The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

By the Grace of the Gods Season 2

One day, the life of middle-aged Japanese businessman Ryoma Takebayashi came to a rather sudden and disappointing end. Ryoma had never had a blessed life, but three great gods sought his cooperation after his death and reincarnated him as a child in another world with swords and magic. Receiving a most cordial and divine welcome from the gods, Ryoma decides to live leisurely on his own in the forest for the time being. Working diligently at magic and hunting, Ryoma's greatest passion comes to be researching his tamed slimes. Training a variety of slimes (some newly discovered), the curtain rises on this easygoing life fantasy celebrating a second life with kind people in another world.

By the Grace of the Gods is based on author Roy and illustrator Ririnra's light novel series and streams on Crunchyroll and Funimation on Sundays.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

By the Grace of the Gods, and if you loved the first season, you'll probably be pleased with how this one is starting. On the other hand, if you found the first season unbearably dull, this second one isn't likely to change your mind, as it is equally stultifying. The plot picks right back up with our little friend Ryoma and his many, many slimes. His laundromat business is going gangbusters, his employees wish he might be a little bit more hands-off so that they can work, and a new breed of evolved slime is waiting in the wings to be revealed. It is just more of the same, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

It feels like a slow start, even for this show, however. There is a genuine effort to balance reminding us of who Ryoma is and what he's gone through up to this point with plot seeds for the episodes to come, and while it works, it might have been better not to make it so obvious what the episode is doing. We are given an obvious picture of just how smoothly the laundry business is running at this point. While everyone loves working there, it's also easy to see why his assistant manager sits him down and has a little talk about allowing the employees to do what they were hired for, IE, work. Ryoma has been on his own for so long that he has forgotten what it's like to have others pull their weight, and probably his past life as an overworked salaryman in Japan did not help him with this particular lesson. While sitting back and enjoying life is a major part of his second life, learning healthy work habits is equally important for him to know.

Whether or not he will learn this is up for debate because his new slime is a medicine slime, evolved when a poisoned slime drank an antidote. The medicine slime can make an impressive variety of medications, which means that Ryoma has yet another marketable skill at his disposal. He's balked at opening a second shop, whether it's a second laundromat in a different town or pretty much anything else. Still, when he looks to buy medicine bottles in bulk, he gets pressed into opening a pharmacy. Since he has trained his workers at the laundromat so well, he has the time to do such a thing, but a piece of him seems to realize that this might just be falling back into bad old habits from his previous life. He's absolutely going to do it anyway, and some of the justification in his mind is his relationship with Elia and her family.

Although it feels rough and uneven in places, this is yet another harmless episode of a harmless show. It's not hugely enjoyable, but there is a sedative feel to it that isn't entirely a statement made out of malice - there's something soothing about it, which is a large part of its appeal. Hopefully, subsequent episodes will smooth things out going forward.