Chris and Steve work their way through all the summer isekai anime to date to see if there’s one shining light among the reincarnated heroes.

These series are streaming on Crunchyroll and HIDIVE.

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.


Chris

Steve, I hope you enjoyed our little TWIA summer vacation ’cause it’s back to the old anime news’n’views grind. A new season just started, so it’s time for the anime-watching equivalent of catching up on e-mails after a weekend off.

Chris1
Steve

Alas, there’s no rest for the wicked. And there’s only one place for the most wicked of us to go to: Isekai Hell. That’s right, we’ve got a brand-new slate full of reincarnated slop to trudge through as we pan for whatever nuggets of gold we can find. It’s a This Week In Anime tradition! Can you see how excited I am?

Steve01
It says something that we continue to get enough « brand-new » (to use the term in a way that does not indicate originality) isekai anime every season that we’ve been able to mine a column’s worth of content out of these each go-around for several years.

Chris2

Would we have done this with Magic High School or Schoolgirl Slice of Life had TWIA been running during the years of those trends? Who’s to say, and who’s to say when this isekai tidal wave will recede? All we can do for the moment is jump right in.
I’m still miffed that monster girl mania never took hold as I had hoped it would. But you’re right; there’s no use in lamenting what could have been. We have to face reality. And by that, I mean we have to face the genre most obsessed with not facing reality. So we can begin with the most delusional of the summer bunch, the cloyingly titled Am I Actually the Strongest?

Steve02
I wouldn’t believe we could find a sadder, grosser isekai baby than the one from the beginning of Mushoku Tensei, but here we are. This was one I was familiar with before its premiere, thanks to previewing the manga a while back, so I knew going in not to expect much. And even then, any hope that the medium hop might elevate the paper-thin material was pretty soundly dashed.

Chris3

AIATS is a good place to start since it’s so direly barebones in how we’ve come to expect from the isekai genre. It’s to the point that even if this were some hypothetical viewer’s first brush with these tropes and story mechanics, I can’t imagine they’d be turned on to the genre by it due to its flatness.
Under the umbrella of isekai, you’ve got a bunch of stock narrative templates that most of these stories play by, at least in their opening act. This one explicitly follows Mushoku Tensei‘s template, with an otaku loser being reborn as a baby pumped full of magic for no reason other than he needs to be the protagonist. Now, with Mushoku Tensei‘s anime, at least you had stellar production values. With AIATS, the most we get is five minutes dedicated to breast milk. How avant-garde!

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Hey now, that leaves out the layers of sophisticated humor that AIATS is playing with.

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The wolf girl also propositions the baby so she can produce said breast milk.
I was also struck by the story’s cowardice, immediately turning her into a hot anime babe. Nothing was stopping this baby from being nursed by a giant wolf. If it was good enough for the founding of Rome, then it’s good enough for Isekai Narrative #427.

Steve05
Reincarnated In Another World Where I Was Raised By Wolves, have we gotten that isekai before? But no, this show cops out before the first commercial break by consigning the wolf-girl as our main character’s sassy maid. And it proves just how desperate a move that brush with bawdy humor was since, by this stretch, I found myself begging for the breastfeeding wolf jokes to come back!

Chris6
Upon review, I found that I had stopped screenshotting anything after the time skip. Despite the gestures towards tastelessness—which I can appreciate in the right setting—there’s just no distinguishing x-factor here. Which should have been obvious as soon as the series’ expression of ultimate magic turned out to be a baby dispensing cubes.

Steve06
So many of these series pride themselves on meticulously describing how their author-and-audience avatars would min-max or otherwise break the magic systems of their worlds for overpowered purposes. And while I’m annoyed by that in ways we’ll surely get to later, it turns out going the other direction like AIATS and saying, « Uh yeah, he’s super-powerful, so his barrier magic can do basically whatever he wants it to do » isn’t any more engaging.

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I am begging the writers here to literally think outside the box for once.

Nope, it’s cubes all the way down.

Publicité
An unamazing cube. Not even close to a Rubik’s. Gold Ship would want nothing to do with it.

Chris11

Just as well, the stated lack of ambition on the part of the main character « compliments » the story’s apparent lack of ambition, so I’m comfortable knowing I won’t miss anything by not continuing to follow this series to see if he is the strongest.
Cubes might not make one the strongest, but you know what could? Extra beans.

Steve07
They’re a cheap, nutritious staple, and I can’t believe the show in the running with AIATS for worst of the batch is out here besmirching their good name by association.

Chris12
I suppose we do tend to go from worst to best (or most tolerable) in these survey columns, so it’s only appropriate we move onto My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1, another title whose specific concatenation of words makes one question how we’ve arrived here.
There’s a lot to question with this one. Sure, there are mechanical elements, like this world’s item-drop-based economy seemingly precluding growing food the traditional way, even though plants exist.

Chris13

There’s also the question of why you would base your title and concept around assigning your lead character a particular power limitation, only to circumvent that just in the first episode by writing in a special plot-device dungeon for him filled with the finest skeletons eight dollars on the Unity asset store can buy!

Chris14
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Men will literally farm rare skeleton drops instead of going to level 2.

Steve08

I’ll grant Unique Skill this much: the concept of an entire dungeon drop-based economy is an interesting thought experiment. It’s taking wobbly video game logic to an extreme that could be used to satirize or interrogate any number of issues. If I trusted a typical isekai author to do that, I could foresee neat things in this show’s future. However, obviously, I do not.

Steve09
That’s exactly the thing! There’s potential for commentary here, but as far as Unique Skill seems to be concerned, replacing the grind of crushing real-life work with the most mind-numbing iteration of video-game grinding is an aspirational dream for the sorts of audience that latches onto a show like this. Is it that much of an improvement when you’ve swapped turning in TPS reports with poking identical slimes in identical hallways for hours?

Chris16

Am I Actually the Strongest? may have bored me, but Unique Skill actively made me sad.
Ah, but you see, in this fantasy world, he can poke slimes real good AND be coddled by his new tiny mom-wife. Nothing sad about that!!

Steve10
You could do some really troubling analyses of this show regarding our MC’s primary power: he immediately earns more compensation for his job than the woman who teaches him everything about it, then sweeps her into an apartment where she becomes enamored with doing housework for him.

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As we all know, these shows are primarily wish-fulfillment for a generation of men who feel they’ve been left out of a narrative of economic and familial security (that may have always been a fantasy in the first place). Still, they aren’t all so brazen about it.

That aspect is where things tripped over into the dark. Some comforting aspects are swinging for a Helpful Fox Senko-san vibe. But then Unique Skill swerves straight into actual propaganda territory, positioning its story not as a momentary escape but instead seems to be positing that the people who come home from their soul-sucking jobs to watch anime should keep working harder with the prospect of an RPG-themed overpowered reincarnation as a reward.

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It’s like an exploitative religion if the heaven they were promising was just repeatedly grinding the first level of Mystery Dungeon.

Well, with how these divine pantheons seem to be reincarnating every Tom, Dick, and Harry who croaks nowadays, it’s no wonder that might seem like a surer thing than a pension.

It makes you realize the proliferation of isekai as a genre might be a sign of the times more than anything. In that case, while there are plenty of other reasons to work to better the world, one smaller reward might be lifting us out of this trend’s seemingly inescapable hold. We need better treatment for workers, we need comprehensive social programs, and we need public healthcare!

Chris23
Public healthcare? That’s commie talk!

Steve11
Indeed, even the nominally healer-focused The Great Cleric still positions the noble pursuit as something one does in the name of the almighty dollar.

Chris24

Or silver or gil or whatever they use in this one’s world.
Shout-out to this one for using my favorite death trope (excluding Truck-kun, of course): rando with a gun and a keen sense for dramatic irony.

Steve12
Steve13
Oddly, they could have set something up with our hero dying in a way connected with receiving or not receiving medical treatment, which might tie into his later goal of serving as a white mage. But nope, he was just mowed down by a thug having the luckiest day of his life.

Chris25

Tragically, that narrative choice at the beginning might be the single most exciting thing about The Great Cleric.
What, you weren’t enthralled when our protagonist shut himself inside a featureless room and thought hard until his numbers went up? Wasn’t that classic tract of the hero’s journey good enough for you?

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It is bizarre that most of these isekai light novel authors realized that worlds that work like video games are an ostensibly cool concept but also seemed to hone in on menu navigation as the most fun, compelling part of that experience.

Chris26

I love managing spreadsheets as much as the next nerd, but it’s not exactly what I’m looking for in a cartoon.

These dudes will be very disappointed when they finally go back and check out Excel Saga.

The fact that we’re reduced to making the same complaining cracks about status screens should indicate how little The Great Cleric has going on. Before and after I watched this premiere, the only discussion I saw about the show involved gawking at its off-putting interlaced running animations or questioning the fashion disasters of its characters’ outfits.

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I’m not sure what that business-casual boob-tie is holding up, but it sure isn’t this narrative.

The dishwashing gloves really pull the look together.

Again, I’ll give this series the « one neat idea » caveat, where these rogue, exploitative clerics sound a lot like the « disruptors » of our past decade. Startups like Uber and Airbnb grew too fast to be regulated, and now everyone has to deal with the ensuing local fallout and overall enshittification of their services. Sounds ripe for commentary! I’m sure there will be none of it!

Steve16
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Even if they do, it’s one of those situations where the show’s first episode utterly failed to engage me enough to stick around to find out. It provoked a couple of pity chuckles out of me when the MC pretended to be a backwater idiot to avoid suspicion.

Chris31

But even that wound up emblematic of the major sin of this premiere, facilitating what felt like a full twenty-two minutes of explaining world and magic mechanics to the audience instead of hooking us with anything resembling a real story.
If we want to start talking about real stories, we have to start talking about real people. And the realest guy I know is Father Casserole.

Steve20

Definitely a person and not the name of a dish you’d be served at Hannibal Lecter’s house.
The on-screen text of « Father Casserole » in Sweet Reincarnation provoked a bigger laugh out of me than any of AIATS’s lupine-lactating attempts at « humor. »
You can’t beat the simple joys of Japanese authors coming up with names for people from fantasy Europe.

Steve21
There is probably a good reason that this is the first time in this column we’ve bothered to mention the actual names of characters. Sure, it’s because they’re objectively hilarious, but Sweet Reincarnation feels like the point where the bar starts raising a smidge. Even from the beginning: forget getting randomly gunned down; I am here for our guy getting crushed by his massive dessert sculpture.

Chris32
Chris33

The chocolate-filling blood pool is just a pastry chef’s kiss.

It’s a Final Destination-worthy intro. I was very pleased.

There’s an enjoyable sense of irreverence acting as icing on this one. It is doing the Ascendence of a Bookworm thing, with the amazingly aptly named Pastry involved in a bunch of religious and royal intrigue that he thoroughly backgrounds in pursuit of one singular, simple goal. Instead of the revolutionary recreation of reading, our pint-sized pâtissier is laser-focused on sweet, sweet sweets.

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My dude, your blood is racing for more reasons than simple excitement, and you might want to hope this fantasy realm invents insulin as quickly as you can get them to come up with fondant.
Yeah, before it turns out he’s a one-of-a-kind magic adept (because, of course, he is), I liked that his leading talent was applying his prior life’s knowledge to help out his new family. That tack requires putting more thought into the writing so the characters and the world feel fuller. Y’know, basic stuff, but we’re begging for scraps here.
Or begging for bonkas.

Steve22
They call apples ‘bonkas’! The writer of Sweet Reincarnation was strongly pursuing some Silly Name Agenda, and I wholly support them.

Chris36

It does also help that, as far as the first episode, Pastry’s status as a magic wunderkind is more of a device to facilitate that background intrigue with the corrupt church. This is a good angle since I always get curious about established power structures wanting to exploit the overpowered protags that get dumped into their worlds by the truckload.
I also dig that their awakening ritual is so freaky: they give a kid drugs and lock him in sensory deprivation for two days. That is some cult indoctrination/MK Ultra-type weirdness. I don’t know how much I trust the show to follow up on that uneasiness, but it’s a cut above its peers regarding leading with impact.

Steve23
Pastry had to put up with his mom and sister using him for impromptu fashion shows. Even the wildest religious torture isn’t enough to break his hardened will.

Chris37

True, true.

It is a strong enough lead for Sweet Reincarnation. It helps that the production values look better than the other shows we’ve discussed. Not enough to convince me to keep up with it throughout the season, but at least to the point that I could recommend it to a genre fan as the most competent of the ‘stock’ isekai entries here.

Chris38
It’s going through the motions, but it’s got oomph while doing so, and you can’t deny the power of oomph. Now, if you want oomph that’s more left-field, you should look yonder, past the lake, towards that rectangle with the big anime eyes.

Steve24
Oh, thank goodness, we’d been on this trip for a while, and I was starting to think I could use a snack.

Chris39

Isekai Hell is barren, but even the harshest desert has oases. And sometimes, they come in the form of an idea that’s just stupid enough to be innovative.

Reborn as a Vending Machine, as is obvious from its title, is a joke from the beginning. It’s the thing that was written as a prompt or a dare, then kept going to figure out how this would even work long-term.

Chris40

With some tasty results!
The tastiest thing the anime has going for it is the casting of Jun Fukuyama as the titular vending machine. If most of your show will be a big metal box talking to itself, you’ll want to hear FukuJun’s dulcet tones prompting you to insert a coin into his slot.
It’s a lesson the similarly singular-gag concept series So I’m a Spider, So What? learned by watching Aoi Yuuki play through a dungeon crawl as a spider VTuber, and all further isekai productions should take note.

Chris41
Casting is important! As is writing actual jokes! I love that our dude sees a vending machine about to fall out and hit him, and his instinct is to try to save it. That’s much funnier than telling us he was obsessed with them. We see him die for one.

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It does make me wish the series would lean into the « Vending Machine Otaku » angle more, and maybe it will in later episodes. Dispense some trivia about different models or regional variants of machines! As-is, even this series couldn’t escape the standard stat sheet sequence, but it convinced me this might work well as some resource-management game if I could play it myself.

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Yeah, I had the same reaction. There seemed to be enough thought put into this that I wonder if this didn’t start as an abandoned vending machine simulation game. So it was at least, from that angle, more tolerable to me than the usual inconsequential numeral nonsense.

It could be a case of familiarity bias. I’ve seen dozens, nay, hundreds of wizards and clerics allocate their skill points by now. But a vending machine, that’s a class whose optimized builds are utterly alien to me, so I’ve got a little more cause to sit up and follow what it’s all doing.

It also helps that the story acknowledges that Boxxo’s build would leave him with some shortcomings that might sometimes necessitate him being carried by his party members.

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I should note that Unique Skill also did the gag where the normal-looking girl is super strong, but it’s better here because she’s lifting a talking vending machine. Sometimes all it takes is one sufficiently unique idea to buoy an entire premise. For now, anyway.

It’s the sort of thing you realize has to happen at some point if the characters are going to get anywhere in the plot (or you already peeped the key art with Lammis hoisting Boxxo around on her back) but still works in the moment because this show has, like, a real sense of flow to its storytelling and humor. It’s not always laugh-out-loud stuff, but sometimes it’s enough to see medieval-setting extras react to potato chips and canned oden.

Chris48
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Lord help these peasants if Boxxo ever starts stocking Doritos.

Just because our hero is named Boxxo is enough for me to shower praise on this series. It’s not that it’s stupid; it’s confidently stupid. There’s a fine line there, but if you’re on the right side of it, you can have a whole lot of fun.

If the most successful circle of Isekai Hell we’ve toured thus far only worked because of that stupidity, is there any hope for one that takes itself utterly, entirely seriously?

Chris52
It is also, rather surprisingly, the only of these premieres that includes the institution of slavery. And in this case, it’s to have our hero engage in it and go, « Wow, that’s awful! »

Chris53
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Being part of the emergent villainess isekai genre means that Last Boss Queen is playing in its own batch of signifiers, but the tone this one approaches them with definitely distinguishes it.
This premiere at least heavily resembles My Life as a Villainess but without the jokes, which isn’t as much of slight as it might sound. It’s a setup rife with potential for delicious melodrama. And I’m actually into the idea of our heroine processing guilt, not for things that she did but for things that her character did or would have done, per the game’s narrative.

Steve28
As long as you’re riffing on the established beats of one of the genre’s most well-known entries, you might as well stand out by running in the opposite direction. It lets us get a feel for the reincarnated Pride as a person, even as we’ve only seen her past life in brief flashes. She’s striving to do better by the people in this game world, not just to prevent her plot-mandated death but because she’s been convinced that she might have it coming otherwise.

Chris55
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It also helps that villainess isekai, as a genre, tends to have more plot than their more standardized fantasy counterparts. So there’s more propulsion than Am I Actually the Strongest?. The production and animation could be better, but the direction carries some urgency and energy.

It’s also worth contrasting the power fantasies between those two examples, though I’m sure I don’t have to recapitulate the juvenile aspirations of AIATS. Here, Pride’s baser motivation is avoiding a grisly death, but her actions are more about molding the narrative and creating a better world for the characters within it. It’s a power fantasy based on a narrative, so the narrative is of more immediate importance. So we get distinct personalities and dramatic stakes that help this feel like a real story. It’s nice!

That’s an interesting contrast between those hoary old RPG-based isekai shows and visual-novel-based ones like Last Boss Queen. Both tend to involve breaking open the games’ systems in ways you couldn’t do just interfacing with them through a monitor, but messing around with stat sheets is usually in the name of powering yourself up while having unlimited conversation options with characters tends to facilitate righting wrongs that were previously ironclad in the narrative.

Chris57

That’s probably why I latch onto villainess isekai series like Last Boss Queen more than any of those earlier shows we discussed that outnumber it.
I don’t have any attachment to the common isekai signifiers, but I value good storytelling. That doesn’t preclude an overly long title with a ton of superlatives, but it might have to work harder and pay more attention to its fundamentals.

Or the anime audience may come to their senses, stop watching so many dang isekai, and get back to monster girl shows again. It could happen!

Don’t tempt the heavens to get out of Isekai Hell, Steve, lest we lose you to Truck-kun sending you to be Reincarnated In Another World Where Monster Girl Anime Got Popular Instead of Isekai.

Chris58

A wise man once said the mind itself can make a heaven of hell. And that man’s name? Satan.

4.7/5 - (24 votes)
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