Ah, Well, Different World and All – This Week in Anime

And every three months, I respond with some variation of “I am very tired.”

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.

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!

She has done nothing wrong, ever, in her life. I know this, and I love her.

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.

I am curious to find out what Terenezza’s full deal is, by the way. She seems terrible in some truly entertaining ways.

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!

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.

This one is basically playing the hits for villainess isekai much the same way Gatherer’s Adventure was for vanilla dudebro isekai.

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.

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!

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.

Also: an astonishingly handsome bishonen who looks like he stepped out of a whole other era.

Contrast that with something like Dad is a Hero, Mom is a Spirit, I’m a Reincarnator, which does have a fairly unique setup, but execution that has mostly fallen flat from what I’ve watched so far.

You can also see that this one got the bad new Crunchyroll subtitles when I watched it, not helping its case.

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!

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.

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.

Better than that, just have your isekai guy forcefem himself on his way to the other world.

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.

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.

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.

At least I disliked it in different ways than I usually dislike regular-ass isekai!