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This Week in Anime - Did That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Peak Too Early?


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Marzan



Joined: 29 Mar 2009
Posts: 514
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 1:41 pm Reply with quote
A fun read. To be honest though, I don’t think Slime ever peaked. The only thing it has going for it is that it doesn’t try to shock and be all dark in order to attract viewers.
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ThatGuyWhoLikesThings



Joined: 04 Jul 2013
Posts: 1000
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:01 pm Reply with quote
I'm not surprised. When you make it so that your protagonist is not only totally OP but everything for him just ends up working out without much trouble, I'm not saying it's impossible to make a story work with a protagonist like that, but you're severely limiting your own potential when you do that.

Compare to Tanya from Youjo Senki, who is an unparalleled monster in combat, but events often end up spiraling out of what little control she has thanks to a malicious "god" manipulating things from behind the scenes. And if the higher ups of her country make a decision on something, she has to follow it no matter how good or bad it is, otherwise she risks sabotaging her personal end goal.


Or Subaru from Re:Zero, who is not only pitifully weak but rarely do things end up going his way. Even when things start looking up for him, reaching his desired outcome is still incredibly difficult and requires careful planning and the help of powerful forces, and he has to bust his ass to get anywhere. To say nothing of his own personality flaws that also hinder him plenty.

Even Medaka Kurokami from Medaka Box, where her being absolutely perfect is literally the point, faces numerous emotional conflicts that come about from her being too perfect of a person, even if she can resolve almost all physical conflicts with little to no effort.

Rimuru certainly has a likable enough personality that's easy to root for, but that can only get you so far. If there aren't any losses or challenges, it's a lot more difficult to get genuinely invested in his character. There's a reason why Shizu's arc has generally been considered the peak of the anime, and that was almost 20 weeks ago.
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Stampeed Valkyrie



Joined: 10 Aug 2014
Posts: 825
Location: PA
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:51 pm Reply with quote
To put it simply.. Yes.

What was at the beginning a series I looked forward to each week, it fell flat at the end.

I'm surprised it garnered a 2nd season TBH.. I won't be as quick to pick up rewatching it when it finally does come around.
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maus



Joined: 26 Nov 2005
Posts: 84
Location: The Netherlands
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:26 pm Reply with quote
It was funny but I feel the exciting parts got resolved too easily. All that build up to a climax and Rimuru eats the Boar king. Then a huge skymonster fish comes knocking, and dies in fifteen minutes after being introduced by a loli barrage. It's boring. While Shield Hero gets better every week.
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Mr. sickVisionz



Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 2171
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 3:37 pm Reply with quote
The second season cour hasn't been as good as the first but for me at least, it hasn't fallen off a cliff. To me, it peaked like how I think the first season of MHA is far and away the best (everything was fresh and new and I didn't know if it was the type of show where good guys died so the fights all had a lot of tension) but I still love MHA and am ultra hyped for it to come back for more.

Slime to me was like an A+ for fun in cour 1. In cour 2 it's dropped to like B+ on a bad day, A- on average.
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Takkun4343



Joined: 19 Jul 2007
Posts: 1493
Location: Englewood, Ohio
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 4:05 pm Reply with quote
The Royal Chef from Black Clover is my favorite Salt Bae meme.
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Engineering Nerd



Joined: 24 Apr 2008
Posts: 897
Location: Southern California
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 4:17 pm Reply with quote
maus wrote:
It was funny but I feel the exciting parts got resolved too easily. All that build up to a climax and Rimuru eats the Boar king. Then a huge skymonster fish comes knocking, and dies in fifteen minutes after being introduced by a loli barrage. It's boring. While Shield Hero gets better every week.


While I agree most of your points, but I really would not bring Shield Hero into this conversation. It has its great share of problems and issues on characterization and world building, and if the discussions I seen on many Japanese, Chinese and English forums are any indication, many share the same sentiment as well.
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KyokoBestMeguca



Joined: 05 Aug 2018
Posts: 24
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 9:04 pm Reply with quote
This show felt like watching One Punch Man backwards. The punchline is the same: the big scary monster ends up going down comically easily. The difference is OPM uses progressively longer and more intense buildups to that punchline whereas slimeboi kind of does the opposite. The Orc Lord had a good few episodes building up to his downfall, then the sharknado had one episode, and the whole think with Mullet Tinkerbell in the sad kids arc was introduced and resolved in the same episode.
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zrnzle500



Joined: 04 Oct 2014
Posts: 3767
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 9:36 pm Reply with quote
Mr. sickVisionz wrote:
The second season cour hasn't been as good as the first but for me at least, it hasn't fallen off a cliff. To me, it peaked like how I think the first season of MHA is far and away the best (everything was fresh and new and I didn't know if it was the type of show where good guys died so the fights all had a lot of tension) but I still love MHA and am ultra hyped for it to come back for more.

Slime to me was like an A+ for fun in cour 1. In cour 2 it's dropped to like B+ on a bad day, A- on average.


I think I would with this, at least with regard to Slime. While the biggest highlights are in the first half, I still enjoyed the second half, and will gladly watch the second season. I really disagree with the columnists' characterization of the final arc, but I guess it really comes down the fact that the TWIA crew dislike isekai and I (and I think it would be fair to say most of the audience for the show) don't dislike it. Unless one such show is entirely mold-breaking, it will be weighted down by the same criticisms that they have always made and will make about the genre, because they are common tropes of the genre. If the criticism ultimately comes down to "I don't like this kind of story", there isn't much there for fans of that kind of story other than a signifier that the critic is not one of them. There's nothing wrong with that per se, it just means that we're never really going to be on the same page, even at the best of times.

With regard to Milim, a single loli character and a stray...premature comment are frankly some of the least of my concerns with the genre, as it is today. I guess what I'm saying is that it wasn't a show where I worried about the main character acquiring another slave, and I appreciated that.
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RegisterJustForComment



Joined: 17 Apr 2018
Posts: 62
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 9:50 pm Reply with quote
I say that it's only the problem of timing when you just can't change the order of the original story arcs and choose an exciting arc with a great ending for the finale out of all the arcs that the novel have just like that. And even if they can, you'll just get a lot of material cutting.
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer


Joined: 14 Dec 2012
Posts: 1380
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 10:11 pm Reply with quote
zrnzle500 wrote:
but I guess it really comes down the fact that the TWIA crew dislike iseka.


I wouldn't say I dislike isekai - being the gimmick du jour notwithstanding, I think an isekai story has the potential to be interesting as much as basically any other genre work. It's just that a story being an isekai doesn't make me more or less interested in it on its own. One of my favorite shows the year it came out was Grimgar because, outside of taking a unique perspective for this kind of story, it was just a well-realized and directed show that got me invested.

Slime Time, for its part, worked for me through the first half because it was doing its own thing within the isekai toy box, and doing it pretty well. But the pacing of Milim's arc and the total lack of meaningful characterization for the kids in their arc just left me cold.
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor


Joined: 19 Jan 2012
Posts: 639
PostPosted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 11:37 pm Reply with quote
Also want to clarify that I don't dislike isekai. I dislike lazy storytelling and boring power fantasies, which isekai falls into much easier than a lot of things by its nature. If the person being from outside the established universe exists for no reason other than to be inherently superior then it's probably not something I'm too interested in. Cour one of slime tip toed around this so I found it alright, but as I said in the column it quickly abandoned any interesting pretext in favor of rapid fire poorly done cliches.
This is also not to say having an OP protagonist is an instant fault. ONE has staked a pretty successful career out of them with Saitama and Mob, but the key to those stories is the emotional feelings of everyone involved instead of simple showboating. Those not being isekai is kind of irrelevant because there's no reason an isekai story couldn't do the same, as isekai has a lot of different ways it can go and to use it as a palette swap OP trip seems like a waste. I mean Inuyasha and Fushigi Yugi would be pretty awful if their protagonists simply annihilated every meaningful encounter, and things like The Devil is a Part Timer or Dragon Maid successfully make it work by reversing the worlds and what it means to be Fantasy OP in a mundane one. Restaurant to Another World simply wanted a low stakes pretext for some food and fantasy and it succeeds at that!
So to reiterate I don't have some sort of an inherent bias against isekai. If you want to accuse me of anything then I have a problem with lazy power fantasies, whether they're isekai or not.


Last edited by ATastySub on Fri Mar 22, 2019 1:46 am; edited 1 time in total
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Hiroki not Takuya



Joined: 17 Apr 2012
Posts: 2501
PostPosted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 12:40 am Reply with quote
^^Keep telling it like it is Cool It's been mighty frustrating to have been saying the same since January only to be criticized that the show is just wonderful as it is, how dare you find fault. If you ask me, the problems have been glaringly obvious from the beginning to the point that despite loving the first half, I only kept watching to see if it could present even one more interesting story. The last arc looked to be that but nope, Rimuru the Blue Easy Button had that covered too...
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GhostD



Joined: 07 May 2016
Posts: 998
PostPosted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 10:41 am Reply with quote
Wow they actually mentioned most if not all of my hidden frustrations about the show. Im not usually the type to post negative criticism about a show but reading this almost felt like I did even though I didn't
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
Posts: 3442
PostPosted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 11:56 am Reply with quote
While it's true that Isekai don't have to feature an incredibly OP protagonist, I think if we define Isekai as "being transported to another world" we need a subgenre of isekai as "being transported to another world as an incredibly overpowered character" in the same way that technically an Harem is a romance show but so many romance featured harem that they ended up being considered separate genre to make talking about them easier.

I think it's obvious from the number of OP MC isekai show that there's a significant number of people who actually want this and would be disappointed if they didn't get a couple of arc that just finish with the MC effortlessly clearing obstacle. I personally don't get it and I just started avoiding Isekai because of that, but I think it's part of the enjoyment for a lot of people.
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