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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You can probably picture it from the word “isekai” alone, but humor me here; somewhere in a nondescript, grim fantasy universe, a stoic antihero named Sir Shagura closes in on his greatest nemesis, the dread necromancer known only as the Corpse God. The two trade displays of immense power; Shagura, as both a master swordsman and sorcerer, has both literally bone-cracking physical strength on his side and a rune-spamming sort of instant spellcraft that Dead Mount Death Play inherits from an older, pre-isekai boom, strain of narou-kei. (It wouldn’t look too out of place in A Certain Magical Index, if my memory’s serving me right.) The Corpse God, of course, has his necromancy, and conjures whole hordes of skeleton soldiers and a pretty badass undead dragon to stop Shagura’s heroic rampage. As the two fight, it becomes clear that this cool-looking but profoundly D&D-ass setup is just one layer of something deeper and stranger. Shagura, it turns out, has an “evil eye” that lets him see the ghosts of those he’s killed, from monsters and bandits all the way down to birds and bugs. So does the Corpse God. They put this power, it’s fair to say, to pretty different ends.

But just as it seems like “what if an isekai protagonist had necromancy powers” might be all DMDP is working with, it flips over its first card. The Corpse God, near destruction, casts some bizarre spell that Shagura’s never seen. Shagura, apparently, dies, as the actual video starts to glitch and sputter out like a damaged VHS tape. After his death, Shagura awakes in yet another strange and wonderful world. You’ve probably heard of it, because it’s ours.

Shagura opens his eyes in the body of one Polka Shinoyama [Yuki Sakakihara], dazed and confused as memories of both his own past life and that of his new body’s come back to him in a slow trickle over the course of the rest of the episode. This whole “memory bleed” phenomenon has been explored in a lot of isekai, so it’s interesting to see it inverted (if not necessarily disregarded) here. Polka is set in a state of gentle wonder by Japan, where he finds himself, noting that the children he sees seem to be happy, that there’s little violence, and, more to his chagrin, that there isn’t really much magic either. He’s so taken by all this, in fact, that he doesn’t notice the huge gash in his own throat that he’s somehow surviving just fine. He certainly doesn’t notice the mysterious man monitoring him via drone-cam, shocked that this guy is up and walking about. It’s pretty clear from even this fairly early stage that something is going on, but what remains a mystery.

The usual isekai protagonist footnotes do still apply; he pretty quickly regains the ability to speak Japanese after waking up (despite a cool segment where he can’t understand the police officers who try to ask him about that huge cut across his neck, who get subtitled with keysmashes in the English sub track), and he deduces a whole bunch of things unreasonably quickly. This dude is still an isekai protagonist, while he’s notably less obnoxious than many examples of the genre (and DMDP is notably less so in general, no stat screens here so far, thank god), he still is one.

Thankfully though, it’s not all isekai genre clichés. Some of Dead Mount Death Play is other genres’ genre clichés. Which, to be honest? Is kind of welcome at this point. Here’s one I never get tired of; the initially friendly girl who turns out to be a gleefully murderous assassin. In DMDP, that’d be Misaki [Inori Minase], who provides us with one of the season’s most Twitter-ready oneliners as she yanks Polka away from the cops. As she does so, DMDP flips the script twice more.

Surprise #1: she’s actually the girl who killed Polka the first time, and now she’s back to finish the job. (And it must be said, she looks great while doing it; that jacket with “GET HOOKD” written on the back? That’s a killer fashion statement.) There is a fight that takes place in a building that the yakuza have been using as a body-disposal facility, which turns out to be flooded with ghosts.

Surprise #2: “Polka” is not actually Shagura. The guy we’ve been following since the transition to “our” world is actually the Corpse God himself, who we learn cast some sort of spell on himself mere moments before Shagura offed him. (I like to think it has some equally D&D-ass name like Isekai Self or something.) He disposes of Misaki by drawing on the power of the spirits in the building in an admittedly pretty badass little sequence where he impales her on an enormous skeletal appendage. He tosses down a quip/vague mission statement about how this will help him lead a truly peaceful life (I would love to know fucking how, but that’s a question for next week I suppose). Roll credits.

All told, I like Dead Mount Death Play so far, but I wouldn’t quite say I love it. And as far as its relationship to its parent genre, DMDP is not a piece of frustrated hatemail like last year’s The Executioner & Her Way of Life, so I’d advise against going in with the expectation that you’re going to see isekai as a format ripped apart or anything of the sort. A lot of the standard isekai beats are still here, but they’re mostly inverted by the change of scenery, and that alone is worth something in a genre this oversaturated. (This is the second one I’ve covered this season and I don’t even seek these things out.) But the fact that they are here at all makes me wonder how much staying power this thing truly has, even given that it has two cours to fully explore its potential.

On the other hand, the show works in two pretty effective twists in its first episode. If it keeps doing that sort of thing, it might be pretty hard to predict where the hell this is all going. DMDP, as a series from former Baccano! and Durarara!! writer Ryougo Narita, had a fair bit of hype behind it going into this season. I’m not going to claim I understand that hype yet, exactly, but this first episode was, at the very least, extremely entertaining, a few notably sour bits aside. (The show’s humor is very dated, something viewers will either find charming or incredibly offputting. I’m not sure where I fall yet.) It would be pretty easy for this series to lapse back into nothing but cliche without much effort. Misaki’s presence in the marketing as a main character makes it pretty obvious that she’ll be brought back to life at some point, which will put her in his debt in an abstract sort of way, or possibly a magically-enabled literal one, a truly draining tendency of isekai fiction to a far greater extent than it is in any other genre of anime. There are a lot of ways this could go wrong, and I’m sure the reappearance of the real Shagura in the episode’s closing minutes, which indicates that his world will continue to play a role in the story, will put some off as well.

But! I remain optimistic for the time being. Plus, we don’t get a lot of urban fantasy action anime anymore, and if one has to piggyback on the isekai boom to get made, well, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.

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