Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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Here is, without embellishment, the first five minutes of Reincarnated as a Sword, the latest entry in the novelty isekai canon; a guy (Shinichirou Miki) dies (of course), and is—you’ll never believe this—reincarnated in a stock fantasy world as a magic sword.

He fucks around in some JRPG-esque menus, and when a group of goblins tries to pull him out of the stone he’s stuck in, he attacks them because he “doesn’t want to be used by goblins,” and kills them all. This gives him experience points which he spends yet more time plugging into the aforementioned menus, and he comments that he feels nice, assuming it’s because he’s fulfilled “the purpose of a sword.”

I am hardly the first person to have noticed that the average isekai protagonist is a gleeful cartoon sociopath who seems weirdly eager to cut down every being in their way—whether or not they’re sapient—in the pursuit of naked personal power, usually as imagined by some borrowed grab-bag of video game tropes. But Reincarnated as a Sword is a pretty damn stark depiction of such a thing. Our Hero also spends a good chunk of this episode hacking a goblin tribe who live in a cave to pieces for no reason other than acquiring more magic skills. This in spite of the fact that, as demonstrated by their having a hierarchy at all (there’s a goblin king and a goblin wizard, naturally), these are clearly intelligent beings of some kind. Shouldn’t he hesitate at least a little bit, sword or no?

(If I scrunch my eyebrows together quite hard, I can pretend this is commentary of some sort. “Clearly,” I can imagine “this is the series lampooning the power fantasy nature not just of the isekai genre but of kill-all-the-monsters sorts of RPGs in general.” It’s not really that, of course, but it’s a fun thought experiment.)

Even if we really work to suspend our disbelief and acknowledge that this is just how this world works for whatever reason, say maybe the monsters respawn or something, it doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling television. The production has a decent amount of polish, and I must commend the staff on managing to squeeze a few visually dynamic action sequences in fights centered on a flying sword, because that can’t be easy. But that polish alone does not elevate Reincarnated as a Sword beyond the bare minimum of “watchable.”

Eventually, he gets stuck in a field that drains all of his magic, and can’t go anywhere. Thus we are treated to the truly absurd sight of a fucking sword lamenting its fate as it’s stuck in mana-sucking ground, and despairs that no one might ever wield it. It is a bizarre spectacle, and is a scene that, I must imagine wholly unintentionally, captures a certain zeitgeist. This, truly, is what the dregs of TV anime have come to. (Aren’t we all suddenly very glad that Chainsaw Man starts in two weeks? I know I am.)

We should, at least, give some cursory acknowledgement to Sword‘s other protagonist, who the titular sword eventually meets while stuck.

This is Fran (Ai Kakuma). She is a catgirl, and because the isekai genre has over the past decade developed a bizarre fixation on the awful practice, she is also a slave. Fran doesn’t get nearly as much screentime as the sword himself, so we only see little bits and pieces of her story over the series’ introductory 30 minutes. But what we do see is pretty awful; she’s routinely kicked around and beaten, is shackled with a magic collar that forces her to obey her masters’ commands, and in general is just treated like dirt. Now, the bare minimum of credit is due here; Reincarnated as a Sword does in fact seem to understand that slavery is bad. That is unfortunately more than can be said of some isekai, so it is worth acknowledging.

In fact, if you squint, you can imagine how a compelling story might develop here. Fran finds and acquires the sword somehow—and that part does, in fact, happen, she runs into it while being chased by a monstrous, two-headed bear—and becomes a swashbuckling liberator of her people, the Black Cat beastfolk, and all the other sorts of animal people enslaved here by humans. Now let’s be clear here, the main character becoming a sort of catgirl John Brown would still be incredibly strange, and it would probably be heavier subject matter than something like this is equipped to handle, but it would certainly be something. And it would, again, at least be an acknowledgement that the world this takes place in is fucked up and needs some fixing.

There isn’t anything in this first episode that prevents Reincarnated as a Sword from eventually becoming that kind of story, but it still seems unlikely, if only because the show seems far more interested in hurling menus, stat screens, and meaningless terminology at us instead. Fran gives her motive for linking up with the sword, which she calls Shishou (“Teacher” or “Master”), as a desire to be “the first Black Cat to evolve.” There is some indication of what that actually means, in-universe, but does it really matter? It’s just another narrative shortcut taken among an entire forest of them.

Ultimately what you have here is yet another isekai with a marginally interesting premise that completely squanders it by taking the dullest route possible through almost every single plotting decision it could make. The idea that it might eventually become something more interesting isn’t really enough, I imagine, to make most people want to tune in. Maybe, in six weeks, we’ll be here talking about how utterly incredible it is that Reincarnated as a Sword started out so anonymously and eventually got so good. But I very much doubt it. I intend to spend my viewing hours elsewhere this season, and I recommend you do the same.

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