Spring 2016
If I want to classify myself as some kind of ‘isekai connoisseur’, then I have no excuse to have not at least seen SOME of Re:Zero. I’ve gotten halfway through it, as I have with most of the shows on these ‘mini review’ posts, so I can’t give it a de-facto hot take. But I can sum up my feelings of it well enough so far! Firstly, I was curious what made this show so polarizing, but I’m under the impression that I haven’t gotten to the ‘polarizing’ part yet. I’ve heard many people complain about how Subaru is some kind of scumbag, and I haven’t seen those aspects come into play yet. Though, at least getting through half the first season, I can understand one of the aspects that might divide viewers: This show is Anime as Heck.
Some viewers are going to love its indulgence in action sequences, and our protagonist’s heroism. Though other viewers might get annoyed at the show’s lack of believability. ESPECIALLY when some element of time travel is involved. The type of viewer who takes out their magnifying glass to try and scan for ‘plot holes’ seem to take more scrutiny with a story like this one. It doesn’t help when the advice for popcorn stories is to ‘turn your brain off’… This advice is always misleading, because the wording seems to make it sound like you have to purposely ignore all of a show’s problems in order to enjoy the good parts. But that’s not exactly true… What the advice ‘turn your brain off’ really implies is for you to turn your focus to what the show is doing right, rather than stacking up its weaker aspects against similar stories.
You end up having to accept that Subaru has unnaturally good intuition, putting the time travel elements aside. Because for the sake of the story’s progression, Subaru ends up having to do multiple things that seem too clever or too agile for him to normally pull off. Because the alternative is to bring in another character to do all the heavy lifting for the protagonist, which would suck. As far as the first 6 episodes go, though, Re:Zero seems entertaining enough regardless of how ‘meaningful’ the rest of the story ends up being. Maybe I’ll report back on it in another monthly anime post. There’s also something to be said about hype and expectations, but there’s nothing I can say that you haven’t read 8 million times if you’re a regular review reader (especially on MAL, oof…) You can’t really blame the anime itself if everybody is expecting every hyped up anime to be another Code Geass or Fullmetal Alchemist.
Fall 2019
Watching Noukin is somewhat of a bittersweet experience. Or… scratch that. It’s mostly just bitter. Being a huge fan of the Yuru Yuri adaptation staff and their various works, it pains me to say that Noukin is the last one they ever produced as a team. Kind of. Firstly, you have to agree that Onipan doesn’t count, and then you also have to accept that this counts as the ‘Yuru Yuri team’ even though they’re missing a lot of that staff. Regardless though, there’s some amount of irony in seeing some of my favorite anime staff members being forced to adapt a Shosetsuka ni Naro light novel adaptation of all things.
You might notice me bringing up ‘Naro’ a lot in this post, and that isn’t a coincidence. Noukin, Re:Zero, Mushoku Tensei, and Kuma Bear are all series that started on the same user-created light novel website. The website name is shortened to ‘Syosetsu’ though most people refer to it as ‘Naro’. In other words, all of these shows I mentioned started out as the Japanese equivalent of fanfiction. And so this is what we’ve come to, the Yuru Yuri guys tackling the writing of Some Guy posting his story to a user-content website, and it certainly gives off that impression when you’re watching it. It doesn’t help that this staff is far more familiar with manga adaptations, and they certainly haven’t ever adapted anything in the fantasy genre as a team before.
When you start to dig into Noukin as a story, you hit the bedrock quickly. Like, can we at least get a light novel author who can come up with something a little more original than a truck-kun isekai backstory? Especially if you’re just going to do it as a joke, there’s plenty of funnier ways to kill a character. But as usual, since the isekai ‘backstory’ doesn’t actually matter, you might as well forget about trying to come up with anything unique. Why even bother, am I right??? Putting that aside, our main protagonist just wants to live a normal life and make friends, but she’s accidentally become overpowered and now she has to try and hide it. It’s not a bad premise for a comedy., but I should know better not to get my hopes up for a Project No.9 adaptation. This is a studio whose output consists mainly of seasonal trash fodder, and unfortunately, the same goes for Noukin.
In spirit, I’d be more willing to say Uzamaid was the last adaptation from the ‘true’ Yuru Yuri staff. By contrast, Noukin is missing a LOT of that original animation team. We have directors and writers crossing over, but it’s obvious from the lack of visual gags that this vehicle is not powered by the same engine. Furthermore, the show is lacking in every aspect a good comedy needs. The characters are bland and the jokes are dull. It also has that usual Naro writing problem where the show wanders around aimlessly without doing anything to strengthen its original premise. Why the ‘fantasy’ genre seems to be such a common medium for uncreative, uninteresting stories is beyond my understanding. Whatever. Maybe one day the REAL Yuru Yuri team will get together to put out some actual kino again. I can only hope.
Fall 2020
I’ll be blunt here, this one is flat-out bad. Like god damn, it’s hard to believe some of the Yuru Yuri staff are on this one. That’s the main reason I watched this, but their talents have not been put to use here. But unfortunately, that’s the risk of giving your time to Naro light novel adaptations. They have a high chance of disappointing, and Kuma Bear is one of the worst ones I’ve seen so far. A cursory readthrough of the premise should have scared me off, but I decided to be a hero and go in blind.
Stop me if you heard this one before: Our protagonist plays a VR fantasy MMORPG, and they’ve acquired an outfit that’s completely overpowered. And then she gets transported INTO the game world. The whole gimmick of this series is that it’s based off the RPG joke where the dumb, embarrassing looking outfit ends up being the most powerful one. In the case of our protagonist, Yuna, it’s a goofy looking bear costume. Nobody takes her seriously because the costume looks dumb, but she’s SUPER powerful. She can kill pretty much any monster by herself, she can heal terminal illnesses, what can’t she do??
Even compared to the likes of Slime 300 (another Naro isekai with a similar premise), Kuma Bear offers almost nothing of value to the viewer. The characters are bland as hell, the setting is bland as hell, the story is bland as hell. It’s completely predictable with little attempt to tap into slice of life elements or comedy elements. And you’re telling me this got a second season???? Who is the audience for this?! Must have been cheap to produce…. Hopefully EMT Squared can get lucky sometime in the future and adapt something that isn’t more seasonal fodder, because if they keep producing adaptations for stories like this and Beast Tamer, they’re all gonna be trapped in the isekai mines.
Winter 2021
I’ll admit it, I was wrong about Mushoku Tensei! But I’m still standing with the opinion that this story shouldn’t be an isekai. Most isekai stories don’t need to be isekais. Back when I wrote about the Winter 2021 seasonals, I ended up blowing off this story as being ‘sugary’, something that could be equated to Tensura, but after learning more about this series and watching more of it, it’s clear that’s not what this story is aiming for. This story wants to tackle mature themes, but it doesn’t always want to tackle it in mature ways. It’s meant to be engaging, even if it means throwing reasonability out the window at times. But in a world like this, there’s no reason why you can’t occasionally step further into fantasy elements, seeing as it’s a fantasy setting…
And as such, this series aims to delve into what it’s like growing up in a world with a completely different culture. This is something a lot of internet age people seem to have trouble understanding. The idea of humans living in a different environment, growing up with an entirely different moral system. One where people do things that seem wrong not out of evil intent, but because it’s what’s socially normative there. Hell, even in fantasy anime, you’ll almost never see these elements explored at risk of offending the viewer, despite its permeance in our real world. The controversy stems from our protagonist, who DOESN’T grow up in this environment at first. He lived on Earth, so there’s no excuse for him not to rely on his Earth morals, though the difference here is that our protagonist seemingly had no moral compass in his previous life. So it’s doubtful this has much effect on his new life. You could call this a cop-out, but honestly I think it just adds more to the unnecessary nature of this story being an isekai. It’s creating problems that need backwards reasoning to solve, despite not ultimately being valuable to the story’s strengths in the first place.
Or in other words, you can get away with explaining all of this story’s main concepts without needing to rely on Rudeus’ past life knowledge. But who would ever want to read a boring NON-isekai fantasy story, am I right??? In this regard, I see Rudeus’ backstory and ‘isekai narration’ as this story’s equivalent to the Harrison Ford voiceover version of Blade Runner. Rudeus is essentially there to win over the idiot audience that thinks the fantasy setting isn’t interesting enough when there’s no RPG elements involved. Isekai back story or not, our protagonist is conveniently clever, more so than you’d expect from a NEET shut in. The benefit to this however is a feeling of actual forward momentum. This is something other isekais, especially Naro light novels, tend to struggle with the most. And I’m sure I could squeeze out some other thoughts from my brain, but I’ve said about all I needed to based on what I watched. My conclusion is that Mushoku Tensei is an interesting fantasy story so far. And if I ever bother to go farther into it, I’ll be able to see how it holds up.
Summer 2021
I like trash anime. But you know what’s better than trash anime? Trash anime that’s also surprisingly enjoyable to watch. I’ve heard that Girlfriend, Girlfriend was an underappreciated gem, so I figured why the hell not and I gave it a spin. And you know what? The reviewers weren’t wrong! The show’s strength lies in its absurdity and ability to keep the story moving no matter how much nonsense gets thrown at it. And despite the characters being somewhat one-note, the seiyuus really sell them. Like god damn, Ayane Sakura is shouting her lungs out on every single episode here as the red-haired Saki. And our protagonist’s volume is comparably loud.
The comedy is unsurprisingly harem-focused and ecchi-focused, but by the genre’s standards, this might be the most entertaining harem comedy I’ve seen up to this point. It’s sort of like School Days except instead of everybody lying and betraying each other, these characters can’t seem to keep their thoughts to themselves, and everybody goes along with it for the lols. Everybody decides that they’re gonna try to make this polygamy thing work out no matter how many problems end up coming from it.
There is no self-insert fantasy here, it’s pure chaos from start to finish. And I really couldn’t ask for anything more from this kind of adaptation. It looks great, has a decent sense of pacing, and there’s enough variety from episode to episode to keep it interesting. Just don’t jump into this one unless you can accept that you’re getting into something stupid with a lot of jokes about anime boobs.
Spring 2023
I did it… I watched the epic meme isekai anime of 2023, KamiKatsu. Half of it anyways. This is an anime that’s notorious for its animation ‘shortcuts’. Ridiculous looking CG monsters (which appear in nearly every episode), bizarre use of real-life farming footage, many moments are condensed into 8-bit sprite animations as well. If you’re looking for something strange and stupid at the same time, KamiKatsu is exactly that.
First and foremost, this isekai almost never takes itself seriously. Putting its low-budget scuff aside, most of its main characters are here purely for laughs. The story is also ridiculous, comparable to light novel schlock such as Index, C3, or Date a Live. And honestly, I’ve seen plenty of shows with worse writing than KamiKatsu. Most of this show’s actual problems come from its pacing. It’s lighting fast in the first couple episodes before screeching to a crawl later on. There is little sense of time, as scenes tend to bounce between goofy comedy and ‘actually serious’ back and forth. In that regard, I get strong Silver Link vibes, though I’d reckon that KamiKatsu is more creative on average.
To nobody’s surprise, KamiKatsu has notoriously inconsistent animation and production values. Any Gohands enjoyers know exactly how this goes. Some scenes get detailed out, other scenes are hardly animated at all. The audio is hit or miss, the soundtrack is all over the place, the ED and OP play randomly during the episodes at times. It’s a god damn mess. Yet, KamiKatsu is constantly shuffling ideas around, so while it might not always make sense, it rarely ever gets boring. And I have to add that KamiKatsu has really WEIRD ecchi content. Like in one episode, you have the annoying ass pervert friend Roy fantasizing about the loli goddess Mitama stepping all over his face. And in a later episode, there’s this glasses girl who cums and pisses herself while standing up because she gets blasted with ‘lust energy’?? That’s in addition to the gender-swap stuff and big titties, it’s fuckin wacko.
Even though I’ve heard this show described as ‘so bad it’s good’, I think it’s fair to give credit to KamiKatsu that it’s purposely trying to be goofy. You need a high tolerance for its stupidity if you plan on giving it a whirl, though it’s creative enough that you might get something from it if you’re in it for the absurdity. Otherwise, some of these characters can get annoying quickly…
ESCAPE THIS PLANET 