeting a daughter of the lord of the very town he's trying to escape from did bring a smile to my face.

I think I've finally run into the inevitable problem of being bombarded by too many isekai. But I can't complain. After all, what else was I supposed to expect? So long as a bajillion more isekai keep coming out of the woodwork a minute, the number of ways you can call something mid just gets exponentially bigger and bigger until it stretches out to infinity. My final thought: there are a lot of other isekai I'd love to live a loner life in, but this ain't one of them.