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This Week in Anime
An Isekai a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

by Christoper Farris & Steve Jones,

It's time once again for Chris and Steve to explore the new season's isekai offerings. Will it be better than they expect?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Magic Maker, I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So I Might as Well Try Mastering Magic, Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time, The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World, Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf!, Promise of Wizard, Headhunted to Another World: From Salaryman to Big Four!, The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World, and ZENSHU are available to stream on Crunchyroll.
Beheneko: The Elf-Girl's Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster!, and From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad's Been Reincarnated! are available to stream on HIDIVE.

@RiderStrike @BWProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Chris
Steve, I'll tell you I'm almost happy for our regular return to isekai hell. Opening the forbidden doors of incest anime last week was amusing enough, but that's a topic that's probably best not to touch too often-


Oh, god!
Steve
Our column topics are merging. Reality is collapsing. It's January 2025. Welcome to the new normal.

We have eleven new isekai premieres to work through. Let's rip off this band-aid before Truck-kun claims another.
The sheer number of world-warping premieres this go-around necessitates even less preamble than usual. That means there's a decent amount of variety, and even some quality picks, among all that. It also means there are still a few that run together like our converging column topics.


For instance, I know I didn't make much mental differentiation between the protagonists of Magic Maker and I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, and both shows were about the same level of boringly basic as Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time. Magic Maker kid might get a couple extra microns of notoriety on account of the incest.
I was practically crying tears of joy when it introduced the incest. It's the only interesting thing that happens in that premiere. You might think it would get some points by playing coy with it being an isekai, but it's just a boring story with or without reincarnation. If you like watching fish make orbs, then be my guest. You can have Magic Maker.
Noble is also virtually identical to other "reincarnated into a wealthy family" isekai we've covered before. I'll only note that the premiere was staid enough that I skipped ahead to the part in the second episode where the protagonist enslaves two hot babes. At least there's something to be said for frankness.

You didn't miss anything, I can confirm that Noble on the Brink of Ruin is an absolute watch-checker of a show. An interminable introduction to this unseasoned lead accumulating magical powers and inventing instant ramen noodles.


It's mostly useful as one of those shows that indicate just how deep in the Mariana Trench the isekai baseline is. Magic Maker at least shot for the less-common-in-this-genre incest fetish to make up the extra points. Slavery? They all do that, Noble, you ain't special.
Immediately after he enslaves the second girl, she runs out and returns with a sandwich. We are regressing so much more quickly than the human mind can comprehend.


Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time, for what it's worth, angered me the most. This one gets a nice-looking adaptation. It has a same-day dub. It's polished. It's advertised. And all for this??
One of these days I'll figure out why all these shows are so fixated on the god-forsaken stat screen.


I was infuriated by Greatest Alchemist, maybe for slightly different reasons. This thing slips in just a couple of whiffs of a more interesting big-picture plot in between stat menus. Some of it genuinely looks like it's from a different, possibly better show! But it's so glossed over and the parts it's supplementing aren't enough to make me even consider sitting through more of this.
I'll grant that the LitRPG genre has to have some appeal to a large audience, and I'm sure those tropes can be wielded compellingly, but I don't see any of that in Greatest Alchemist. Furthermore, I don't understand how or why this story earns this elevated treatment. Is it luck of the draw? Is it behind-the-scenes production politics? Is it just genuinely more popular? I'm more interested in that than anything in the show!
The bigger-picture magic politicking and time-displaced nature of the protag's placement make me think of how this broader stuff was done better back in So I'm a Spider, So What? Greatest Alchemist even jocks its own cute spider. So even the potentially interesting stuff is completely derivative.
Ah, true. The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World is another one where I swear I've seen this exact episode. Including the magic interdimensional Amazon app. Did they rip this from Sonny Boy, the only good isekai? (I'm only half-joking.)

The lack of ambition in isekai protags has reached the point that "magical dropshipper" is now an aspirational career path. Online Shopper was a weird one for me. Sitting through all these shows every season means I was primed to appreciate its wordless musical montage skipping through all the isekai setup guff at the beginning. Plus I was just inherently amused by the lead casually hooking up with the inn hostess after he drew her like one of his French girls.


The production values on this show are generally dire, and it's pretty cowardly in other places.
I like its opening in the abstract—parodying 2001 A Space Odyssey to skip past all the faff—but it's executed way too amateurishly. And that's the real shame when you zoom out and look at the industry landscape as a whole. If fewer shows were being made, maybe there'd be a better chance of turning good ideas like that into good anime. Still, there's no redemption for rank cowardice.

You can draw furries. Of all genders. It's not against the law, and there's plenty of reference material out there.
It's the point where Online Shopper lost the miniscule amount of goodwill its modicum of moxy had built up for me. You can promise all the construction-vehicle Transformers in the world, it's not gonna make me interested in following further if your best attempt at "beast folk" is multicolored genericized catgirls. It all speaks to profound laziness in the fantasy worldbuilding of the setting of this series and, more broadly, all the other mid-entries in this inescapable genre.

Now, Beheneko on the other hand. You can use a lot of adjectives to describe this show, but cowardly isn't one of them.
Given what I was complaining about, I can't take this show to task too hard for being open about wanting to do it kitty style.

I respect perverts who are honest. Beheneko forthrightly asks its audience to imagine how awesome it would be to take a literal catnap on an elf girl's giant rack, and it sweetens the pot further by making said elf girl openly lust for her pet cat. That's awful, and I love it.

This show has you covered if you're just into anime for cats and tats.

HIDIVE even got the uncensored version for their stream; they know precisely why people are here. Beheneko is pretty "eh" as far as shows go, but it's not offensive or bad enough for me to hate it. It's maybe a little interesting that it's part of the recent "reincarnated in my own fantasy world" sub-trend of isekai. It also feels like another cribbing from I'm a Spider's playbook. But again, none of that is the reason anybody's here.
While it's neither as competent nor as abject as I'd like, at least Beheneko has things I can identify as unique and appealing to weirdos. That's more than most. Also, kudos to the localizers who parsed this next-episode preview dialogue, because you guys had me wheezing.
It's the sort of pun you dream of having the opportunity to make with a premise like this, and it justifies this show's existence 1000% more compared to the likes of Greatest Alchemist or Noble on the Brink of Ruin.


Besides, it's not like this season doesn't have you covered if you're looking for slightly less outlandish elf-adjacent isekai.
I just want to go on record that I would never make my isekai elf childhood friend adventurer waifu hide her ears. Let those pointy babies breathe.

Also, buddy, if you want her to be less conspicuous, you shouldn't buy her a neon blue sailor uniform. That's arguably more depraved than anything in Beheneko.
Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf! piques my interest by being both a regular and reverse-isekai and by having a halfway-novel world-traveling mechanic. Plus I like the bit where the MC high-fives a lizardman.

It's the sort of setup that feels like it could go some places later, even as the central feature of its first episode is just the elf girl eating different Japanese foods.
It's pretty okay! It's not spectacular, definitely familiar, but it's also one of the precious few isekai that take a moment to communicate and appreciate a proper sense of adventure. That's the basic impetus behind these fantasy worlds, and it gets buried way too often beneath bad self-aware comedy and status screens.
It's downright cruel that the constant trudge of seasonal isekai can make me bored with what should be lavish fantasy settings! Ms. Elf has the split contrast between our world and the magical one to drive appreciation for both of them, so yeah, that's something.


Will it have more than that? I dunno, but it is promising the elf waifu in a variety of cute outfits. For some, I imagine, that will be enough.
Likewise, I imagine Promise of Wizard doesn't need to deliver much to its target audience beyond its gaggle of smexy anime boys.

I love it when a show lets me speedrun clocking that it's based on a gacha game.

This is a show I feel had to come out now before the Twisted Wonderland anime drops and dominates that genre space. It gets to be framed as the somewhat less common lady-led isekai series, with a self-insert gal only slightly more interesting than her Potato-kun counterparts.
Frankly, I think it's progressive that women can also enjoy a self-insert protagonist who has zero personality and expresses nothing but befuddlement about the narrative happening around her.

It feels like equality! I wanted to give this show the benefit of the doubt, since some of the boys are pretty cute. But then it got into dense descriptions of untenable world-building and magic systems and the characters spent, no joke, a full six and a half minutes standing around arguing in a stairwell, and I understood truly how far we'd come.

It did introduce me to the established nursery rhyme name of "Cock Robin" and I am grateful for that.
This isn't my scene, but it's distinct enough from the usual isekai slop, so boringness aside, it doesn't fill me with as much despair as some of our earlier examples. Don't let me stop you from indulging in your SSR bishies.

That said, I think we can finally move on to the part of the column where we talk about stuff we enjoyed. And I want to kick that off with Headhunted to Another World: From Salaryman to Big Four! because that's the one that surpassed the shackles of its title and surprised me.

Same! I threw this one on right after grinding through Greatest Alchemist and perhaps unfairly expected to be similarly underwhelmed. So the intro getting its gimmick out in a solidly amusing way immediately got me to sit up and pay attention.

It's novel and funny, a rarer combination in this genre space than you might think!
Not all of its jokes land, but it's rapid-fire enough to reach an acceptable hit rate. Like, I know "the demon lord is a better boss than a human CEO" is a bit that's been done before, but it hits its mark here.


The important factor is that Dennosuke feels like an actual character. His pre-isekai history is important and informs both his personality and how he approaches his struggles in this new world. That should be basic, Storytelling 101 stuff, but almost every show we've discussed so far fails to clear that bar!
It's great because instead of just being handed min-maxed magic or alchemy powers, the skills he cultivated in his previous life make him so effective in his new isekai role. We can believe that he's good at business negotiation and management from what's been shown of his backstory, as opposed to accepting convenient power-fantasy contrivance.


Admittedly, it probably says something that Headhunted to Another World is speaking way more to my flavor of fantasy than the typical isekai exploits. A job where I'm healthily respected for my skills and all my co-workers are hot demon women.
It's written for working stiffs like us. It relates all of Dennosuke's conflicts back to his normal job making those conflicts more compelling. A senior coworker royally screws something up and passes the buck to the new guy? I've been there!

I also think it's charming that his mind palace is an izakaya.
I want to be there. It is funny as hell that the show about a guy becoming an actual demon army general has the MC demonstrate more empathy for others—and succeed because of it!—than so many of your standard isekai Melvins. If this series is just a weekly string of Dennosuke solving different fantasy anime problems with the power of Japanese business etiquette, it'll probably be worth keeping up with.

My only major mark against it is that it looks bad. I also watched this back-to-back with Alchemist, which made me even angrier that Alchemist hogged all the good animation. Give some of those keyframes to a story that earned them!
In a just world, a cool, clever anime like this would be the attractively animated, visibly marketed one. But alas, something like Greatest Alchemist somehow appeals more to the important audience of web-novel-reading teens.


The good news is that Headhunted to Another World isn't the only isekai this season aimed at old people working for a living.
Nothing about From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad's Been Reincarnated! should work as well as it does, but that's the power of smart, earnest writing. Moreover, the power of knowing your roots.


The boomers cooked with this one.
Man, I finally caught up on Aim for the Ace! just in time. Part of me feels bad for the Villainess genre, which felt so fresh when it first started, only to be beaten into the ground by the anime trend meat grinder. It's astonishing to have something like this successfully recapture that feeling.


Our main ojisan Kenzaburo is even an avowed nerd like so many isekai leads, yet he doesn't feel nearly as bogged down as others.
I was utterly unsurprised to learn that the mangaka, Michiro Ueyama, is a dude in his fifties. He's taking the basics of the micro-genre, but utilizing them authentically to his own experience. That's the way you should capitalize on a popular trend.

Write what you know and apply that to piloting a haughty rich girl voiced by M.A.O. and unwittingly seducing the otome game heroine.

I think it's incredibly cool that you have this author and main character completely outside the target audience for otome games, yet it still feels like he's coming from a place of respect and appreciation for that genre. Obviously, part of that's rooted in the understanding of how these otaku tropes influence and inform each other, and that also feeds into Kenzaburo's wanting to encourage and nurture the younger generations.

It's just more positively earnest than I expected from a story about someone from an older generation interacting with The Kids These Days and their media.
And, like Salaryman, Kenzaburo's thoughts and actions are informed by his life as a dad and middle manager, which makes the show more relatable and the comedy funnier. Giving your main character a personality works. More isekai should try that.


Although, honestly, the M.A.O. ojousama voice is a bigger cheat skill than anything else I've seen from an isekai protag. Talk about wish fulfillment.
I'm glad she's dedicated to dishing out dadly advice, because Grace Auvergne could order me to die for her and I'd have no choice but to comply.
Incidentally, which demon did you make a pact with to get a good Super Sentai isekai made?

I'd never in a million years ask for an isekai to be made for me, specifically. But now that The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World is here, I'm not going to argue with it.


Pumping my fists several times just in the cold open for this premiere due to how hard this show Gets It.
I haven't watched anything Power Rangers-related in 25 years, but this one shot unearthed a primal memory deep in my brain. So yeah, it absolutely Gets It.
This is one of those genre mash-up ideas that's so bluntly simple I'm amazed they haven't tried it before (disregarding some Super Sentai entries like Zyuohger that do have isekai elements). And it works precisely because of that simplicity.


If you watch a lot of Super Sentai, you know that the Reds aren't always the most complex leads. But stick such a guy into the standardized isekai setup, and the sheer contrast springs everything to life.
It's so unabashedly goofy that it's hard not to be charmed by it. And Red, simply by being a Red, is already leagues beyond the amount of personality contained in your average Truck-kun victim. Moreover, he bounces off nicely against Yihdra, who knows magic but doesn't know quite as much about color-coded smoke bombs.

I am so much more receptive to a fantasy-land character being wowed by this guy's talking electronic transformation brace and swarming magic robots than I ever was to an anime girl staring in awe as some potato pulled herbs out of his item box for the umpteenth time.

Her witch hat is also appropriately big and floppy. This key detail is as important as all the Sentai references.
Very true. And the premiere is stuffed with neat little details and moments. Like this bit where she flicks Red's inset off the screen. It's a small thing, but it shows you that there's real love and thought being put into this adaptation.

You can tell that from the spot-on details of how the Kizuna Brace works. I want toys of both this and the mecha, that's how well they're doing their job.

Red's enthusiasm and chemistry with Yihdra demonstrate their enjoyment for the isekai side of this crossover as well, and it rubs off on me in watching this show. That's how successful it is at livening up the formula.
We don't universally hate all isekai. You can get away with this much cleavage showing on your female lead as long as ingenuity and passion are on the table.
Alternatively, you can show off as little of your female lead as possible and still be off to an early start as potentially the best thing of the season.
Very early on, ZENSHU positioned itself as the juggernaut to the rest of the season's baby isekai. I thought it'd be the sole saving grace of this column, and I'm glad a handful of the other shows proved me wrong. But it's still probably the best of the lot, at least as far as premieres are concerned.
I hope our readers can appreciate just how good an isekai like this must be to become the critical darling of the season the way ZENSHU has. It's got a strong production, ironically from MAPPA, doing a show that starts about rough working conditions in the anime industry.
It's tough for an anime to pull itself back up after the cardinal sin of showing me a fake anime I'd much rather be watching. But ZENSHU barely manages. Chalk it up to the creative duo of Mitsue Yamazaki and Kimiko Ueno.
I knew the team behind Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun wouldn't let me down. I would've loved to watch Sukeban Magical Girl Dark Academy, but then I've also already found myself interested in what the "original" version of in-show fantasy series A Tale of Perishing must have been like. ZENSHU so far seems to be a story that understands the appeal and impact of stories on us.


Naturally, a series that so celebrates the creative process will rise above the perfunctory efforts of some of those shows we looked at earlier.
Its setup begs for metatextual readings about how artists and audiences approach storytelling. Is Natsuko "fixing" her favorite anime by interfering with it, or is she changing it into something else entirely? That's a neat thematic playground.


I also like that it's a story about how cool the Giant Warrior from Nausicaä is. Cartoons are awesome. We're allowed to celebrate anime's legacy from time to time.
I hope the lavish production is one the animators at MAPPA have had the space and treatment to enjoy making because the final product genuinely delivers on the outsized joy of creating art. Natsuko's method of countering an aerial attack in the second episode is to draw up an Itano Circus...and the production got Ichirō Itano himself to storyboard that part!

Now that is the kind of metatextual otaku referencing I love to see in my isekai!
It's been over ten years since Shirobako put Hideaki Anno in their anime.

ZENSHU is another one where the protagonist's magical isekai powers come from her home-world skills and abilities. So it's got that going for it alongside what a gloriously relatable gremlin Natsuko is as a lead character in general.

This is probably the most relatable line of dialogue I saw throughout this whole isekai sampling exercise. Being puzzled yet captivated by a work of art is the best feeling in the world. That's how I know Natsuko is a real one, even if she's fictional.

You can feel the real people behind the story. That's the difference-maker, not just for isekai, but for storytelling in general. Some of the stronger-than-I-expected entries this go-around indicate that maybe there's yet ongoing hope for this exhausted genre, so long as future creators keep that in mind.

Then again, maybe the absurd number of isekai premieres this season just meant the better ones were down to the law of averages.
I'm not filled with as much despair as I thought when I saw the number of shows we'd have to cover this time. Four out of eleven ain't terrible. There's some hope out there yet. But that bad isekai still hit like expired clams. Good thing I have three months to recover until the seasonal torture labyrinth beckons us once more.
Don't forget, you're here forever.
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