This Week in Anime

What New Isekai Anime Should You Watch?

Chris
Steve, I hope you enjoyed our little TWIA summer vacation 'cause it's back to the old anime news'n'views grind. A new season just started, so it's time for the anime-watching equivalent of catching up on e-mails after a weekend off.

It says something that we continue to get enough "brand-new" (to use the term in a way that does not indicate originality) isekai anime every season that we've been able to mine a column's worth of content out of these each go-around for several years.

Would we have done this with Magic High School or Schoolgirl Slice of Life had TWIA been running during the years of those trends? Who's to say, and who's to say when this isekai tidal wave will recede? All we can do for the moment is jump right in.

I wouldn't believe we could find a sadder, grosser isekai baby than the one from the beginning of Mushoku Tensei, but here we are. This was one I was familiar with before its premiere, thanks to previewing the manga a while back, so I knew going in not to expect much. And even then, any hope that the medium hop might elevate the paper-thin material was pretty soundly dashed.

AIATS is a good place to start since it's so direly barebones in how we've come to expect from the isekai genre. It's to the point that even if this were some hypothetical viewer's first brush with these tropes and story mechanics, I can't imagine they'd be turned on to the genre by it due to its flatness.

Hey now, that leaves out the layers of sophisticated humor that AIATS is playing with.

The wolf girl also propositions the baby so she can produce said breast milk.

Reincarnated In Another World Where I Was Raised By Wolves, have we gotten that isekai before? But no, this show cops out before the first commercial break by consigning the wolf-girl as our main character's sassy maid. And it proves just how desperate a move that brush with bawdy humor was since, by this stretch, I found myself begging for the breastfeeding wolf jokes to come back!

So many of these series pride themselves on meticulously describing how their author-and-audience avatars would min-max or otherwise break the magic systems of their worlds for overpowered purposes. And while I'm annoyed by that in ways we'll surely get to later, it turns out going the other direction like AIATS and saying, "Uh yeah, he's super-powerful, so his barrier magic can do basically whatever he wants it to do" isn't any more engaging.


I am begging the writers here to literally think outside the box for once.

An unamazing cube. Not even close to a Rubik's. Gold Ship would want nothing to do with it.

Just as well, the stated lack of ambition on the part of the main character "compliments" the story's apparent lack of ambition, so I'm comfortable knowing I won't miss anything by not continuing to follow this series to see if he is the strongest.

They're a cheap, nutritious staple, and I can't believe the show in the running with AIATS for worst of the batch is out here besmirching their good name by association.

There's a lot to question with this one. Sure, there are mechanical elements, like this world's item-drop-based economy seemingly precluding growing food the traditional way, even though plants exist.

There's also the question of why you would base your title and concept around assigning your lead character a particular power limitation, only to circumvent that just in the first episode by writing in a special plot-device dungeon for him filled with the finest skeletons eight dollars on the Unity asset store can buy!

That's exactly the thing! There's potential for commentary here, but as far as Unique Skill seems to be concerned, replacing the grind of crushing real-life work with the most mind-numbing iteration of video-game grinding is an aspirational dream for the sorts of audience that latches onto a show like this. Is it that much of an improvement when you've swapped turning in TPS reports with poking identical slimes in identical hallways for hours?

Am I Actually The Strongest may have bored me, but Unique Skill actively made me sad.

You could do some really troubling analyses of this show regarding our MC's primary power: he immediately earns more compensation for his job than the woman who teaches him everything about it, then sweeps her into an apartment where she becomes enamored with doing housework for him.

That aspect is where things tripped over into the dark. Some comforting aspects are swinging for a Helpful Fox Senko-san vibe. But then Unique Skill swerves straight into actual propaganda territory, positioning its story not as a momentary escape but instead seems to be positing that the people who come home from their soul-sucking jobs to watch anime should keep working harder with the prospect of an RPG-themed overpowered reincarnation as a reward.


It's like an exploitative religion if the heaven they were promising was just repeatedly grinding the first level of Mystery Dungeon.

It makes you realize the proliferation of isekai as a genre might be a sign of the times more than anything. In that case, while there are plenty of other reasons to work to better the world, one smaller reward might be lifting us out of this trend's seemingly inescapable hold. We need better treatment for workers, we need comprehensive social programs, and we need public healthcare!

Indeed, even the nominally healer-focused The Great Cleric still positions the noble pursuit as something one does in the name of the almighty dollar.

Or silver or gil or whatever they use in this one's world.

Oddly, they could have set something up with our hero dying in a way connected with receiving or not receiving medical treatment, which might tie into his later goal of serving as a white mage. But nope, he was just mowed down by a thug having the luckiest day of his life.

Tragically, that narrative choice at the beginning might be the single most exciting thing about The Great Cleric.

It is bizarre that most of these isekai light novel authors realized that worlds that work like video games are an ostensibly cool concept but also seemed to hone in on menu navigation as the most fun, compelling part of that experience.

These dudes will be very disappointed when they finally go back and check out Excel Saga.

The fact that we're reduced to making the same complaining cracks about status screens should indicate how little The Great Cleric has going on. Before and after I watched this premiere, the only discussion I saw about the show involved gawking at its off-putting interlaced running animations or questioning the fashion disasters of its characters' outfits.


I'm not sure what that business-casual boob-tie is holding up, but it sure isn't this narrative.

Even if they do, it's one of those situations where the show's first episode utterly failed to engage me enough to stick around to find out. It provoked a couple of pity chuckles out of me when the MC pretended to be a backwater idiot to avoid suspicion.

But even that wound up emblematic of the major sin of this premiere, facilitating what felt like a full twenty-two minutes of explaining world and magic mechanics to the audience instead of hooking us with anything resembling a real story.

The on-screen text of "Father Casserole" in Sweet Reincarnation provoked a bigger laugh out of me than any of AIATS's lupine-lactating attempts at "humor."

There is probably a good reason that this is the first time in this column we've bothered to mention the actual names of characters. Sure, it's because they're objectively hilarious, but Sweet Reincarnation feels like the point where the bar starts raising a smidge. Even from the beginning: forget getting randomly gunned down; I am here for our guy getting crushed by his massive dessert sculpture.

The chocolate-filling blood pool is just a pastry chef's kiss.

There's an enjoyable sense of irreverence acting as icing on this one. It is doing the Ascendence of a Bookworm thing, with the amazingly aptly named Pastry involved in a bunch of religious and royal intrigue that he thoroughly backgrounds in pursuit of one singular, simple goal. Instead of the revolutionary recreation of reading, our pint-sized pâtissier is laser-focused on sweet, sweet sweets.

My dude, your blood is racing for more reasons than simple excitement, and you might want to hope this fantasy realm invents insulin as quickly as you can get them to come up with fondant.

They call apples 'bonkas'! The writer of Sweet Reincarnation was strongly pursuing some Silly Name Agenda, and I wholly support them.

It does also help that, as far as the first episode, Pastry's status as a magic wunderkind is more of a device to facilitate that background intrigue with the corrupt church. This is a good angle since I always get curious about established power structures wanting to exploit the overpowered protags that get dumped into their worlds by the truckload.

Pastry had to put up with his mom and sister using him for impromptu fashion shows. Even the wildest religious torture isn't enough to break his hardened will.

It is a strong enough lead for Sweet Reincarnation. It helps that the production values look better than the other shows we've discussed. Not enough to convince me to keep up with it throughout the season, but at least to the point that I could recommend it to a genre fan as the most competent of the 'stock' isekai entries here.

Oh, thank goodness, we'd been on this trip for a while, and I was starting to think I could use a snack.

Reborn as a Vending Machine, as is obvious from its title, is a joke from the beginning. It's the thing that was written as a prompt or a dare, then kept going to figure out how this would even work long-term.

With some tasty results!

It's a lesson the similarly singular-gag concept series So I'm A Spider So What learned by watching Aoi Yuuki play through a dungeon crawl as a spider VTuber, and all further isekai productions should take note.

It does make me wish the series would lean into the "Vending Machine Otaku" angle more, and maybe it will in later episodes. Dispense some trivia about different models or regional variants of machines! As-is, even this series couldn't escape the standard stat sheet sequence, but it convinced me this might work well as some resource-management game if I could play it myself.

It could be a case of familiarity bias. I've seen dozens, nay, hundreds of wizards and clerics allocate their skill points by now. But a vending machine, that's a class whose optimized builds are utterly alien to me, so I've got a little more cause to sit up and follow what it's all doing.

It also helps that the story acknowledges that Boxxo's build would leave him with some shortcomings that might sometimes necessitate him being carried by his party members.

It's the sort of thing you realize has to happen at some point if the characters are going to get anywhere in the plot (or you already peeped the key art with Lammis hoisting Boxxo around on her back) but still works in the moment because this show has, like, a real sense of flow to its storytelling and humor. It's not always laugh-out-loud stuff, but sometimes it's enough to see medieval-setting extras react to potato chips and canned oden.


Lord help these peasants if Boxxo ever starts stocking Doritos.

If the most successful circle of Isekai Hell we've toured thus far only worked because of that stupidity, is there any hope for one that takes itself utterly, entirely seriously?

It is also, rather surprisingly, the only of these premieres that includes the institution of slavery. And in this case, it's to have our hero engage in it and go, "Wow, that's awful!"

Being part of the emergent villainess isekai genre means that Last Boss Queen is playing in its own batch of signifiers, but the tone this one approaches them with definitely distinguishes it.

As long as you're riffing on the established beats of one of the genre's most well-known entries, you might as well stand out by running in the opposite direction. It lets us get a feel for the reincarnated Pride as a person, even as we've only seen her past life in brief flashes. She's striving to do better by the people in this game world, not just to prevent her plot-mandated death but because she's been convinced that she might have it coming otherwise.

It also helps that villainess isekai, as a genre, tends to have more plot than their more standardized fantasy counterparts. So there's more propulsion than Am I Actually The Strongest. The production and animation could be better, but the direction carries some urgency and energy.

That's an interesting contrast between those hoary old RPG-based isekai shows and visual-novel-based ones like Last Boss Queen. Both tend to involve breaking open the games' systems in ways you couldn't do just interfacing with them through a monitor, but messing around with stat sheets is usually in the name of powering yourself up while having unlimited conversation options with characters tends to facilitate righting wrongs that were previously ironclad in the narrative.

That's probably why I latch onto villainess isekai series like Last Boss Queen more than any of those earlier shows we discussed that outnumber it.

Don't tempt the heavens to get out of Isekai Hell, Steve, lest we lose you to Truck-kun sending you to be Reincarnated In Another World Where Monster Girl Anime Got Popular Instead of Isekai.