The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Sweet Reincarnation

Pastry Mille Morteln, age 9, is both his father's heir and the reincarnation of an unfulfilled pastry chef. While he dreams of a land filled with sweet treats, there's a lot to be done first! From learning how to fight, to controlling his new magical talents and doing his best to defend his village from bandits, and yet all he wants to do is bake the perfect apple pie... Pastry Mille Morteln has his work cut out for him.

Sweet Reincarnation is based on Nozomu Koryu's Sweet Reincarnation (Okashi na Tensei: Saikyō Patishie Isekai Kōrin) light novel series. It streams on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

Another day, another boilerplate isekai. Not that Sweet Reincarnation is the worst, by any means – thus far it's largely devoid of the markers of the least creative titles in the genre. Instead, it simply isn't all that interesting, although it does have one of the more creative deaths I've seen: in his previous life, Pastry was killed by his own giant sugar (marzipan?) sculpture at a competition. I wouldn't have thought that either sugar or marzipan was heavy enough to do so much damage, but I do bake on a much smaller scale.

In any event, poor young Pastry – yes, that's his name – is reborn into a world where sugar is rare and even apples are hard to come by if you don't live in the right region. Again, this is a decent addition to the story, because in the pre-industrial world, that was how it worked; it's why people used to keep pineapples as decorations and markers of wealth rather than just eating them. It doesn't matter that Pastry is the only son (and therefore heir) of a landed lord, he's still bound by what's possible in his new life. It may seem a little odd that magic exists but no one can easily get sugar, but at least it's not a conflict rooted in the usual power struggles like we more typically see. And there's so far no indication that Pastry's incredible amounts of magic power are going to enable him to suddenly produce gallons of molasses.

The problem instead is one that's been plaguing shows this season: the story's opening salvo just isn't all that interesting because it's more invested in setting up the plot than in actually starting it. Pastry's just a nine-year-old boy with baking aspirations, and even his father taking him to the capital to go through the Sanctification Ceremony isn't all that exciting. There are attempts at humor with the revelation that Pastry's mom and closest-in-age sister enjoy dressing him up in girls' clothes, but that's not nearly as funny as the episode wants it to be, nor is the scene where Pastry agonizes over picking the best apples – excuse me, bonkas – all that amusing. If this were selling itself as a slice-of-life story, it might work a little better, but that's so clearly not what's going on that it just feels stifling. It at least looks better than Am I Actually the Strongest?, but it's got the same paint-by-numbers feel.

That absolutely might change in the next episode. The panda priest is so transparently evil that danger is almost certainly coming for Pastry's home fief, and that may give the plot a kick in the behind to get it moving. But this episode is pretty dull and I don't think I'll be coming back for a second helping.

At one point in the middle of the first episode of Sweet Reincarnation, our hero Pastry, who is still in the prepubescent phase of his new fantasy life, is brought to the church to be strapped to a rack and locked away for nearly two days straight. This torture, where the would-be magic user must endure days of isolation and mind-numbing boredom, is apparently the secret to unlocking the latent magical potential of the children in this world. “I don't know why they're putting so much effort into this,” I thought. “They could just make the kid cover all of the soul-crushingly generic isekai anime for Preview Guide!”

I'm just joshing, folks. We're all having fun, here! Well…okay, that's a lie, I didn't much fun with Sweet Reincarnation at all, on account of how it fails to include even one interesting moment, compelling character, or funny joke in the entire twenty-two minutes of its premiere. You know who is having fun, though? Pastry is. Our boy is so obsessed with making sweets that he doesn't even mind the kind of psychological and physical trauma that is enough to drive grown men into madness, simply because he gets to think about baking desserts. So, I sure do hope you share our protagonist's single-minded, borderline deranged love for concocting tasty pies and tarts, because that is the one and only thing about Pastry that this show is willing to invest in. This guy died thinking about pastries, he spends the first half of the episode thinking and/or raving about pastries, and, after the brief interlude where he is forced to think about pastries some more while tied to a torture rack, Pastry concludes the episode by marveling over his newfound magic powers for a moment…only to then go back to marveling even more about how much he likes apples, which are simply pastries that have yet to reach their final form.

So, yeah, outside of a completely flat protagonist and a story that follows the formula of the modern reincarnation isekai down to the letter, what else does Sweet Reincarnation have going for it? Um…the animation is kind of nice looking, I guess? I'm honestly at a loss, with this show. It's yet another title to throw onto the pile of Nothing Isekai that come and go with distressing regularity, each and every season. Like the others, it will fade from memory just as quickly as it entered, and the only evidence anyone will be able to find of its existence will be the empty calories they stock up on from the snack run that this episode might possibly inspire.

What a horrible way to go: having your giant candy sculpture fall on you. A sculpture in the shape of a phoenix is the perfect thematic choice for a reincarnation story—although having it resemble a truck would have been the ultimate tongue-in-cheek choice.

Anyway, here we are, back with another isekai story featuring an overpowered protagonist reborn into a noble, loving family after being killed in our world. But this time, our hero wasn't an assassin or even a shut-in in his previous life. No, this time, he was a pastry chef. Now, in his second life, he wants to do something he wasn't able to in his first life and change the world through his culinary skills.

You know, if this episode had gone deep into the science and logistics of what it takes to make simple pastries—showed the step-by-step process like in Dr. Stone or something similar—this could have been an interesting 22 minutes. When you can just go to the convenience store around the corner and get a piece of cake, it's easy to gloss over all that goes into it—not just on the baking side but in the cultivation and selective breeding of all the crops/animals involved as well. And while the series does touch on these concepts (with our hero Pastry talking about the lack of sugarcane in his area and pondering about perhaps cultivating bees for honey instead), the standard isekai plot tropes are quick to put the story back on track.

Bandits are coming to attack, and since it seems like we can't have a non-overpowered protagonist anymore, Pastry is taken to the church to unlock his immense-to-a-point-never-before-seen magical powers. This is done through extreme torture—i.e., being in a sensory deprivation chamber for two consecutive days. Of course, this is brushed off as a joke as he thought about all the desserts he'd like to make to pass the time.

And, honestly, that's about the height of humor as far as this episode is concerned. Overall, there is only one joke told again and again: Pastry is thinking about cooking, while everyone else thinks he's thinking about something much more serious. In other words: he is the clown, and everyone else is playing the straight man. Yet, neither says anything out loud, so the misunderstandings continue.

All in all, this is a rather mundane first episode. If food porn and isekai fantasy are your things, I can see a world where you might enjoy this. However, with the humor being predictable, the characters one-note, and the plot points anything but unique, I would hesitate to recommend this to anyone.

I'll level with you: it is really, really hard for me to work up even marginal interest in any isekai title these days. It's been years of seeing the same basic formula repeated over and over again, occasionally sprinkling on a new gimmick that is quickly repeated until it too becomes part of the established formula. So while there is nothing terribly wrong with this premiere – it is largely competent, especially compared to many of its subgenre peers – I also couldn't work up even the slightest bit of interest in seeing more.

Honestly, most of the things I liked about the premiere mostly came down to it not repeating the cynical or incompetent choices of stuff like The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure. The episode runs at a decent pace, the characters are bland but inoffensive, and there's not an excess of screaming characters trying to be wacky and funny. It goes through the typical beats of an isekai story, with our unfortunately-named protagonist predictably being blessed with immense power and everyone thinking about how cool and important he'll one day be. The one wrinkle is that Pastry is more interested in sweets than he is for the prescribed heroism that awaits him, but even that is barely a character trait, and it mostly functions to make him feel totally detached from the storyline happening around him.

That's a bummer because, taking on this episode in a vacuum, there's some interesting ideas at play. The idea that magic is something that must be drawn out through total isolation is neat and kind of off-putting in a way that works. The scheming priest behind Pastry's magic test planning to expose the kid's uber-magic is a solid idea that will presumably put a big target on our protagonist's back. While the gag about Pastry's mom and sister dressing him in girly clothes is a little weird, it at least feels like our hero has some sort of connection to the people around him. It's not anything amazing, but there's been at least a little thought put into this story outside of handing our male lead an arsenal of unstoppable magic and a harem of anime girls to be saved by him.

Unfortunately that's not enough to overcome the otherwordly fatigue this whole subgenre has built up for me. If the best thing I have to say about a show is that it's not as insufferable or transparently uncreative as I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World, then it's still probably not a good show. Being able to crawl over a bar this low just isn't a feat worthy of praise, and neither is this show worthy of much attention.

I really like to bake; in fact, once I'm done with this write-up, I'm planning to get into the kitchen and put together a blackberry-coconut macaroon tart for a party tonight. So, while I tend not to care for reincarnation isekai, I thought maybe this one would align with my interests enough to keep my attention. But it looks like Sweet Reincarnation is just another isekai with a sugar glaze slapped onto it.

Without a doubt, it's the best-looking premiere so far. I appreciated that, not just because it was a relief to look at something competently animated, but because it really did make all the food look delicious. The sugar sculptures in the first minutes were genuinely lovely with their sheen and luster, and all the cakes, tarts, and cookies flying around in the opening made me want to get up and start preheating my oven. The animation is bright, colorful, and sharp, a big step up from literally anything else I've watched so far this season, and Pastry's dad was just as delectable as any of the sweets on display. Yeah, I guess I'm not totally over my dad thing.

But there's a mean-spiritedness that permeates throughout, jarring as the crunch of an errant eggshell. Pastry's female relatives love to force him into dresses and put makeup on him, even though he's plenty old enough to tell them to knock it off and he obviously doesn't enjoy it. The coming of age ceremony consists of tying him to a chair and locking him in a dark room for two days to unlock his magic. It's not even like they toss him in a dark room; he's bound down, completely unable to move, blindfolded, and left alone. Of course, Pastry spends the whole time daydreaming about baking something with apples. I know that boredom is good for creativity, but don't you think this is a touch extreme? As someone who spends a lot of time around children, it was discomfiting to sit through.

Like a fancy Instagram cupcake, Sweet Reincarnation may be trendy and shiny and nice to look at, but underneath all the adornments, it tastes like it was made out of a bland box mix. I think I'll pass and wait for something to come along that was made with real ingredients