Nick and Steve wade through the latest season of isekai, reverse-isekai, and reverse-reverse-isekai and come to a startling revelation: we've truly reached the bottom of the barrel.
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Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Nick
That's right folks, it's a new season, and that means we've got to pay the Isekai Tax before we're allowed to talk about anything good.
Which, per usual, is no small feat since we're still wading waist-high through the depths of this isekai fad. I'm sure someday, when anime adaptations have moved onto even more depraved material, we'll look back on these times with the wistful eye of a grizzled old sailor staring at an oceanic sunset. But for now, it freaking sucks.
It is more of a slog every season. I remember a few years back when having five isekai shows was considered notable. That number seems quaint compared to the otherworldly excess we get now. Let me tell ya, they almost uniformly made for the most excruciating viewing for the Preview Guide this time around.
Right, counting sequels, spinoffs, and even a couple of reverse-isekai examples, we had 10 or 11 shows that fell under this umbrella. That is not a small number. That is a large number.
Also, as you so helpfully illustrated, they're starting to bleed together as we mine more and more greedily into the depths of Narou. It's not just shows reusing the same plot device or aesthetic but making the same basic jokes as one another. It's like having an entire LARP group of nerds who want to be The Funny One.
To be fair, though, I noted some minor but appreciable improvements over recent prior seasons. The same dreck is tempered by more variety from the other shows, especially from the reverse-isekai examples. Also, there weren't any premieres this season that overtly featured the protagonist buying a slave. Small victories!
Honestly, I'm not sure which is worse: Watching another angsty Mevling justify slavery or watching him say this line a million times:
Now there's a quandary with no answer. But since we are here to separate the wheat from the chaff and the chaff from the manure, it makes the most sense to start with the manure. And no isekai this season resembles excrement better than KamiKatsu does.
It really is the most visible incarnation of failure you can get without a total production meltdown. Watching that first episode was like a bad trip without any of the fun of illicit drugs. Just an onslaught against the senses with the pacing of a heart attack and the aesthetic of a landfill.
Its saving grace is that it's bad in a deafening and baffling way. Not really so bad it's good, but so bad it's fascinating. Like, I'm entranced by the creative decisions that went into making a shot that looks straight out of a visual novel.
The stiff pose, bland and blurry background, and perfectly centered 3/4 profile are perfect. By which, I mean terrible.
It's such a weird moment because it feels intentional. That is straight-up a joke you would see in Endo and Kobayashi Live!, but here it has no context or reason to be purposeful. So it's a conscious creative decision that makes no sense, or it happened accidentally, and they stumbled into something this specific.
I wouldn't grant KamiKatsu the benefit of intent in any regard. The pacing is the biggest smoking gun, which is especially egregious when the show transitions from a BDSM gag to a hanging in less than five minutes.
That's probably the weirdest part. This kind of breathless editing would maybe make sense for a pure comedy that wanted to speed through the jokes. Yet KamiKatsu has a supposedly serious story and very high concept about this fantasy world having no concept of deities, our hero somehow birthing one into existence, and a whole society built around government-mandated suicide. It's insane, and all the more so when you remember our hero enters this world getting dick-based CPR.
It's genuinely the worst thing I watched this season. That is a horrific achievement when there's another isekai show written by the creator of
The Fruit of Evolution and directed by the man who brought us Berserk 2016.
It's such a miserable god damn experience. The first half is endless misery porn that can't even pretend to sympathize with its main character as a human, and the second half is endless on-screen text boxes.
Translators/typesetters should be eligible for hazard pay if assigned to an isekai with status boxes.
It sure was fun seeing every bad directing choice from So I'm a Spider, So What? transplanted into this thing. Constant, meaningless text. Terrible framing of action that never properly communicates impact. Yet no Aoi Yuuki to help make any of it tolerable.
Exactly, the anime is barely more technically competent than KamiKatsu, which is not the ruler you want to be measured by. The camera movement is downright disorienting with all the constant zooms and pans.
I especially love how the text panels become so ubiquitous that they frame entire shots through them. Just the perfect bad decision on all fronts.
It's just plain dumb too. Like putting aside that the narrative is a stupid, vindictive person's idea of "redemption," there's the part where Yuuya experiences overnight Chad-ification...and then he doesn't notice it for the entire summer break? Despite the fact we see his POV of him looking down at his rock-hard abs.
It's dumb as hell, but honestly, I was too caught up in it being so damn predictable. Because, of course, the cure for Yuuya being hated over his appearance is for him suddenly becoming a ripped supermodel. Or, well, what this show's art style imagines a supermodel looks like.
Boy looks like a C-tier character in an idol anime if you ask me.
Nick, you don't understand; as an isekai protagonist, he's contractually obligated to look like cardboard.
Either way, seeing Yuuya be rewarded by just ditching the body that was unfairly maligned by the entire world is a good tell that this show doesn't sympathize with him. It just needs to make him as pitiful as possible, and it figured "fat and ugly" was the laziest shorthand for it.
It favors the smallest-minded plot beat at every turn. It's repulsive television. Don't watch
Cheat Skill. And don't watch The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure: Serving Gods Who Go Too Far either, but that's not due to me hating it. That's due to it being so bland it's impossible to feel anything about it.
If your hero says any variation of that line, you've given up as a writer.
Oh man, let me tell you about this show, dear readers. So this guy, he walks into an anime producer's office and says he's got a show for him. The producer asks what it's about, and the guy proceeds to have a stroke while reading random titles from Narou, periodically throwing up a little bit in his mouth, all while the producer looks on with total apathy to his plight. Eventually, the man passes out, waking up on the floor hours later in a pool of his bodily fluids.
The producer looks down at him and says, "Well, that's quite a show you've got there. What do you call it?"
The answer is a show that felt like it was an hour long despite being just 20 minutes and was so demoralizingly dull that it took me over a week to come up with a halfway passable "The Aristocrats" joke for it.
The only edge it has over KamiKatsu or
Cheat Skill is that it's inoffensive because it's just a checklist of the familiar isekai tropes.
You've got the fourth wall breaking. You've got the wealthy fantasy parents. You've got the sudden natural adeptness at magic. You've got the maxed-out video game stats. You've got the hero accidentally summoning a monster that he then defeats. I've literally watched this exact show before, and it sucked then too.
It also looks like butt, but in the way most of these shows do, thanks to being pumped out like cheap toilet paper every season.
KamiKatsu and Cheat Skill look bad, but they're at least the result of bad creative decisions. Aristocrat makes no decisions, takes no chances. It is paste.
The thing is, it stole that joke from KONOSUBA, which beat it to the punch by seven years. I don't even like KONOSUBA, and yet I'm offended on its behalf. Get your own jokes, ya schmucks.
No doubt, but when I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, I will excuse plagiarism if it lets me take another jab at the show's expense.
What's even sadder is it's not even the only show to wholesale ripoff KONOSUBA this season. Summoned to Another World for a Second Time has its worse version of Darkness.
Here, finally, we have an isekai with a kinda neat concept. The protagonist saved the other world five years ago, but now he and his classmates have been brought back to deal with the aftershocks. I imagine some interesting narrative ground being trodden upon here, like our hero bridging the years-long gap in his isekai relationships. Maybe the audience has to piece together what happened in the original summoning from context clues. Since his classmates are with him, he may have to learn to work with others instead of saving the world himself. You could use this opportunity to comment on isekai tropes and take a more three-dimensional look at the consequences of otherworldly heroism. It could be cool! And naturally, the premiere exhibits no intent to explore any of this.
It's sad because it's the most competent and engaging of these standard isekai stories, at least on paper. Unfortunately, there's no honest attempt to capitalize on any of it. So it's the same as if the guy had just played the video game the fantasy world is based on and called it a day.
I'll give it this much: her recognizing him by the specific way he smacks her ass is at least audacious enough to be theoretically funny. But otherwise, this premiere slid off my brain like dead snake skin.
It's a shame because it's technically on point too. Decent character designs, good framing, and use of light/color. The director worked on parts of stuff like the Revue Starlight movie, Made in Abyss, and
Kaguya-sama, so there's some genuine talent here! Too bad the writing doesn't hold up.
It's soooooo close to being good. At this point, I'm desperate enough for entertainment that even the bro-con stuff wasn't a deal breaker. Yet the show drops that one joke in your lap without anything to jazz it up.
That's it. That's the joke. She wants to bone her brother, and he goes "Whaaaaaaa" and is weirded out. There's not even the taboo of Mr. Melvin being into it.
It's no Yosuga no Sora, that's for sure. Even when his sis enters the scene, it gets a couple of decent bits out of her, like her forcibly isekai-ing herself.
But otherwise, it really is just one joke. Alas.
What's striking to me is that it's so one-note about it. By episode two of Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? you had the positively shameless scene of the titular mom dry-humping her son and saying, "Mommy's wearing a thong today." That was terrible, but it was terribleness with conviction.
Woe be it for me to laud that show because it eventually turned one-note and boring. But you're right; it possessed that quintessential incestual spark of tackiness that
One-Hit Sis sadly lacks.
By the way, since we already brought it up multiple times, it's worth mentioning we have a Konosuba spinoff airing now too. It's not technically isekai, but it is more Megumin, and that's not the worst thing.
I'm kind of in limbo about that one. As I said, I don't care much for the original Konosuba, so I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't dislike this spinoff. Unfortunately, I also came away underwhelmed by its humor outside that one line.
After slumming it through most of the other titles, I won't complain about something being "just OK," that's for sure.
Me neither! Moreover, we've finally reached the point where we can talk about premieres I liked.
Mortifying that it took this long, but hey, out of the woods and into the Duke's Mansion, huh?
Indeed. Though Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion proves the plasticity of the "isekai" label. Because while it is about someone being reincarnated into another world, it bears little resemblance to the titles we've covered so far.
Which, incidentally, is why I like it, lol.
That says more about the previous titles and the general state of this astroturfed subgenre than it does about Raeliana. Regardless, my biggest hang-up with this one is that I wish it had slightly better production. As-is, the writing is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
It feels weird to break down a premiere that serves as a competent introduction to a longer narrative, but here we are! It introduces us to Raeli. It gives her motivation and a personality. We learn about the web of intrigue her character is trapped in and how she intends to use her outside knowledge to her advantage. She's not overpowered, but she's clever and has the conviction to use what little leverage she possesses to cheat her predetermined death. It's good stuff. It's an honest-to-god story. Hallelujah.
Raeliana refuses to play Sekiro, and I respect her for it.
We've already had more than our fair share of gamer protagonists. It's about time we had a different class of nerds at the helm.
But yeah, it's nice that instead of being in an otome game, Raeliana is in a novel. That gives her a very different dynamic with the characters, but it means digging through a different meta-narrative, especially since she's supposed to be a minor character.
Sometimes it goes too far and zooms in so much that the characters start aliasing.
However, it at least has an ambitious eye for direction, and it didn't make me motion-sick like Cheat Skill. So this one's a win.
I'm eager to see where this one goes and how silly the names can get.
Well, buddy, if you want silly names, we'll have to venture into the Mirror Realm of reverse-isekai.
Gesundheit.
Ah yes, Dead Mount Death Play, the story of one man's quest to strike down Da Share Z0ne once and for all.
I'll admit, I was surprised how long they committed to the bit with that one. If I hadn't known the synopsis, I would have genuinely thought this was just an average fantasy story about killing a bone bozo.
I knew nothing about it going in, so my first impression was being put off by how long the opening fight scene was. They could have shaved five minutes off that easily. But the intrigue picks up once we get to our world, and I was pleasantly surprised by the twist at the end. Then everything fell into place when I saw that Ryohgo Narita wrote this.
Narita's name is the main reason I'm interested in seeing more. On its face, shoving a reverse-isekai into a sort-of death game scenario isn't all that intriguing. However, this dude has a knack for writing extremely charismatic psychopaths, so I'm interested in watching a Fate thing for the first time in years. So I'll stick around to see what Bone Daddy Jr. gets up to.
It's trashy in a way that invites you to roll around in the dumpster, which is pretty rare. I'd still like another season of Baccano! but if that's not in the cards, I'm down to drown in blood for a bit.
Yeah, I've seen anime of this ilk fizzle out before, but Narita's a name I trust to keep the momentum going. If nothing else, I respect ending your ultraviolent edgy premiere with a dumb and macabre post-credits gag. That takes real conviction.
It's also a fun contrast to the other reverse-isekai show of the season, which is so sweet and chill that it could probably put you to sleep (Complimentary).
We are, admittedly, really stretching the definition of an isekai anime here, but Otaku Elf both technically counts and is a delight to watch, so I'm not backing down. Genres are fake, anyway. Only Red Bull is real.
Asspull or no, I enjoyed this premiere more than anything else we've mentioned here. It's warm, comfy, and heartfelt. It made me laugh and smile. The only stat screens were on Elda's legally-distinct game console. It was wonderful.
I think "warm" is the operative word here. Plenty of comedies center on nerds and nerd activities; Otaku Elf's undercurrent of genuineness and pleasantness buoys the whole affair. It balances jabs at Elda's NEET lifestyle with an understanding of her deeper character without leaning too heavily in either direction. It's charming as all hell.
I fully expected Elf Umaru-chan but came away with an incredibly charming character drama instead. By far my biggest surprise of the preview guide and the standout of this season's batch of Otherworldly fare. Granted, we had to split hairs to include it, but that's anime's fault.
The choice was either splitting hairs or suffering a splitting headache from all the interminable isekai anime we brought up earlier in the column, so I regret nothing. And I'm sure you noticed that all the shows we disliked were those that most closely hewed to the genre's tropes and stereotypes. Isekai, as it continues to be popularly understood, still doesn't seem interested in innovation. Thus, we will continue to clutch at its fringes.
So long as the market forces behind it continue, we'll keep getting more bland, incompetent sludge. I'm just happy I won't have to think about KamiKatsu again after this column. Now let me go check my e-mail to see about our Streaming Review assi-
Pardon me; just gonna go hunt for a truck to run me over.
Remember, Nick; there are fates worse than death. And most of them involve vehicular reincarnation.