The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement

One day, Mitsuha falls off a cliff and is transported to a medieval Europe–type world. After a near-death encounter with a pack of wolves, she realizes that she can transport between two worlds—this one and her own. Taking advantage of this ability, Mitsuha decides to live in both worlds and calculates that she'll need 80,000 gold coins to be able to retire. Mitsuha now has to devise different ways to collect her gold coins.

Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement is based on FUNA's light novel series and streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement's twist on the isekai formula is that our heroine, Mizuha, can travel between our world and the fantasy world at will. Better still, she is able to take items with her.

Beyond that, Mizuha didn't end up in the other world due to some god choosing her to be a hero or as some kind of random reincarnation. Rather, it's all a cosmic accident. This means that Mizuha has no goal other than the one she picks for herself, and she decides on the most profitable one. After all, it looks like gold is gold regardless of the world, and if she can take mass-produced (and incredibly cheap) items from our world and sell them in the fantasy world for gold, becoming rich in both worlds doesn't seem too hard a task.

Of course, there is the ethicality of the whole endeavor. It's basically a Prime Directive situation. She could easily ruin part of the fantasy world's economy or radically alter their culture in her pursuit of a quick profit. So in the end, she may be more of a villain than a hero as far as the fantasy world is concerned.

While the setup is multifaceted and super interesting, there are a few downsides to consider. The whole explanation of why she can travel between worlds is frankly unneeded, and robs the story of what could be a potential mystery. Along the same lines, having a random parallel world traveler magically give her the “understand all languages” ability is a bit too much of a deus ex machina for me. I would have preferred if it were simply not explained along with her ability to slide between worlds.

And while I like the idea of her brother's otaku nonsense suddenly being useful, I wish it functioned more like a memory than an active conversation—like he had been coincidentally preparing her all her life for this and she had ignored it in the moment. I think it would be a bit more tragic and meaningful rather than some kind of running gag.

Still, when it comes down to it, Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement is a show with a novel twist on the standard isekai formula that I haven't seen before. I'm interested to see where it goes and how much it will turn into a thought experiment exploring the ramifications of her actions—like trying to use undocumented gold coins in our world and exposing materials such as plastic to the other. I'll definitely be back next week to find out for sure.

I was intrigued by Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement when I learned that it would be an isekai where the little heroine girl could travel back and forth between the isekai world and her ordinary world at will. No getting reborn, no losing all of her memories, no being gifted a stupid RPG video game menu screen. She is just an unusually smart kid who can pop from one world to another and has to use her wits and her access to fancy Earth technology to make some extra scratch with all that gold that is just lying around.

That, to me, is a pretty neat idea for a show, and Saving 80,000 Gold is an example of how far a neat idea can take a show when it struggles with many other elements. Yes, the show is barely animated, the backgrounds are pretty bad, the generic fantasy world is even more generic than usual, and the pacing is slow…but hey! That premise is pretty solid! Plus, this is one of those rare instances where I didn't mind how slow the pacing was (at least, once the show got done with Mitsuha just wandering around an empty field for, like, five minutes straight). I always appreciate whenever an isekai anime at least pays lip service to how even a tiny genius girl would have some trouble adjusting to the language barrier and living standards of a medieval fantasy setting, so I'm glad that we at least waited until the end of the premiere to give her the Speak Common skill, on top of all her other new powers.

I'll also admit that I laughed at the dumb jokes about Mitsuha's brother constantly interrupting her inner monologue with his incredibly nerdy but shockingly convenient hobby trivia. What can I say? This isn't a great show, but for an isekai anime, it's pretty alright. It's got a likable enough leading lady, a cute sidekick for her to hang out with, and a decently strong core concept that could go some places once the season picks up. I'll give it another episode or two, and I might not even get paid to watch it. Coming from me, that's not too shabby.

Is it possible to make an anime wrong? I don't mean make one badly or incompetently. I mean wrong. As in fundamentally making the wrong decision at every step of constructing a piece of animated audiovisual narrative fiction. The answer is “Yes”: It's called EX-ARM, and while Saving 80,000 Gold isn't quite that incompetent, the fact that it came to mind at all means this show is dead on arrival.

I could complain about how this is another isekai show where the character has a magic power via entirely bullshit means. I could complain that our lead character has no real personality despite having a tragic backstory and that she's such a nothing character that her dead older brother has more personality in this episode. This whole episode feels like it was written as a stream of consciousness with no direction or narrative momentum. But those flaws pale in comparison to just how poorly this thing is put together from a technical standpoint. The animation is garbage. The art is weak and generic when it isn't actively falling apart. The editing feels like the episode was fed into a wood chipper and hastily assembled by a blindfolded intern minutes before it aired. Any semblance of tone has its legs cut out from under it. It is shockingly bad at basically every level, and no superficial faults can distract from the foundational ones.

I've had some trusted friends say they enjoy the light novels for this series, and I believe them, so don't take this as an attack on the source material. The concept of world-hopping to stockpile gold for early retirement is fun, and I can easily imagine an economics nerd charm to a better version of this show. But like Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer before it, this production has gotten its head kicked in by the industry's current production glut. Any good things inherited from the source have been buried under a grave with a wonky perspective.

Ah, avarice. If it's not the oldest motive, it's certainly up there. What better way to use your spontaneous ability to go to other worlds than to pad your retirement account by peddling modern Japanese goods to a medieval fantasy realm? It's not necessarily a route most isekai protagonists take. Still, it's hard to fault Mitsuha for making that decision, even if the theme song suggests some less-than-scrupulous uses of earth technology. I don't want to see this story turn into her becoming an arms dealer rather than selling the magic of outhouse air fresheners. Since I never got through more than one of the source light novels, I don't have an answer for that, and to be perfectly fair, this episode isn't necessarily making me want to go back and read anymore or watch more of the show.

That's more a statement on how relatively uninteresting this episode is than on using money as a plot device. Heroine Mitsuha has been dealt a raw hand by fate, but we don't see a whole lot of how that affects her on a day-to-day level. We know that her parents and older brother both died in some accident, but apart from the fact that she misses her brother, she doesn't appear to necessarily be stuck in her life without the ability to move forward. Not that grief presents the same in all people, and certainly, the fact that her brother lives on in her mind as a source of advice lets us know that she does feel his loss keenly. But the story is more interested in showing her attempting to communicate with people in the other world before eventually shoving an explanation of how she got the power to jump worlds in the first place into the latter half of the episode, and it just simply isn't thrilling. That Mitsuha cannot immediately communicate with the people in the other world is a different angle on the isekai story than we typically get, but the problem gets resolved magically and quickly, and the fact that she appears so much younger than her actual age is only barely touched on. Mostly we're sitting here watching her blindly grope her way through the most uninteresting isekai experience ever, and even if you're partial to slow-moving shows wherein a cute girl does a thing, this may be a little bland.

I also want to mention the laughable animation of wolves running forward when seen from an above angle. We see this same shot twice, and it gives those horses in I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss a run for their money. The rest of the art and animation aren't great shakes, but this really stands out in a not-good way, and we can hope that there aren't many animals running in the show's future.