The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - The Water Magician

Ryo is delighted to be reincarnated into the fantastical world of Phi, where he thinks he'll get to live a quiet life learning to use his newfound water magic. Going with the flow here, however, means something very different. Ryo is immediately pitted against the wild lands he winds up in and the slew of deadly monsters that call the remote subcontinent home. You'd think he'd forget about taking it easy when he's stuck fighting for his life, but lucky for Ryo, he's naturally optimistic, clever, and blessed with the hidden "Eternal Youth" trait. Twenty years pass in the blink of an eye, and each encounter along the way pushes him one step closer to the pinnacle of human magic. Little does he realize that's only the opening chapter of his tale. A fateful meeting soon thrusts Ryo to the forefront of history, forever changing the course of his life.

The Water Magician is based on the light novel series by author Tadashi Kubō and illustrator Hana Amano. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

If The Water Magician has a besetting sin in its second episode, it's that it simply isn't doing enough to let us get to know the characters. Yes, the pacing is pretty slow, too, but arguably, an episode that features Ryo interacting with his first-ever fantasy world human should involve more character development. There are a few good moments, like Ryo casually mentioning things he's familiar with from fantasy works in modern Japan without any explanation, which throws Abel off. And Abel, being just generally perplexed by Ryo, works a bit because it's played seriously. He's just been shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere, and the only human around is this weird guy with no clothes and a strange knowledge base. But I'd have liked to see more, with Abel drawing Ryo into conversation to try to figure him out, or Ryo being a little more excited to meet a real, live human after conversing with a dragon and a Dullahan for an unspecified number of years.

I suppose this could all go back to the idea raised in reviews of the first episode: it's not very interesting. While it does manage to nearly circumvent the usual isekai issues of an overpowered protagonist who doesn't deserve or earn his strength (if only because Ryo's spent what seems to be a very long time working on it) and there's no harem or slavery in sight, it also just sort of…exists. Ryo and Abel meet, they set off, and plenty of things never get clarified, like why Abel was traveling on a ship with smugglers in the first place. Is Ryo so innocent that he can't fathom that Abel might be a bad guy himself? How did Ryo explain the robes that the Dullahan gave him when he'd already established to Abel that he had no clothes? In a show with more action or interest, those questions wouldn't matter so much, but with as little happening as there is, they become outsize.

I do like the music. It's more orchestral than not, and while it could get a little loud at times (reminder: I'm sound-sensitive), it forms a charming background to the otherwise lackluster episode. Creature designs aren't great – there's something weird about the dragon's face, and the behemoth looks like a hippopotodile – but I like the art style for the ending theme. This second episode makes it increasingly likely that this is going to be one of those series that's just sort of there. There are worse things, but also far better.

It isn't often that I can't finish a book, and the first light novel of The Water Magician has that dubious honor. It was, to put it mildly, a slog. The first episode of its adaptation fares slightly better, if only because it speeds up the process of Ryo learning to use his new water magic about tenfold. If I'm remembering correctly, this episode covers the greater part of the first book, and that's an improvement, because I could get through it.

And it honestly isn't terrible. It's not great, either, but there's something sort of endearing about Ryo's enthusiasm for figuring things out. He works diligently at mastering his magic and bringing it up to the fantasy novel standard he's hoping for, he manages to figure out ways around having fire magic (I loved that he used ice to create a magnification device to start a fire with the sunlight), and having him either befriend or enrage all of the monsters around his home. Is it all terribly convenient? Yes, but that's basically par for the course at this point, and neither Ryo nor the story is particularly obnoxious about it.

That said, there's almost no action to speak of here, and the movement of time is nebulous. In part that may be on purpose; at the very end, we learn that Fake Michael (as Ryo names the angel who sent him to his new world) didn't realize that Ryo has an eternal youth power, so it's entirely possible that hundreds of years have passed and Ryo (and the viewers) didn't realize it because he doesn't age. About the only hints we have are minor ones in his appearance: he eschews his modern clothes for a skirt made out of hide (?) and his skin tans. Well, and he masters his magic, but in this sort of isekai tale, that doesn't necessarily denote the passage of time so much as it does the hero's inherent awesomeness.

I think, in the words of the great Douglas Adams, the best way to sum this up is “mostly harmless.” It's fairly inoffensive and if it isn't exciting, it's not entirely dull either. And Ryo and his pals all just looks so gosh darn happy in the opening theme that it almost makes me want to see what's making them so joyous. While I wouldn't say this has potential, it's also not bad either, to damn it with faint praise.

Last week, I called this anime a thought experiment—an excuse to think about all the rules for a fictional magic system and then work through what could be done within it and how. The problem is, of course, that without a plot, such a thing is only really enjoyable to the one making the magic system. This episode is similar—only this time its a thought experiment about making a fantasy world instead.

Unfortunately, this is done in the most boring way possible: through expository dialogue. Information about the world is simply relayed from one character to another. So we get things like “that's not how magic usually works” or “there are three kingdoms in the plains beyond the mountains” or “elves and dwarves exists” (and are, for some reason, exactly like the stereotypes you are imagining). Do we see how magic normally works? Do we get a quick flash of what the lands beyond the mountains look like? Do we get a visual representation of what elves and dwarves look like (outside of the opening and ending animations)? The answer to all these questions is, of course, “no”.

And like with the last episode, while exploring a fictional world can be a ton of fun, it is the story that facilitates this. With this second episode, the plot is simply, Able and Ryo start their walk to the nearest town. While this does give an opportunity for some fights, none of them have anything akin to real drama. Ryo simply drops ice on everything they encounter and wins instantly.

But then we get the encounter with the griffon. For some reason, Ryo just inherently knows he can't drop an ice block on its head. Why? I have no idea. He goes on to slaughter dozens of wyverns (flying creatures of a similar size) in the next scene without any issue, so I'm clueless as to what the issue was.

But while I was as bored by this episode as I had been the first, I do feel like there is potential here. The world and magic system are clearly well-thought out. The issue is that the anime is so front loaded with these things that there's no room for anything else. Perhaps as a book, this story works. After all, you've bought the book so you're pretty much locked in to read the whole volume. A Slow Start is a bit easier to stomach in that case. However, as an anime, this just feels like the author is being self-indulgent to the extreme—and there is nothing in the show so far to make me want to continue indulging their whims when I don't have to.

I am a person who loves magic systems. I love learning the rules and seeing how the characters use their heads to get the most out of their magic. But here's the thing. A magic system should be there to support the story—it can't be the plot in and of itself. If it tries to be, we get something like this first episode of The Water Magician, which is little more than an extended thought experiment.

We learn a ton about how magic works in this world—that you visualize what you want to happen and, with practice, it'll eventually work the way you intend. Of course, the better the image in your head—the more complex and detailed it is—the better the spell works. Thus, our protagonist with all his modern day knowledge of atoms and physics is able to do much more than create water out of nothing. All too soon he's making ice walls and pressure cutters. My favorite moment in the episode was seeing that he, unable to figure out how to make ice shoot like a bullet, came to the creative (yet natural) conclusion to simply make it appear above his target and use gravity to “shoot” it down.

All this is to say the author of this story obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the magic system, how it works, what it can do, and what it can't. The big issue, however, is that they didn't seem to do the same for the actual story. This episode is 90% Ryo learning magic or using it in battle. The remaining 10% are his conversations with an angel and a dragon respectively. And as for Ryo, he's is a blank slate of a character. There is nothing interesting about him. The only adjective I have to describe him is “affable” (though I suppose “bland” would work just as well).

So while I enjoyed watching Ryo explore water magic, it's far from enough to keep me watching. I don't care about Ryo or his life. Nothing in this episode has me excited for what is to come. The revelation that he's immortal likewise fills me with little hope—especially as it's presented as a pointless afterthought. The only reason I'll be back next week is because it's my job—so here's hoping the series makes the most of its second opportunity to win me over.

I'm sorry, y'all. I am going to have to tap out of this one. The first episode of The Water Magician was already almost too boring for me to endure, but this second episode actually manages a rather incredible feat: Instead of isolating Ryo to a patch of wilderness where he has nothing to do but wander around and monologue to himself about magic rules or whatever, we actually get a real human being for him to interact with—and the result is somehow even more boring than before. The other day, I was feeling fancy at the grocery store and I decided to buy two whole loaves of decent quality bread to keep in our pantry. I honestly feel like I would get more entertainment value from walking out of my office right now, opening up my pantry, and just watching those two bread loaves sit there next to each other. One of them is a croissant loaf, while the other is whole wheat from Dave's Killer Bread. I feel like they might actually have some interesting trade secrets to share with each other. Maybe they could compare crusts and crumb density.

Anything would be better than the Ryo and Abel power half-hour. The Water Magician apparently thinks that dialogue in a work of fiction serves a purely utilitarian purpose. It devotes so much of its runtime to characters explaining what they are seeing, the motivations for their actions, and their goals—and somehow neither character can muster a single ounce of personality between them. It is, again, almost fascinating, from a critical perspective. The only emotion that Ryo seems capable of perceiving is dull, passive enthusiasm for whatever task is put in front of him. Died tragically young but reincarnated in a world where the laws of magic spit in the face of the only reality you've ever known? Alrighty, sounds good. Stuck in the wilderness with nothing to do but tend to your garden for who knows how long? Alrighty, sounds good. A castaway adventurer needs help, and is asking you to leave your home for the first time in ages to discover more of this fantasy world you were reboring into? Alrighty, sounds good.

It's maddening.

Have you ever been on a trip with a group of family or friends to the zoo, or the museum, or a foreign city, and there's one person in the group who can only contribute to the experience by pointing at things and identifying what they are? “That's the skeleton of a dinosaur.” “That's the painting of sunflowers from all those movies.” “That's the street where the coffee shop is.” Abel is that guy. His entire body is overflowing with such an earnest but fundamentally bland need to provide exposition that there's no room for any character traits that would make him the least bit engaging as a travelling companion for Ryo.

Just about the only reaction of any kind that this episode was able to elicit from me comes about 16 minutes into the episode, when a bunch of wyverns are fighting with a behemoth monster. Even then, it was only because the cut gets noticeably terrible looking for a few seconds right in the middle, and I felt bad for the poor animators that probably ran out of time to polish up their work. Other than that, The Water Magician continues to be a void from which no detectable emotional response can escape.

I cannot accuse The Water Magician of trying to play coy about what it is. The entirety of the summary for the premiere on Crunchyroll reads: “After dying, Ryo Mihara finds himself reincarnated in a fantasy world with the ability to cast water magic.” The episode is called “The Slow, But Dangerous, Life.” Those two sentences tell you, quite literally, everything you could possibly hope to know about this show without just watching it for yourself. There is a boy who learns water magic after getting reincarnated to another world. He encounters the occasional danger. Beyond that, life is slow. So slow. So very, very slow.

Look, I can recognize when a show executes on a premise well, even if I cannot possibly fathom the appeal of the concept. In fact, I take that back; I can fathom how people might find Ryo's adventures compelling when they specifically take the form of a survival video-game that one could actually play. I have devoted plenty of hours to titles like The Long Dark, No Man's Sky, and the like. This show is replicating the feel of those games quite well. The chill music, the laid-back atmosphere, the fact that whatever violence does occasionally occur is presented as secondary to the real thrill of wandering around aimlessly and gathering up stuff to take back to your house so you can make more stuff. It's all there.

The thing is, I can barely even grasp how it would be any kind of engaging to watch another person play those games when I could just be doing it myself. To make a decent-looking but otherwise unremarkable animated pastiche of those activities just removes me even further from what actually makes them interesting.

This is my way of trying to highlight a major caveat with that score up there. Folks that are into the idea of watching a blank-slate anime protag spend an entire episode doing nothing but surviving in the fantasy wilderness by himself will probably enjoy this. I think? It's honestly getting difficult for me to even guess at who the intended audience for any of these shows might be. As for me, personally? I was bored to tears. I mean that literally: I started nodding off and yawning so much that my eyes kept watering up and making it hard to focus on what was even happening on screen. This is the animated equivalent of a melatonin-codeine cocktail, so far as I am concerned. I will keep it in mind the next time I am suffering from a bout of insomnia, but that's just about as far as its appeal runs, in my book.