This Week in Anime

Reincarnated in Another Column

Chris
Lucas, the new anime season is underway, and you know what that means: while everyone else has picked out their favorite cool new shows to follow for the next three months, we get to start by slogging through all the ones about doofuses reincarnated into bland fantasy worlds.

As is often the case, we can cover a fair number of shows here, so kicking things right off with Loner Life works well enough. Especially since it is effectively the most "basic isekai" of this season's batch.

To the point that said same-face MC (I think his name's Haruka) fully predicts where it's all going in the opening minutes and seems as exhausted with the affair as we are.

I'd say "Get used to it" since supposedly weak skills actually being the strongest is a persistent gimmick in this genre space (as we'll see), but in Loner Life's case, it still comes off like a misfire. Not only do Haruka's amazing trash abilities suck any tension out of his solo survival efforts, they quickly turn around his opinion on the isekai situation. That was the actual unique thing this show had going for it at first!

And man, I hope you enjoy listening to him narrate all that as it happens for the entire length of the first episode.

Exactly. This sort of thing can work, but it does so much better when your protagonist is a cute spider played by Aoi Yūki voicing her little heart out. Loner Life is a decidedly less interesting Let's Play to watch.

Really the nicest thing I can say about it is that even though it was probably the show that had me the least engaged as I watched it for this column, it was also the first one I watched, so it left me with ostensibly nowhere to go but up.

This tends to be a driving force of a lot of these series, I've found: authors who seemed to mostly be entertaining thought experiments about how they'd min/max this or that game system to their own benefit if they wound up in that world as opposed to our boring old regular one. Forgetting that fiddling with stats and menus doesn't make for the most entertaining television, especially when you haven't gotten the memo that games like Metaphor: Refantazio have been actively trying to make that part at least more visually interesting than these anime's boring ol' status screens.

Decent visual effort can go a long way, and getting back to the topic at hand can also be a make-or-break factor for the shovelware of seasonal isekai. For instance, I know we don't always make time for sequel seasons like Reincarnated Aristocrat up there in these regular run-downs, just due to time constraints and what each of us is individually caught up on. But my old frenemy ARIFURETA came back for a third round this season, and I'll always be amazed at how this show turned itself around visually.

It still doesn't look amazing, sure, but these solidly animated scenes of murderous bunny girls kicking ass would've been unheard of the way the show looked back in its first season.

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't have to scrap your whole production and reanimate the entire show in a matter of months.

ARIFURETA is still ARIFURETA at its core, even if it's softened by Hajime being taken decidedly less seriously at this point in the story.

Checking in on some of these later seasons (I know a lot of people are really psyched about the re-return of Re:Zero) does underscore some shortcomings of sloshing through the new isekai of the season based on the first blush, as we do. Shows like ARIFURETA can grow and change over time! So maybe something like Loner Life will develop into something worth watching after a while. Similarly, maybe I’ll Become a Villainess Who Goes Down in History won't feel quite so 1:1 with its villainess-isekai forebears as it goes on.

At least this show was decently cute at the start.

Look, I respect the villainessekai subgenre slightly more than its more basic cousins, but that respect is tempered by the fact that I already watched My Next Life as a Villainess pretty much knock this setup out of the park the first time.

I enjoyed watching Alicia's commitment to gainz and I appreciate that she'll apparently get herself a sick eyepatch at some point, but you're right that this is probably stuck in the "Wait to see if any of my friends tell me this actually got amazing and I should catch up" position.

It's equality! It actually proves a point that's come up time and again with vanilla isekai: that the premise itself can't be what makes a show good or bad, it has to be its own unique ideas and execution.

My Next Life as a Villainess had a premise that was more novel at the time it came out, sure. But it also had immediate character and personality. Yeah, I know it's just the first episode of Villainess Who Goes Down in History here, but I don't think I could tell you as much about any of these supposed suitors as I could about Keith at the end of Next Life as a Villainess' first episode.

Ah yes, now we're getting into the thought-provoking premieres that get you asking the real questions. Questions such as "Is it still a villainess isekai if the heroine is really only adjacent to a villain?" and "Is it still an isekai if you're getting reincarnated as yourself six years earlier in your own world?"

Do-Over Damsel does decidedly slot into the "pseudo-isekai" category, I'll concede, and there are a few of those this season as well. The framing of Jill is of someone who met their end and now gets to use a second chance and their previous experiences to make a better life for themselves. Spiritually, it's there.

Yeah, it turns out there are other questions this show provokes, but I'm pretty sure they're best answered by a judge and/or jury.

Indeed, Jill's intermittently quite cool and entertaining in her time-displaced variations. I am a little annoyed that shrinking her down to her ten-year-old self undercuts the potential for further badass displays like she has in the intro, but her shrunk-down self has her moments.

Maybe it helps a little bit that she's still technically 17 years old on the inside and also extremely not okay with Hadis' whole deal. Truly she is like a reverse Rudeus.

Aside from the inherent turn-off some may find in the central romance, I think I can see what you find appealing in Do-Over Damsel's premiere. It's got well-presented, cool, and funny parts, and there's some decently dense drama in here, some of it even making me interested in learning more about Hadis!

Well, it's good to know Do-Over Damsel has some kind of company, at least beyond sharing space in the "Reincarnated, but in your own world" genre, which is oddly prolific this season.

Is it also a problematic age-gap romance if it's a millennia-old reincarnated dragon and a 17-year-old lamia? Man, I have no friggin' idea.

It's to the point where I actually kinda forgot about the whole "The MC used to be a dragon" gimmick partway through! Technically slightly more happens in this than in the likes of Loner Life, but I don't want to give Dragon Life more credit just because it gave the lead a cute lamia to soundboard off of as opposed to just monologuing for half an hour.

That's the thing about getting so many series playing in these fantasy sandboxes at decidedly more derivative levels: you get anime that are evocative of previous series in the established genre space.

For instance, even one of this season's more surprising reinventions of the ideas of rebirth and world-transportation can't help but give off just a few The Devil Is a Part-Timer! vibes.

Hey, that's the kind of understanding you hope to come to when partaking of this seasonal sampler platter. It makes for a solid conversational contrast, too, since I quite dug the Demon Lord Velsvalt's misadventures in the same year where The Punisher lives on the edge.

Well, for one thing, having a bit of sauce on its production definitely helped bump Demon Lord 2099 up compared to its isekai contemporaries. These things so regularly look totally basic, so something that eschews the RPG Maker look is immediately going to get my attention.

But the reason for applying that style, the premise, is what I would say is the show's main appeal. It's not properly isekai nor reverse-isekai like Devil is a Part-Timer, but...half-isekai? The world our hero-villain wakes up in is a combination of his and a futuristic Earth, and the resultant magitek aesthetic is far more compelling for me to follow than plain ol' swords and spells and stat sheets.

It also has a cute hacker who rigs a VTuber billboard to go all Italian-Senate-Tifa, so there's that.

There's definitely a gap between its banger opening establishing its premise and the tense revelations that set up the conflict, where it feels like the character writing could've gotten snappier, as in Baccano!. The hacker scene stands out in that regard as well. So there's admittedly some critical bias at work in watching this one after so many of the others on this list, but even with that acknowledgment, I can see myself following Demon Lord 2099 for fun this season.

I certainly appreciate it proving that "isekai" as a broad genre label has so many more different permutations it could encompass.

Ah, reincarnated in your own world, and it's also our world. That's definitely not really isekai. That's just sekai.

On the other hand, hey, there's Aoi Yūki!

The show seems to have a decent amount of self-awareness so far, anyway. I have to admit that I'm darkly amused that the series whose title literally translates to My Wife Will Become an Elementary School Student wasn't even the most troublesome on that topic as some of its reincarnation brethren. Thanks, Do-Over Damsel.

We've covered all the new proper isekai and even some of the not-quite-isekai reincarnation anime. The latter brings to mind the question of what really "counts" as this genre increasingly slips its tendrils into other anime. Like all the new fantasy shows, should series like The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party, Is, in Fact, the Strongest and The Most Notorious "Talker" Runs the World's Greatest Clan get honorary mentions just because they've got character classes, stats, undervalued protagonists, and overly long titles?

This is an audience that thrives on feeling persecuted, so honestly, they're probably living for it.

As for me, my main takeaway from all these psuedo-isekai and isekai-flavored fantasy series is that if the seemingly unstoppable genre can't ever properly recede, maybe diluting itself is the next best thing. As we've seen with Demon Lord 2099 and Do-Over Damsel, stretching the definition can result in anime that at least feel fresh, even if they still aren't outstanding, story-wise, for whatever reason. It's nice to get a seasonal batch where there aren't four more photocopied shows like Loner Life.

It's just like the old saying goes: If you can't beat 'em, have 'em get reincarnated as something else in another world.