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This Week in Anime
Ah, Well, Different World and All
by Coop Bicknell & Christopher Farris,
Chris and Coop wade through this season's isekai offerings. Wait, are some of these shows trying to do something different?
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
And every three months, I respond with some variation of "I am very tired."
Coop
Oh so very tired, Chris... If my general feelings for this season of Isekai and Isekai-adjacent series had a title, it would be: Fallen into a Pit of Rote Plots: The Editor Who Understands Why People Like This Stuff but Has Seen It All Done to Death!
Do you think that needs another exclamation point or two?
At least as many as your average shonen battle episode title.
It's a cruel irony. Those who do this stuff apparently like watching us wade through it, hence the demand for our seasonal isekai smorgasbord. Plus, the sheer amount we've trudged through at this point means the critical fatigue renders us more...reactionary to the repeated tropes and natures of isekai. I see a stat sheet, and my eyes glaze over; it's involuntary.
The further irony then is that the isekai genre itself seems to be agreeing a bit these days? There's no shortage of new shows in the genre this season, but perhaps surprisingly, very few of them are exactly the straightforward fantasies I've come to associate with it. There are even some pretty intriguing swerves here! Not that this means they're all exceptional, just that even the mid ones are at least mid in mildly interesting new ways.
It's all the more serendipitous that we've already started looking at the season with images from A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai, because the series is a perfect baseline example of the genre and its tropes.
The godly summons for a pre-sekai character sheet meeting, the aforementioned pop-up screens, hints at dark secrets about our hero, body cleaning spells, cute sidekicks, paper-thin Dragon Quest allusions... It's nothing new.
This little man is a cutie for sure, but I've seen these narrative boxes crossed off in many a light novel. Gatherer's Adventure makes a case for being a perfectly cromulent "one of those" for viewers who see this as their interchangeable background noise, but I'd rather spend my personal time on other titles.
I don't know that I can even be charitable enough to call this one cromulent; there's just nothing to it. The distinguishing element is its MC's ability being pick up materials, and it's treated as this super-awesome cool fantasy power because that's the video game mechanic the author decided to craft it around.
Like you said, that's the baseline for isekai as a genre, and it's why I sigh so heavily every time one of them comes up during premiere season. I crave engagement and friction in my fiction, so watching somebody with default character-creation settings sleepwalk through a game world on easy mode does nothing for me. The problem is that there are usually multiple shows like Gatherer's Adventure per season!
Yepper doodles there are. Through my time editing a light novel series and proofreading many others, it's very hard for me not to see these works as just that—work. If I'm working on something, I want to give it my all for it to be a great reading experience in English—regardless of my personal feelings on the material. At the end of the day, everything is someone's favorite. That changes when I put on my critic hat, but my professional isekai (or litRPG?) insights remain underneath.
If you're wondering why my subs look a touch odd (other than the recent Crunchyroll subtitle hiccups), I watched these shows dubbed whenever available. Generally, I found myself way more charitable to a title as a result. With a dub, I could get a grasp of the ADR writer's decision-making while localizing these stories into English. In most cases, the crew kept true to the spirit of the original script while introducing sensible line punch-ups or rewordings on occasion.
While I remain baffled that Crunchyroll regularly bothers to dub shovelware like this over more interesting titles, I can understand taking any punch-ups where you can. The only flavor Gatherer's Adventure has otherwise is the odd detail of its MC being taller than average.
See, now we're in the complete opposite territory, quality-wise, when it comes to isekai. May I Ask for One Final Thing? was a blindsiding right hook of a delight when I caught the premiere at the beginning of the season. So much of that is down to our gal Scarlet here, who hits it off as a late contender for Character Of The Year.
She has done nothing wrong, ever, in her life. I know this, and I love her.
Scarlet is a perfect example of a great lead or cool character, elevating what could be a fairly average plot. I'm thrilled that the Final Thing team seems to recognize this fact, because Scarlet absolutely commands the viewer's attention (and production's budget) whenever she's onscreen. It doesn't hurt that Morgan Lauré kills it as Scarlet—she does a fantastic job of balancing the punch princess's cold use of decorum with her burning desire to kick ass and chew bubblegum.
It's a great example of melding a show's unique selling point and appealing main character into one entity—the platonic opposite of something like Gatherer's Adventure fronting a generic Melvin with an uninteresting ability. I'd watch Scarlet deck dukes with her dukes on deck, whether or not Final Thing was an isekai.
And that turns out to be important, because not only is this anime's use of the isekai setup unique from more standard entries in the genre, it doesn't even tell viewers it's an isekai for most of the first four episodes!
Just in case any of y'all hadn't caught up and were wondering why we were even talking about this show.
As part of the handful of series with a dub, Final Thing is my favorite of the bunch. Not only is Lauré's performance great, but the script here is fairly liberal with the punch-ups—specifically with Scarlet and Julius' (played by Reagan Murdock) dialogue. As I mentioned before, I could see some saying "it's a little much," but I feel these choices fit the characters and their relationships quite well. For instance, this moment is great subtitled, but it almost made me keel over in English.
There's so much personality to it! It's a series that wouldn't be as much fun as it is if it didn't seem to be having as much fun with itself. It's why I would be predisposed to like it as an isekai series, even if this latest reveal didn't also earn my sympathy by seeming like it's going to have its heroine rail against the reincarnated chump that's here to make this fantasy world her playground. It puts it in the company of The Executioner and Her Way of Life, another winner in the genre that did so via subversion.
One Final Thing actively hiding its isekai status for a good bit speaks to that overall sense of pushback that we and so many others might be feeling with the genre these days. And I have to wonder if that feeling informed another unconventional choice with another show this season, in Fated Magical Princess: Who Made Me a Princess.
Just like with One Final Thing, some anime viewers might be wondering why we're covering this one. Well, while Fated Magical Princess isn't an isekai...it used to be one!
Learning about this creative decision from both you and Rebecca made me wonder if committees are starting to steer away because they've already noticed that the well is dry. Of course, there's no end to the stories being published every day on places like Narou, but there's probably a regurgitative quality to the mass majority of these works. As Miles pointed out a while back, these make for cheap and profitable series, but that will change when eyes start to waver.
Thinking of the success of straight fantasy like Frieren and Delicious in Dungeon, it makes sense to reconstitute these stories in adaptation. Then again, it doesn't help that series like Hero Without a Class, Backwater Dungeon, and Banished Court Magician muddy the waters by being what most readers would experience in a light novel story but without "another world" thrown into the mix.
It's why the rise of terms like "Narou-kei" and "LitRPG" has started to proliferate as a differentiator. However, it's all the same to me, and I'd imagine that's the case for a large majority of viewers as well.
They definitely shoot for a lot of the same vibes, with the spurned-nerd overpowered wish-fulfillment fantasy of, say, Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon hitting the same notes as any series where said nerd is an actual reincarnated real-world gaming nerd. Some of them even still have stat sheets!
And even with its isekai elements carved out, Fated Magical Princess still plays on these same sorts of powers. Athy's engagement with her world is still based on her having predetermined knowledge of her story, regardless of whether she got it from knowing it in fictional form first. Just in the anime version, she's an oddly cognizant baby with little explanation.
If nothing else, it makes me appreciate the actual necessity of the isekai mechanics if you're going to tell this kind of story. Or at least think they should paper over them better if they're going to excise them.
I'll be curious to hear Rebecca's thoughts on this one by the time it wraps up. I'm not crazy about seeing babies or young children in peril, so that element instantly pushed me back a bit. However, Fated Princess is often a cute and quite pretty show. And I'll admit, it was nice to see Athy get one over on the maid looking to cause trouble around the palace.
I know villainess reincarnation primarily grew out of the otome game genre and entries like Angelique, but I wonder how much of it also got informed by said tragic princesses of your beloved Utena. One Final Thing and Fated Magical Princess aren't even the only ones in orbit around the genre this season, though Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess is the one that doesn't obfuscate or throw out the structure in some major way.
Does going to the moon count as an isekai? Best not to worry about that right now.
A world dedicated to the running of anthropomorphic horse girls is technically "another world," but yes, let's not split hairs further. Also, since I don't think the series has given us Iana's old name yet, I'd like to believe it's "Yoshiyuki Tomino."
I don't want to be too hard on Dark History. It's playing off the basics, but it does actually have conflict and meaningful momentum to its plot already, which was more than I could say about Gatherer's Adventure. Iana's a funny enough little gremlin, and I'm here for any series like this that actually takes into account what its lead was like pre-reincarnation.
But with respect to the oft-mentioned saturation, this isn't really going to stand out next to something like One Final Thing.
There's a kernel of fun here for sure. I like the idea of being trapped within the stack of stories you wrote all the way back in high school and trying to remember what happened in them to survive. Like you said, there's a bit more thought given to Iana's role in this world as both an outsider and its creator.
It's nothing particularly special, but it might stick with the background-watching crowd more than others.
On that same wavelength, the premiere of Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill Season 2 was an oddly relaxing watch. It's no DinD, but I can see why this got the green light to keep going. It quickly establishes that this dude is from another world, but he's just hanging out and cooking with his beastly buddies. It doesn't really try to be anything more than that, and I appreciate it.
I'm honestly surprised how easy it was for me to slide in on this episode despite not knowing a lick about the series prior.
I remember watching the premiere of Campfire Cooking S1 back in the day, and not minding it. For all the isekai anime where it feels like nothing happens, it's at least fair to make that kind of chillness feel like a feature. Give me a series that's intentionally relaxing, rather than an inadvertent sleep aid, any day.
This is another place where I wonder if the swinging pendulum on the isekai trend is affecting which shows get another go. Another returnee, Kakuriyo -Bed & Breakfast for Spirits-- comes from all the way back in 2018, and actually feels even older in how it adheres more to the "classic" isekai framework (before we even called it that) of a female lead winding up in a fantasy world and seeking to make her way back. Usually, meeting a cute boy or twelve along the way.
Similar to you and Campfire Cooking, I was able to slide into checking this one out without experiencing the prior season. Though the show itself takes the long gap into account and including a recap definitely helped in acclimating to its intriguing restaurant-running times. It seems nice enough!
The focus on food here is something that makes these series immediately identifiable to most audiences. Regardless of the world we come from, food always tends to bring people together—even if they're ancient spirits or beastie buddies.
Also... LOOK AT THIS EGG.
More effort put into animating that egg than Gatherer's Adventure had in two episodes of it shuffling around.
I know I'm dunking on Gatherer a lot this column, but it says something that it's the only isekai this season that feels disposable enough to absorb that abuse. Even some of the other, ostensibly more conventional entries at least have a bit more sauce on them than I was expecting.
Like My Status As an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's starts with a callout so direct I opened the column with it, and has plenty of the same nuts and bolts, including the mouthful of a title, the asset-flip main character, and the dang stat sheets. But it quickly distinguishes itself with an awareness of how its contrived-feeling premise can't be all that it seems, playing that for intrigue within its setting.
Assassin Obviously might not be breaking any new ground, but there's a degree of confidence oozing off this one due to its rock-solid design and production work. The character and prop design is WAY more ambitious in comparison to similar shows. Yeah, it's doing a sort-of-well-trodden story, but the series is doing its darndest to stand out despite that.
As with some of the decent-er isekai in the "stock" mold I've seen over the years, such as The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic, Assassin Obviously shows the power of simple competence making up for less originality.
You can also see that this one got the bad new Crunchyroll subtitles when I watched it, not helping its case.
I watched it after the fix, so it probably wouldn't have changed my thoughts too much. The main takeaway I had from this one is that Ellen's parents look too young. Heck, Athy's dad in Fated Magical Princess looks too young.
It also occasionally felt like Ellen was parenting her parents (especially her dad) because of her past-life experience? Not a big fan of that trope, personally.
Doesn't help that that's really the only place Dad is a Hero has used the reincarnation element. I know I only got a couple of episodes in, but this feels like a series that's so far only utilizing one third of its titular premise, and it's awkward and mediocre about it.
But this is what I'm talking about when I say it's kinda nice that even a mediocre isekai is mediocre in new, unique ways. I can't even criticize Rovel for having the generic fantasy-dude character design; it's a huge relief!
Rolling on from trios to quartets, I hear the kids like themselves that third season of Isekai Quartet.
I saw the first two seasons of Overlord ages ago, so this one flew over my head to a degree.
Carnival Phantasm might be my closest point of comparison based on these opening episodes of Quartet.
Same, and I did Carnival Phantasm where it's just going to baffle anybody who doesn't know what a Nrvnqsr Chaos is. That makes Isekai Quartet emblematic of the divide between critics and audiences when it comes to isekai. This is a third season of a half-length crossover gag series, yet it still got voted in for Daily Streaming reviews, presumably by the same public that enjoys watching us bang our heads against the isekai brick wall here every season.
Presumably, like Carnival Phantasm is to me, Isekai Quartet is funny as hell to anyone immersed enough in this genre, but this was all basically nonsense to me. Even the jokes were too many layers deep to elicit a reaction, since I haven't got a clue about the characters it's playing on.
That's not entirely true. The ones I was actually familiar with were from Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious, and it was pretty funny that these characters just exited the show before the OP rolled. Salient commentary on the disposable, so-last-season nature of so many of these series.
My first thought was, "Wow, there sure are a lot of moody guys with shaggy haircuts who love wearing purple, black, and gold."
If this series actually calls attention to how cookie-cutter so many of these protags are, that would be a gag I appreciate.
I should stress for fans that I really do not quarrel with Isekai Quartet. It's just so far outside my wheelhouse that I can't ship any packages to it without incurring hefty tariffs nowadays.
Lelouch sure left an impression on young authors in the process of coming up with their own brooding MCs, didn't he?
I can see that too. It's mostly the "MMO oldhead gets dragged into the game as a great evil and their almost-forgotten NPC becomes real" setup that had me drawing Overlord comparisons. However, our Wild Boss's NPC friend isn't as bone happy as Albedo.
I haven't seen Overlord myself, so I had a fresh laugh when the deal with Dina was revealed. She's funny, and I'm down for any take on the "NPC who exposits for the benefit of the lead and the audience" that has a modicum of fun with it.
That funny tone works with me so far, doing a decent job of playing up the dissonance between Lufas trying to find out what became of his/her old gaming buddies against the backdrop of them all being mythical, opposed figures in the official history of this world.
Using the ideas of multiplayer interactions and emergent in-game narratives, to me, that's way more entertaining than min-maxing RPG stats to give oneself huge bonuses, as far as shows like this utilizing video game elements.
Plus, it's got the genuine, bona fide, electrified mode of transport that put the likes of Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Havenbrook on the map. Who could say no to that?
I already ranted about Dusk Beyond's galling AI dickriding in my Preview Guide entry, so I won't petulantly rehash that here. For this discussion, it fills the slot for questioning what exactly "counts" as isekai. Waking up in a post-apocalyptic far-future version of your own home certainly fits the bill in some ways, but man, do I wish this anime were capitalizing on that mild novelty in any way that actually appealed to me.
Dusk Beyond's got a solid central mystery to pull on. Akira wakes up centuries after being fatally injured to discover that the world's fallen apart and there's a cadre of androids who are dead ringers for his seemingly dead fiancée running around. The elements are all there, but nothing's been capitalized upon just yet.
Yogure's been holding up my interest as the main enigma pulling Akira along. Aside from rocking trans pride at all times on her earrings, she gives the series a bit of kick it needs—with action that actually feels like it has an impact when compared to some of the other titles we've looked at.
I would be remiss if I didn't note that said fiancée/android-basis was also Akira's adopted sister, and apart from confirming that I will never escape the incest pit after the beginning of this year, maybe the current iteration of that arrangement can do more with that dynamic than the prologue did.
Aside from its strange, curved monitor presentation, the first episode reminded me quite a bit of The Witch from Mercury's own prologue. Both try to set up plot threads for their series to follow, but it's left up to the viewer to decide how much that exactly helped or hindered the proceedings. I'd say "hindered" in the case of Dusk Beyond.
I'm pretty sure that Yogure is just his fiancée in a robot body, and she's not telling him for some arbitrary reason.
I had a bet that the real Towasa was still alive somehow and maybe, like, the main Overlord orchestrating this hilariously on-the-nose dystopia, but I don't know how much interest I have in continuing to follow it and find out.
At least I disliked it in different ways than I usually dislike regular-ass isekai!
It got me with a cool robot girl and some interesting ideas, but I'm not sure I'd keep it up with it either. The woefully naive AI evangelizing isn't something I need in my cartoons when it's eroding so many elements of our real lives. And slave tropes. For the love of god, stop it with that shit.
Whether it's "technically" isekai or not, anime like this can always do with more characters like Scarlet punching out slavers.
Still, while they aren't all knockouts, I have to admit that several of the new isekai this season got me interested in them on their own terms. Now, that was part of it because my own weariness with the genre meant I could appreciate productions that stepped back or obfuscated the actual isekai elements. But if it at last signals a shift in this omnipresent trend, I'll take it alongside cool cartoons about a lady who hits hard.
In addition to your isekai of choice, check out something you're unfamiliar with. I understand the need for a comforting, familiar story that won't exactly challenge or leave an impact on its viewers. After all, we all need our small comforts where we can find them these days. However, it gets rather exhausting after a while to watch near-verbatim spins on similar stories. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind when a story takes notes from one of the greats, but sometimes it's got to be a bit more than just that. I think that's probably why, out of this bunch, I gravitated toward our punch princess, robot girl, and cooking guy the most. All three are dealing in familiar territory to a degree, but that's not their only trick.
You must seek out things that feel different, or you'll end up getting hit by mediocrity. To put it another way: vibe shift, or get vibe checked.
Chris and Coop wade through this season's isekai offerings. Wait, are some of these shows trying to do something different?― Chris and Coop wade through this season's isekai offerings. Wait, are some of these shows trying to do something different? Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.Spoiler Warning for discussion ...
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