The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Chillin' in My 30s after Getting Fired from the Demon King's Army

Dariel, a soldier in the Dark Lord's army who cannot use magic. Instead, he wields his intellect and initiative as an assistant to one of the Dark Lord's most trusted captains. But when the captain is summarily replaced, Dariel also loses his privileged position and is fired. In disappointment, he retires in a village of humans, getting a new start in life by using his abilities to accept requests for help.

Chillin' in My 30s after Getting Fired from the Demon King's Army is based on Rokujūyon Okazawa's Kaiko Sareta Ankoku Heishi (30-Dai) no Slow na Second Life (The Slow Second Life of the Retired Dark Soldier in His 30s) novel series and streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

“Slow life” doesn't need to be synonymous with “boring,” but you wouldn't know it from watching this premiere. We have Dariel, the adopted son of the former Demon King who is exiled by his jealous adoptive brother because he can't use magic. This leaves him wandering aimlessly and, as these things go, he saves a random damsel in distress, and soon finds out he's actually a physical powerhouse. Of course, this being a “slow life” anime, this means he refuses to do anything meaningful with his newfound powers. And that's the “joke,” I guess. (I mean, if it can even be called that).

Basically Dariel plans to sit in a backwater town and do low-level quests for the rest of his life. Now, I'm not saying that can't be the setup for an interesting story. However, in the absence of adventure, something needs to step forward and take the center stage. Romance, comedy, or interpersonal character drama can all do the trick. The problem is this first episode has none of those things.

The romance is treated as a forgone conclusion, the comedy terrible, and the characters painfully one-note. For example, when Dariel finds out his entire life is a lie—that he's not a demon and has actually been a human all along—it has almost no impact on him or the way he views the world. Dariel is so shallow of a character, so utterly lacking in self-awareness, that every major decision he makes in this episode is made by looking at Marika's breasts and letting his dick do the thinking.

All in all, this is the most boring premiere of the season so far. I don't like it nor hate it; I don't care about it enough to have an emotional reaction either way. And once I finish typing this, I'll probably never think about it again.

While it's already been beaten by The Iceblade Sorcerer Shall Rule the World, Chillin' in My 30s after Getting Fired from the Demon King's Army may end up being the runner-up for “Worst Character Writing of Winter 2023.” This is unfortunate, because it's a “slow life” series, which is the vaguely game-like fantasy version of a hangout series, and in such stories, it's important that the characters be likable and/or interesting. The cast in this one, however, is neither.

Let's take Malika, who is saved by protagonist Dariel from a monster and subsequently invites him back to her place for a bite to eat. Malika comments that she's usually the one who people rely on, so it was nice to be saved by a man, because I guess competent women really just want to be damsels. Not that we get to see any of that competency, because Malika from that point on is mostly a pair of sentient boobs. She stands on the sidelines, cheering for Dariel, serves tea, and mostly just jiggles around for the entire episode. Also, there's a shiny spot on her enormous jubblies that really looks like an infected pimple and grossed me out pretty much nonstop.

But then where does that leave Dariel, the supposed protagonist who makes all his decisions based on those boobs and has even less personality? He's a load of unengaging nothing, spending the episode either proving himself to be stupidly overpowered or staring at Malika's tits. Like his actual line of sight is noticeably focused on them for most of the episode. I mean, I get it, I probably wouldn't be able to look anywhere else with a pair of knockers like that on display, but I also probably wouldn't decide to set up in a village based entirely on them.

The final party member who shows up this episode comes in toward the end. Gashita is the only other adventurer in the village, an arrogant little snot who lords his D-rank over Dariel. To his credit, he has easily the most personality of the three, but he's also highly unpleasant to spend any time with, and there's nobody likable to balance him out. With two nothingburger as his co-leads, he promises to dominate every interaction until more of the cast, promised in the opening, show up.

There's a good amount of mediocre action and bits and pieces of largely unfunny humor, but even if they were very good, it would mean nothing because I don't want to spend time with these characters at all.

First of all, let's get something straight. The main character of this show is not named Dariel. That name is entirely too ornate for this potato-faced hunk of plywood the show has elected to be its centerpiece. That dude's name is Darrel, and he works at the DMV manning the license printer. His favorite flavor of ice cream is “in a cup, not a waffle cone, please,” and he uses store-brand toothpaste because CREST is too spicy.

If that seems like a weird thing to get hung up on, it's only because you, dear reader, haven't sat through this cure for insomnia yourself. If you had, you'd understand that Darrel is such an empty vessel of a main character that if you knocked on the side of his head, you'd hear an echo. He has exactly two things on his mind, and they're both in the attached screenshot, but Darrel doesn't even have the decency to be horny in an interesting way. It's just that every time he turns his gaze towards his busty love interest, his eyes pan down towards her cranium-sized mommy milkers before going back to his skim milk and egg whites. Not that Malika is any better of a character, since her defining features are, in order: a) big booba b) fell in love with the first guy to save her from a monster and c) the other big booba.

It's such a low-energy, vacuous experience to follow these characters through the motions every other show of this ilk goes through. The moment they started explaining the magi- sorry, “aura” system, my eyes unfocused. It was alright, though, because I didn't need to read subtitles to know that Darrel would instantly be the bestest at everything. Of course, he was! What would the show have to gain by offering him even the illusion of a struggle to overcome? That'd get in the way of the power fantasy of, uh...being great at everything and having boobs to stare at. So, of course, Darrel is the super special ubermelvin, which I guess is an acceptable substitute for a personality of any kind.

Have I impressed upon you how boring this show is yet? How totally empty and anti-entertaining it was? If not, please go to your nearest football stadium and watch the artificial turf pretend to grow for 22 minutes; then you'll have a good estimation.

Watching the premiere of Chillin' in My 30s after Getting Fired from the Demon King's Army is what I imagine it must be like to stumble upon the Twitch channel of some obscure streamer who is methodically clicking their way through a bargain-bin JRPG from years ago. They're on the tutorial, and they've got the dialogue setting on the slowest speed, and all you want to do is have them get through all of the exposition and stuff so you can see if the actual game is any good. Then, at long last, there's a fight! Except, it was just the intro fight that only lets you use a basic attack and maybe an item, and then after that, all you've got is more exposition. All you want to do is mash the skip button so you can get on with it, but the streamer cannot hear your desperate cries, and they ignore the chat entirely, so there is nothing you can do but wait and suffer.

Or, I guess you could turn the stream off, but this is where the convoluted analogy I've cooked up no longer applies to my situation because I had to watch Chillin in My 30s for my job from the beginning to end, and yet I was somehow still practically bruising my thumb on the start button of my wireless Xbox controller because maybe I would get to skip all of Dariel's mopey, pointless monologuing and the equally meaningless explanations of the world's magic systems and get to the credits a little faster. Unfortunately, this did not work; the twenty-two minutes of the show's premiere felt like twice that length.

To its credit, this is not a horrendous or offensive show, no matter how annoying it gets when the episode keeps repeating the “Dariel stares at Malika's voluptuous breasts” joke as if it would somehow be funnier the 8th time than it was the first. No, this is simply a bland and featureless mush of an anime, lacking any distinct or interesting qualities whatsoever. Dariel is a nothing hero, Malika is a nothing love interest, the world is a nothing rip-off of every other generic fantasy world out there, and the magic system is a nothing mishmash of random terms and generic effects. I didn't hate this premiere, but I guarantee you that I won't even be able to finish this preview before I—oh, there it goes. Yup. It completely vanished from my memory.

What was I writing about, again? Eh, it probably wasn't important anyways.

Poor Dariel – after the death of one of the commanding officers of the Demon King's army, who I believe also happened to be his adoptive father, he finds himself unceremoniously booted from the army. The reason he is given for this is that he has no magic, but given that the person who does the firing was the son of the man who raised Dariel, it looks pretty likely that there's just a little bit of jealousy involved as well. Either way, it's a jerk move to throw a guy out after what appears to have been a lengthy service to the crown.

Dariel's lack of magic is a little more involved than it might appear at first. He tells us that demons and humans have zero differences except that demons can use magic and humans can't. As the episode unfolds, and we learn that Dariel was picked up as an orphan, it seems very likely that his adoptive father was fully aware that the child was human and just chose to raise him as a demon because, well, he loved him. If Dariel is the only person who was unaware of his human status, that again gives a little bit of weight to his being let go from the Demon King's army. And Dariel is entirely unaware that he's human – when Malika and her family take him in, he panics that they'll figure out that he's a demon, especially when her dad strongarms him into joining the local Adventurers' Guild, which requires a blood test. When Dariel passes it with flying colors, he's not quite sure what's going on, and quite frankly, neither is anybody else.

Primarily, this is because, while the story attempts to establish lore and worldbuilding, it's really much more about Dariel being overpowered and making his decisions by staring into Malika's cleavage. He seems to base all his decisions on whatever it is that he sees there, and since he saved her life when he killed a giant monkey monster by stabbing it through its conveniently marked heart (X marks the spot, you know), she seems pretty darned attached to him too. Almost as attached as the episode is to loving shots of her breasts. In all fairness, this isn't pretending to be anything other than a comedy, and it does have a few moments worth a chuckle or two. Dariel's entire test by Malika's father to determine what his strengths as an adventurer are is one of them. If there aren't any surprises in either plot or humor, it's still a relatively comfortable watch. It feels very middle of the road as first episodes go, and I give it props for not treating its protagonist, who is in his thirties, as an ancient, decrepit being. There isn't much here, but I think it might be the kind of not much that would be very easy to just sort of fall into watching week after week.