This Week in Anime

What Went Wrong in Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody?

Nick D
Y'know, I guess this is my fault. I made a whole big deal about loving fantasy anime with big ensemble casts, so after discussing Grancrest War and Black Clover, this one was kinda inevitable.

So yes, we're finally discussing the latest addition to the isekai sub-genre.

Yeeeep. Granted I've not been a particular fan of the modern isekai renaissance, but recent entries in the genre have at least made interesting attempts at developing the staples of their premise. Grimgar took a look at the nitty gritty of living in a new world without the skills to survive. Re:Zero tried to pick apart the power fantasy of the typical isekai protagonist. In Another World With My Smartphone questioned whether or not anime should still be allowed to exist. And so on.

Death March seems to be leaning on two major breaks from formula. The first is that Satou is an adult rather than a teenage otaku, and he mostly treats his stay in the fantasy world as a chance to get away from his grueling programming job.

The second is uh...

So yeah, guess we gotta talk about the child slavery thing. Look, I get that sometimes fiction can be indulgent and a way to explore a kink or whatever, but Satou's supposed to having a fun fantasy vacation where he keeps buying people. And I'm sorry, but the only scenario where owning an 11-year-old makes for a good vacation is when you beat them in the finals of your cruise ship's DDR tournament.

It's a really weird direction to take it too. A character with modern sensibilities being thrust into a world with much more regressive social norms is an interesting concept! How does a stranger in an unknown land cope with totally different societal mores? Do they buck against the system or accept it to avoid attracting danger? These are questions Death March doesn't seem even slightly interested in asking.

Which only gets more egregious when it introduces Arisa, who's her own can of worms.

Arisa is somehow both the best and worst character in the show. She's the worst because, well

But she's the best because she's literally the only character besides Satou who expresses any personality, even if that personality is that she wants to bang Satou, I guess.

Okay there is one joke where the cat girl nonchalantly kills a giant bug and shows it off.

as a cat owner, I Can Relate

But Arisa just raises so many questions with her backstory. She's an adult woman from the real world who was reincarnated with her memories intact into this world, then lived as a princess for years before being overthrown and sold into slavery. That's a fascinating premise, but the show never bothers to explore it to any extent. Like, how does she feel about living as a literal sex slave when she lived the majority of her life in the real world and then a significant portion of that as royalty in this one? Or how does she feel about her sister in this world having canonically been raped by their past masters?

Yeah, Satou's the only character with any real interiority, but even he's mostly a cipher. He takes nearly everything with a blank-faced thousand-yard-stare that works when he still thinks he's dreaming this all up, but it doesn't make any sense once he realizes it's really happening. I'm not opposed to the idea of having a chill-ass vacation-by-proxy in an interesting fantasy world, but neither the world nor the characters are thought-out enough to be intriguing.

Honestly I kinda wish that part of him had stuck around. Being a dick isn't a likable trait, but at least it's something distinctive. After the second episode, he loses even that fragment of personality. Like we usually call MCs like this Potato-kun, but even potatoes have texture. Satou is more like a formless pile of starch sitting on a plate.

TBH I think it benefits the show not to pretend to have a plot too often. It's obviously going for a relaxed hang-out vibe, and Satou is literally so powerful that nothing can really threaten him, just be a temporary inconvenience. So if there's no stakes regardless of whether they're buying jewelry or storming a dungeon, might as well be honest about it instead of wasting more time with Satou slowly deciding which skill slot to min-max to win whatever fight he's in.

Yeah, on top of everything else this show kinda looks like a double-fried turd on a stick.

It never quite reaches abysmal levels of shortcuts, but it never gets a scene or moment that looks 100% finished either. And there's this weird filter placed over many scenes that make the background and periphery look out of focus. I can't tell if it's an accident or purposeful, but it looks like crud either way.

Overall, Death March just feels really lazy. Even when there were isekai shows I hated, I usually got the sense that the creator was excited by their own world, at least as a way to imagine getting a harem and having an adventure. Death March doesn't even feel like it's excited about its slavery fetish. It's not even putting in the effort to be titillating. It's just barely there.

Honestly, you could throw a rock in any direction and hit a better isekai harem show. There's no shortage of them. Unless you've run through all those and you're really, really hard-up for an isekai fix, I don't see anything here that hasn't been done way better elsewhere.

On the other hand, there are worse things to be than boring. It could've been a monsterfucker show.