Tag: isekai

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: No, Seriously, What The Hell is Going on in ISHURA?

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Bad anime are fascinating things.

I would argue that there are two pretty distinct types of bad anime. There are anime that are trashy—which have an open disregard for artistic aims beyond “be cool”, a mentality that can lead to shows that are the anime equivalent of empty calories—and there are anime that are boring, which may aim to be Serious Art but profoundly fail at it. ISHURA, an isekai battle royale political intrigue fantasy thing that aired its seventh episode this week, asks; need this be a dichotomy at all? What if, for example, it was possible to be both trashy and sometimes fun, but also tedious and dull? Not at the same time, obviously, but in alteration?

We’ll get into the specifics of that, but in a lot of ways, my main thought about ISHURA, a show I would say I have decidedly mixed feelings on, is just that it is an extremely ’20s anime. Ten years ago, it was not entirely clear how vast the endless appetite for isekai light novel adaptations truly was, so I can’t see it getting made then. Ten years from now, I imagine this market—maybe the entire industry—will have collapsed. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s just my call on things. ISHURA‘s defenders, however, of which there are a surprising amount, will point to a few merits that make them hold the show in more regard than your run-of-the-mill narou-kei adaptation, and argue these are reasons that ISHURA not only got an adaptation, but deserved to get one. Let’s run those down.

1: the action scenes – ISHURA has, in the rare occasion it’s actually gone full-tilt with them, admittedly had some cool fights. These are, though, uniformly sloppy despite the surface-level wow factor. The direction is there, but it struggles against wonky CGI and inconsistent animation quality. In the most recent episode there was a moment where there was very visibly and obviously a cut missing. If I, a random viewer with no formal animation training whatsoever, can notice that kind of thing, there are issues with your pipeline. In spite of these imperfections, I’ll concede that these are easily the show’s best moments, because they’re fun in spite of all that.

2: the worldbuilding – Frankly, I understand this argument the least. ISHURA‘s plot is a confusing, dull tangle of lore dumps, proper nouns, fantasy geopolitics (complete with our old friend, Ye Olde Fantasy Racisme, although it’s not as major a factor here as it is in many competing isekai), and silly character names that I am not going to do the show the favor of trying to summarize here. The world they take place in is an obvious step up from the infinitely-xeroxed settings of many fantasy isekai, but there is a difference between worldbuilding being interesting and there simply being a lot of it, and I place ISHURA firmly in the latter category, despite a few cool details like the presence of a faction of talking wyverns. I will admit the magic system seems neat, but it’s not interesting enough to devote most of an episode to explaining it at length, which ISHURA of course, does. That particular expository scene takes place in a hot spring, which takes us to our third point.

3: the babes – Many people probably think of themselves as being above watching something because it has attractive women in it. I am not “many people,” and, from what I gather, neither are most ISHURA fans. That said, with one exception, I don’t find ISHURA‘s cast to be a standout in this regard. (Which is kind of weird, because the studio behind this series are longtime ecchi peddlers Studio Passione.) None of the men really do it for me either, sadly.

Let’s talk about that exception, though, because she’s indicative of both ISHURA‘s obvious weaknesses and, conversely, its strengths. I think by looking at her, we see the show itself in microcosm.

This is Nihilo [Rie Takahashi]. Full name Nihilo the Vertical Stampede (no relation to Vash). She has short purple hair, a smug streak a mile wide, and has wires that look like old iPod earbud cords coming out of her back. I think she’s basically the perfect woman and I love her more than every other character in this show put together.

I felt the need to include two screenshots because the first one is so dark that it’s honestly kind of hard to see her. I’m not sure why anime have started taking lighting cues from Game of Thrones, but I hate it.

I will not sit here and pretend that Nihilo is a terribly well-written character. She has an easy to understand motivation (she wants to be treated like a person instead of a living weapon, to very much boil it down), which is nice, but we’re not exactly breaking new ground there, and this is the case for most of the show’s characters. What’s more important than all that is that in the most recent episode, she climbs, naked, into a giant spider mecha that somewhat inexplicably has its own name and title. As she did this, and as she sped off cackling about how she felt free and had her “body” back, it occurred to me that maybe I was just watching ISHURA in the wrong way.

This isn’t a get-out-of-jail free card, to be clear. Episodes 3, 4, 5, and 6—a good chunk of the show—are mostly just unforgivably dull. But, there is a certain “smacking action figures together” appeal to the show’s stronger moments, particularly when any of the shuras (as its various Powered Individuals are called) fight each other. Perhaps that’s all you’re really supposed to get out of ISHURA. Pick a favorite character—or a couple favorite characters, I’m also partial to the in-way-over-his-head, wyvern hating general Harghent [Akio Ootsuka] and the skeletal Shalk [Kouichi Yamadera], who also has a nice turn in this episode as he fights the show’s alleged protagonist—cheer when they’re onscreen, and sit through the rest of the show while just barely paying attention.

That’s not really an endorsement on its own, and I would still describe ISHURA as easily the least essential of the anime I’m watching this season. Plus, if it ever slows down so much that we get back to episodes 3-6 levels of tedium, I will be very sad. But episode 7 is at least, you know, fun? Fun is worth something. The show’s massive ensemble cast also makes it so that you never really know quite what you’re getting with each subsequent episode, and I do get why that appeals to people in a landscape where every isekai feels interchangeable.

ISHURA‘s appeal is, in many ways, the appeal of seasonal anime in general; you really never do know for sure what you’re going to get! Sometimes you get excellent adaptations of great source material (Delicious in Dungeon, Sengoku Youko), solid genre work (The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic), fun surprises (Brave Bang Bravern!, Bucchigiri?!), or things that are just totally inscrutable (Metallic Rouge). And, sometimes, you get one of these. If I had to compare ISHURA to anything, it would be Big Order, another light novel adaptation, and one that has found cult “so bad it’s good” status in the near decade since it aired. I’m not sure if ISHURA is committed to the bit enough that it could ever get there, but it seems to be making a run for it.

And yet, at the same time, I’m left wondering if that’s really enough to make up for its many obvious deficiencies.

From its instantly-polarizing opening episode, wherein ostensible female lead Yuno [Reina Ueda, in one of the weirdest miscasts in recent memory] sees her girlfriend brutally murdered in front of her by giant, hulking magitek robots, I knew I would have complicated feelings on ISHURA. I’ve wanted to like it in spite of that, because I think people are often too hard on stories that open on a down note. But it’s become clear that ISHURA is really just interested in shock value and spectacle. That first episode really is quite visually impressive, and the most recent follows suit.

Those are fine things to aim for, but is it really so much to ask that the series have decent pacing and just a little more thought put into it, in addition to that? I’m content to classify ISHURA as a guilty sometimes-pleasure, but it would really be nice if it could be more than that. That it’s not just makes me wonder about what could’ve been.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Munch Squad for Monsters in DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON

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.

There are two ways you can look at Delicious in Dungeon.

The first is as an adaptation of a very well-liked manga; a classic fantasy series with a notable twist and some strong worldbuilding that sets it apart from many of its peers, and a strong sense of characterization as well.

The second is as Studio TRIGGER’s first plain ol’ TV anime since SSSS.DYNAZENON three years ago.1 If we discount sequels, it’s their first since Brand New Animal back in 2020. It’s also the first full directorial turn for Yoshihiro Miyajima, who’s been part of the studio for years but has mostly done storyboarding and direction of single episodes.

Combined, these facets put Delicious in Dungeon‘s anime in an interesting (if not necessarily enviable) spot. Fans of the manga are largely going to demand fidelity to the source material. Long-time TRIGGER heads will be disappointed if the series doesn’t go all-out with explosive action animation. (This has never been all that TRIGGER is good at, but it remains the studio’s defining characteristic in the minds of its western fanbase at the very least.) So far, it seems like those who want a fairly straightforward adaptation of the manga are winning out.2 This first episode is, true to the opening chapters of the manga, fairly slow and expository, neatly setting up and then demonstrating our premise.

Speaking of, that premise is thus; some years ago, an ordinary village was disrupted by a fissure from the ground. From the fissure came the undead form of an ancient king, who promised riches to those who would liberate his kingdom from a wicked magician. The only problem? The kingdom, and the magician, are buried beneath what were once crypts and graves, but have through magical influence grown and warped into a massive, labyrinthine dungeon. Delicious thus marks itself out as one of the relatively few pieces of fantasy media that kind of cops Wizardry‘s Whole Thing but actually tries to explain how any of this—including such gamey staples as partying up, an entire ‘dungeon town’ economy, complete with in-universe resurrection in town upon dying, etc.—actually works, and integrate those mechanics into the story. From what I’ve read of the manga, it’s not always successful at this and I’ll admit to being a bit less enamored with Delicious in Dungeon than some, but it’s still a solid idea, and I give the series a fair amount of credit for trying.

As for whose story specifically we’re following, the anime opens as the manga does, with a party deep in the dungeon encountering a mighty red dragon—our second of the anime season, if you’ll remember the last article I wrote—which they cannot defeat. Of these adventurers; two quit, one, Falin [Saori Hayami], is eaten by the dragon, and the other three; Laios [Kentarou Kumagai], Marcille [Sayaka Senbongi], and Chilchuk [Asuna Tomari], are resurrected in town without a penny to their names, stuck in a pretty awful spot in that if they don’t hurry back to the bottom of the dungeon, Falin will be digested, and at that point there’s certainly no hope of resurrecting her at all. (Thankfully, we learn that dragons digest things very slowly. Still, our heroes are definitely on a clock here.)

So, with a little prodding from Laios, who seems awfully eager to try this in the first place, the party adopts an unorthodox approach which forms the crux of the whole series; they’ll live off of whatever they can procure in the dungeon, which means a whole lot of meals prepared from JRPG enemy staples like giant scorpions, slimes, ambulatory mushrooms, and so on.

The final piece of the puzzle here is the dwarf Senshi [Hiroshi Naka], who the party meets while trying (and failing) to prep scorpion meat. Senshi claims to have been researching monsters and the food that can be made from them down in the dungeon for over a decade. A fact Marcille openly questions, but nobody can fault his cooking prowess. Using the aforementioned Floor 1 mobs, Senshi is able to whip up a pretty tasty-looking stew, and goes into a fair amount of detail about how he’s doing so while he does it. This is the show’s essential appeal; the fun thought experiment of using a D&D Monster Manual as a cookbook.

All told, the premiere promises a fun if straightforward adaptation of the source material. What’s carried over particularly well is the character dynamics, which are enhanced by the obvious benefits of an anime adaptation (voice acting, character animation, and so on). Laios and Marcille have the best of it, here. The former is largely a lovable dumbass, whose fixation on eating monsters (considered strange even in-universe) contrasts with how Marcille is only going along with this very begrudgingly. Marcille’s delightfully bitchy, nervy personality in turn pings ineffectually off of Senshi, who is too busy imparting Cooking Wisdom to care. All three are rounded off by Chilchuck, who serves as a snarky sounding board in this early stage of the story.

Some specific scenes are worth highlighting; there’s a particularly great bit of comedic editing where Laios asks Marcille, just freed from the clutches of a predatory plant, how it felt. In his mind, since the plant has to secure prey (mostly animals) without making them uncomfortable enough to struggle, he thinks it probably feels pretty nice. Marcille’s reaction is this;

I didn’t edit that. (Although I will ask you to forgive my subpar screen-recording software.)

Elsewhere, the actual cooking scenes are the star of the show. This only makes sense, given that they’re the main draw of the series, and the pseudo-tart3 that Senshi prepares in the second half of the episode looks good enough that you’ll be a bit annoyed it’s not a real thing.

All told, this looks like a solid adaptation of an all-around good source manga. I fell off of said manga a while back (not for any reason to do with the story, to be clear, sometimes I just lose track of things), so it’s nice to be reminded of why I liked these characters in the first place. I think, despite the differing desires of the two main groups that are going to check this show out, everyone will walk away satisfied. There’s nothing to complain about here, and with a slated 24 episodes, the series looks to be a delicious two-cour-se meal of fun fantasy anime.

1: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was a weird net animation thing. This series is being released by Netflix in the west as well, but as a simulcast rather than as something they directly funded, at least going by who’s listed as being on the production committee.

2: I know some folks were worried that TRIGGER might insert a bunch of extra fanservice that wasn’t in the original manga a la the Mieruko-chan anime or something. I’m not sure why people were worried about that, given that TRIGGER’s few other adaptations have been very faithful and straightforward, but if you’re in that crowd do rest assured that there’s nothing like that, here. Even in the one scene where there’d be an easy opportunity to add a bunch of extraneous ecchi material, they simply do not. Also, anyone who has read the manga knows that the character it’s horniest about is Senshi.

3: Pseudo because the crust isn’t edible. Which I guess makes it more like some kind of weird pudding?

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Dragons, Tigers, and Isekai in FLUFFY PARADISE

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.

A new year means a new anime season; a fresh turn of the calendar page for a medium that, at least as far as TV anime goes, often feels defined by a chase for the next big cultural touchstone. 2024 does, in fact, have plenty of upcoming anime that look pretty promising, from the battle girl android action-yuri of Metallic Rouge to highly anticipated manga adaptations like Delicious in Dungeon, to whatever Jellyfish Don’t Swim in the Night is going to be. But today, January 1st, the very first anime to make its TV debut in 2024 is this; Fluffy Paradise. It’s an isekai, of course.

It’s hard to even feign shock at the sheer deluge of isekai series anymore, and to be honest talking about the genre’s saturation has started to feel pat. (Plus, there actually aren’t that many this season, compared to some seasons still fresh in memory where we’ve had up to ten airing at once.) So let’s just skip all that and get to the actual meat of this thing, or what meat of it there is anyway. For one thing, yes, this anime starts with the obligate scene of the protagonist dying in the ‘real world.’ I have to admit I’ve always found the fact that they seem to feel the need to show this directly kind of morbid and I’ve never totally gotten over that. For another, the protagonist, in her previous mundane life, kind of looks like Kobeni from Chainsaw Man, so hey, that’s something. (And this seems like something that would happen to Beni, given her rotten luck.)

The fact that she’s a woman in the first place shouldn’t go unnoticed, either. Isekai anime remains very lopsided in terms of protagonist gender, and it is nice to see one that’s not vaguely otome game-themed have a female lead.

Our girl is of course given the obligate talking-to by a deity who offers to compensate her for her short life by fixing things in her favor in the next. He does ask for her help with something rather specific in return, though. We’re told that in this world, humans are persecuting “non-human creatures,” complete with some silhouettes of what sure look like catgirls and doggirls and such. The show doesn’t really circle back around to this until the very end of this first episode, but it is the one point that sticks out.

I say this because much of Fluffy Paradise is frankly dull. It leaves no real impression for most of the length of its runtime. We could get into specifics about its plot and characters, but they feel so cursory in of themselves that there doesn’t seem like much a point. Our girl ends up in a very plain isekai setting, born (of course) to noble parents. There, she’s given the name Nefertima—Neema [Ai Kakuma] for short—and the show begins in earnest. The main focus here is that she wished to be able to “pet lots of fluffy things” as part of her reincarnation, so animals love her, and it’s from this that the series gets most of what flavor it does have.

Anywhere she goes, Neema is surrounded by a Disney Princess-esque parade of adorable animals. This extends even to befriending the divine “sky tiger” that she meets upon a visit to the royal palace. All of this is pretty cute, but it’s not really ever more than that, and even the few moments that seem like they’re trying to be vaguely transgressive (eg. a few mildly charged interactions between the three-year-old Neema and the teenage prince) don’t accomplish even that much. They’re too tame to even be tasteless.

Meh.

Arguably, the entire point of “cozy isekai” like this is that they never do too much. But by introducing that whole Man vs. Nature element at the start, the show inherently asks to be taken more seriously than as just another lazy Monday series. I’ll also admit, I tend to be a bit harsh on this subgenre in general. I’m a longtime iyashikei apologist, and even I tend to find that most of these “slow life” shows are boring rather than actually relaxing, usually owing to their iffy visuals and general lack of atmosphere.

The production values are decent, on that note, but come with their own set of caveats. The animation is just expressive and bouncy enough that Fluffy Paradise escapes the fate of its often-stiff isekai brethren. Even then, there are still a few spots that are disappointingly under-animated, such as a magical board game played in the episode’s middle portion. You could also be forgiven for not really noticing, because the actual art direction is very drab and generic. Pity any RinBot player with this and even just a few other isekai in their back catalogue, because they’d largely be indistinguishable. This is true of the setting as well; an ISO Standard vaguely European isekai setting with basically no characteristics to set it apart from its genre-fellows whatsoever. You can get away with this if your show is funny enough or has strong enough characterization (eg. in the case of In My Next Life as a Villainness! or such), but that’s not really the case here, and the nondescript visuals contribute to an overall feeling of interchangeability. This show could’ve aired at any point in the last decade and it wouldn’t seem out of place. That can be a good thing, but in Fluffy Paradise‘s case, it really isn’t.

But, there is a silver lining here, the one spot where the show seems willing to take a risk, and that’d be the dragon.

Bro thinks he’s Smaug.

In the episode’s closing minutes, Neema’s sister summons a dragon during a magic demonstration. We’re not told anything explicitly here but she sure seems intent on killing it, until Neema rushes out to get between her sister and the dragon. The episode ends on that note, providing a cliffhanger and a (theoretically at least) solid hook to bring people back next week. If Fluffy Paradise ever breaks out of the middling isekai box—and hey, it’s happened before—it’ll be there, with Neema as a defender of the world’s wild things against her fellow humans. Still, given everything else about the first episode, I don’t have a ton of faith it’ll actually follow through on this idea.

I could sit here and wax further about how there are just so many isekai and how it’s such an over-saturated genre and so on, but at some point you just have to let things be what they are. Fluffy Paradise seems basically fine as far as such things go, but it also seems solidly “safe.” There’s nothing in here that a hundred other anime haven’t done, and if I want to put on my Nostradamus hat and make big predictions, I kind of wonder if the lower amount of isekai this season means people aren’t maybe finally getting tired of this whole setup.* Who knows.

I won’t keep watching Fluffy Paradise, personally. But for the people who do, I legitimately hope it turns out to be better and more ambitious than I’m predicting here. In cases like this, I like to be proven wrong.

(Also, the ED is a cute thing with a lovely felt stop motion visual style. That counts for something, too.)

* A very rare after the fact edit from me, here. What was I talking about when I wrote this? This season is absolutely swamped with isekai.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Die, Die, and Isekai Again in DEAD MOUNT DEATH PLAY

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.

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.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Redefining ‘Cult Anime’ in KAMIKATSU: WORKING FOR GOD IN A GODLESS WORLD

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.

Nobody needs me to read them the standard line on the contemporary isekai boom at this rate. Nonetheless, here it is, if you’re somehow not aware; the isekai genre, or at least the most common strain of it in the present day, involves people from our world dying and having their souls migrated into another universe, often but not always a fairly standard-templated one based roughly around a JRPG-ish medieval fantasy setting. There are a lot of these. Almost in purely mathematical terms, there are too many of these. It is the most oversaturated genre in modern TV anime, largely thanks to the machinations of J-media conglomerate Kadokawa, and most of them are deeply forgettable. Over at AnimeNewsNetwork, their This Week in Anime column has made a game out of running down the bumper crop of each season for a while now. (Here is the most recent, from back in January. I assume they’re hard at work on this season’s as we speak.) The tide shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.

I’ll be very honest; I don’t really get most isekai. It’s possible I’m just too far removed from the mindset of the teenage boys that this stuff is aimed at these days, but in general, while I think some amount of any genre of fiction is allowed to consist of naked power fantasies, they must at least be interesting power fantasies. (To put it in crasser terms; if you’re going to pen a 20-novel series about a character who is clearly Just You bedding elf chicks and killing fantasy monsters, the elves better at least be attractive and the fantasy monsters better at least be weird.) Contemporary isekai often fails to clear even that bar, and those stories that don’t come across as power fantasies at all are pretty rare. But, hey, credit where it’s due to KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World (what a title), because whatever the hell it’s trying to do, it’s at least memorably strange, and if you can’t clear “good,” then “weird” is a solid second choice.

And things will, indeed, get weird.

Very broadly, KamiKatsu is a comedy. You might call it a parody, but the isekai genre itself is really only part of what it’s taking the piss out of, so that might cast it in too narrow a role. Our lead is the remarkably unremarkable Yukito [Junya Enoki], who is perfectly ordinary. You know, other than the fact that he was raised in a cult and the way he’s killed—remember, isekai series, we gotta kill the protagonist somehow before the story can even start—is that his father, who is inexplicably a really buff tanned bald dude, sticks him in a barrel, ties a magetama around his neck, and has him heave-ho’d into the ocean in the name of their cult’s goddess Mitama. He drowns, because, like, you know, yeah. With his last breath, he wishes to be reborn in a world with no gods and no religion.

After a series of “hilarious” flashbacks where we see things like Yukito fumbling a relationship because his dad’s culties and stepping in dog shit as his life flashes before his eyes, he is—surprise!—reborn in just such a world, where a hot lady, Aruraru [Kana Hanazawa], quite literally immediately jerks him off. (Obviously this is played as a joke but, yes, that happens. I’m just a little stunned by the audacity, somehow.) After some acclimating, he discovers his dilemma and, indeed, the first episode’s central gag. He has been transmigrated to a world not only without any concept of spirituality, faith, religion, etc., but also one without any of the usual isekai fantasy trappings. Yukito’s big quest in this first episode? He helps out the small village he ends up in with their farming, and grumbles the entire time, complaining about how this is Not what he was hoping for when he found out he’d been isekai’d. (To be totally fair to the guy, if I were sent to a generic isekai universe and found out I wasn’t at least an attractive raven-haired elf woman who could, I dunno, use fire magic or something? I’d be pretty let down too.) He has essentially been reincarnated into medieval Germany.

There is a procession of gags, here. They’re more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but they get the job done. When Yukito accidentally gets a bit overzealous and harvests a truly ludicrous amount of grapes, he makes wine and everyone in the village gets absolutely wasted. When a monster—rendered in truly ugly 3D CGI—attacks the village, another character consults what looks like a spellbook, only for it turn out to be a ‘strategy guide’ that suggests such gems as ‘running away’. Later, Yukito and friends track down a different forbidden book, only to find out that it’s about sex. Again, none of this stuff is going to blow anyone’s socks off, but it’s alright as far as killing a few minutes between plot developments. I should note, by the way, if anyone was hoping that this series was just an extended worldbuilding exercise about what a natively, purely atheistic society would be like, you are about to be disappointed. It’s when our not-heroes travel to the Imperial Capitol for some business that things really start to go off the rails.

Very basically, Yukito discovers that in this world—or at least this country, who knows about any others—citizens are randomly put to death. We don’t know why this happens, but most people have accepted it as a part of life. The other two people from Yukito’s village, including Aruraru, have not, and this marks them as ‘deviants’, which, we learn, is why they are sent to live in the village in the first place. It’s essentially an outcast camp. This really doesn’t seem like the kind of series that should be touching the “is euthanasia ethical?” question with a 10-foot pole, but they do basically go there, and it’s very odd. On the other hand, the real point here seems more to be to ask the audience, “what if the state could just end your life on a whim? Wouldn’t that be super scary?” I really do not want to be the one to have to tell this show’s writer that that is, in fact, essentially how the real world works, but someone will have to at some point.

This whole experience rattles Yukito, and he and Aruraru end up sharing an intimate scene over it a bit later in the episode, which manages to be many things in equal parts; a bit out of place, sad, a little funny, and, when Yukito gives Aruraru his magetama, oddly sweet. (I’m not going to touch on the notion of Aruraru somehow tying him up just before that scene. That’d be the out of place part.)

More importantly, ‘deviants’ like the ones from Yukito’s village don’t even get the dignity of being merely told that their lives are over. They’re just dragged back to the capitol to be executed by the throngs of faceless soldiers that serve the so-far unseen emperor. (Who lives in some kind of magic dome that looks very out of place compared to everything else in the show. That’s presumably on purpose.) If you’d guess that Aruraru is one of those taken from the village to be slaughtered, you’d be right. Yukito pursues in a carriage, only to arrive too late and end up on the business end of a sword himself.

Then, in desperation, he says something like a prayer, saying that the people who deserve divine protection are decent, honest people like Aruraru. It quickly turns into an actual prayer, to Mitama—you remember, the god that Yukito’s father’s cult worshipped?—and the sky promptly cracks with a massive thunderhead, transitioning into an honestly kind of awesome henshin sequence of a sort. For Mitama [Akari Kitou], that is, as she appears in the flesh in the form of a naked young girl (bad) and then promptly annhiliates everyone who hurt Yukito and his friends (good) and brings them back to life (better). The episode ends on that note, with Mitama introducing herself to Yukito and being a little offended that he doesn’t recognize her.

To put it mildly, there’s a lot going on there, not helped by some very weird editing choices (a lot of the footage honestly looks like it’s been sped up. I checked a few sources to make sure this wasn’t a problem on my end but it doesn’t seem to be). But like I said! Memorably bizarre is usually better than boring. If you’re going to watch an isekai this season, you could probably do worse than this one. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t seen any others yet.

Am I going to keep watching this? Honestly probably not. But I might, and that’s a lot more than most of this glut of a genre can claim. Hats off for weirdness!

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: The Exuberant Lesbian Wizard Science of THE MAGICAL REVOLUTION OF THE REINCARNATED PRINCESS AND THE GENIUS YOUNG LADY

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; totally average person from our world dies and gets reincarnated as someone of note in a stock JRPG-style fantasy universe. This is, fundamentally, the rock that the modern iteration of the isekai genre is built on. There are many, many variations of it, but the central premise remains familiar to anyone who has even a slight familiarity with modern anime.

The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and The Genius Young Lady, monstrously long title and all, is really only different in one key way. Our protagonist—and her obligatory love interest—are both girls.

Yes, it’s true, a yuri fantasy isekai. There are a couple of these. I’m in Love with the Villainess is well-liked, and The Executioner and Her Way of Life has an anime airing right now. Revolution Princess is a bit simpler than either of those, though. It is, at least going by the nineteen chapters currently available in English, a more straightforward heroic fantasy. (That’s nineteen chapters of the manga, for the record. It’s based on a light novel, presumably much farther along, by Piero Karasu.) It also draws a bit on the “tech boost” subgenre, a style wherein the hero uses their modern knowledge to fast-track technological development in their new world. It’s a fraught, and frankly, very silly, style, but that doesn’t much matter here. We haven’t really seen many fruits of this pursuit of better living through magitek yet, and indeed some part of the series’ point seems to be in illustrating how difficult doing such a thing would actually be. But I risk getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the basics.

Anisphia (“Anis” for short) is the princess of a roughly medieval European-ish kingdom somewhere in a fantasy world. She used to be someone else, in another life. We don’t learn much about that “someone else,” but we do learn, crucially, that she was obsessed with the idea of magic. Now living in a world where it’s a reality, she’s hellbent on learning as much about it as she can. (Credit here, the scene of young Anis’ personality being “built” puzzle piece by puzzle piece, and finally completing as her past life memories come rushing back to her, is an intriguingly poetic visual.)

Because of a condition, she can’t actually use magic herself, directly. But over the course of her young life, she studies it extensively, becoming something of a magical mad scientist, creating useful gadgets for herself and inventing an entire field of study; a sort of “applied science of magic” called magicology. If that all seems a little dry to you, early parts of the manga are indeed a bit so. Things get more interesting when we’re introduced to Anis’ co-protagonist.

The daughter of a duke, one Euphyllia (“Euphy”), is renounced by the man she was betrothed to. That man? Anis’ older brother, the kingdom’s prince. It’s not totally clear why he’s dumping Euphy—he claims she was talking badly to a lady-friend of his who he seems to have far stronger feelings for, but the situation seems more complicated than that and we don’t learn all the details—but he’s doing it very publicly, destroying her reputation in the process.

Cue Anis, flying in on a magic broomstick of her own design. In an absurd—even in-universe—turn of events, Anis sees this as an opportunity. She reasons that if her older brother doesn’t need Euphy anymore, maybe Euphy should come with her instead. None of the nobles present are particularly okay with this, but Anis does manage to (eventually) convince the only person whose opinion on the subject really matters; Euphy herself.

Even this early on, Anis’ spur-of-the-moment decision to pick up this random disgraced woman as her (we soon learn) lab assistant is strange, but Anis is a beaming ray of pure personality, and it’s hard both for the other characters and for us the audience to not be charmed by her. Her sudden absconding with the Duke’s daughter somehow manages to scan as romantic.

Anis is, in general, an endearing protagonist, although not a flawless one. She’s charming when taken with the magic of her world, which she’s singlehandedly wrought into a science mostly by herself. She has an enthusiasm for admiring her own handiwork (sometimes to a positively Dexter’s Laboratory-ish degree).

But she also has a cool side. She was born without the ability to use magic naturally, and so Sciences her way around problems that would ordinarily be solvable with “regular” spellcasting. It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of thing nowadays, but Revolution Princess sells this characterization very well, partly by making it clear how into her Euphy is, and partly by cutting it with her general immaturity to not make her too perfect. She can occasionally come across as remote and, when pursuing her interests, reckless.

(There’s also the matter that her disregard for the spirits that are responsible for the world’s magic system, and the stones they leave behind that she uses to power her devices, does feel kind of Reddit Atheist-y at points. Thankfully it doesn’t come up enough to be a real problem.)

Euphy, meanwhile, is so dazed by the sudden shakeup in her life that it takes a while for her to know what to do with herself. She knows she likes Anis, at least in some way. She knows that all the training she did to become the future queen—remember, Anis’ brother is a crown prince—was for naught. She feels directionless and adrift. Anis doesn’t entirely get this, and the two come into conflict a few times over it. Anis, you see, is more than content to let Euphy do what she likes, but since she doesn’t know what “what she likes” even is, it just makes her feel restless.

They come to an understanding during of the manga’s first—and currently only—big, dramatic arc, wherein Anis decides to try stopping a rampaging dragon. Why? Well, aside from the fact that if left unchecked it might kill a lot of people, she wants the magical stone it carries within it to make more magitek gadgets. Fair enough. There’s a whole other slate of stampeding monsters to take care of, too, and Anis gets to really show off her action heroine chops here. (For those of you who, like me, just enjoy watching anime girls go full stone-cold killer, this is probably enough to sell the manga alone.)

The fight with the dragon is a visual treat, artist Harutsugu Nadaka‘s compositional skill is really something to behold in general, and he knocks the climactic battle scene here out of the park. I could easily fill this whole article with examples, and the dragon itself is worth highlighting; all shadowy wings beating the air, teeth and claws.

But I have to say my personal favorite is this absolutely bonkers page where Anis uses one of her gadgets, a magic dagger, to split the dragon’s breath in two.

These would be the obvious highlights of any hypothetical anime adaption as well, but don’t consider Nadaka a one-trick pony who’s only good at fight scenes. He can also excellently portray say, warm intimacy or imposing projection equally well, and it is this that gives the manga most of its visual strength. It’s immersive in a way that’s all too easy to take for granted.

When Euphy saves Anis from her first, botched run at the dragon, the princess is undeterred, and the panel makes her look positively majestic. You can practically see her cape flapping in the wind, feel the breeze blowing, and smell the sulfur and burnt fabric. It’s only natural that this eventually leads to that page of Anis splitting the dragon’s breath above. How could someone this confident not be able to do the impossible?

This is the difference between a relationship that feels convenient and one that feels real, and it’s here where Anis and Euphy seem to finally “click” with each other for good. The general sentiments here are old—far older than the manga format itself—but they’re expressed very well. Reading Revolution Princess, I get why Euphy and Anis are into each other, and the visuals play a huge part in selling that. At a ball, some weeks later and held in celebration of Anis’ victory, Euphy straight-up confesses. I’ve seen a lot of confession scenes over the course of my time reading manga, and I have to say that this is one of the sweetest. I absolutely love how we get to see a rare shot of Anis being totally, sincerely flummoxed by someone else’s actions, the brave isekai heroine reverts to a blushing schoolgirl in the face of such strong feelings. (Note also how this scene and the one immediately above mirror each other. I like that, it’s a nice visual touch.)

I’d tell you more—because goodness dear readers, do I ever want more people to pick this up—but in truth, there isn’t much more, at least not yet. Revolution Princess is still a fairly young serialization, and as good as it’s been so far, I feel as though its best chapters are ahead of it. I can only hope it picks up the following it deserves. In addition to its obvious appeal to the WLWs of the world (or just anyone who likes a good romance), there are other, intriguing plots forming in the background; dragon prophecies, jealous older siblings, and and an eccentric girl who “collects curses.” A world is being built here, and while Anis and Euphy are at the center of it, they aren’t the only interesting parts of it.

I often lament that so much yuri focuses solely on the romantic aspect. I like romance (I’m covering two romance anime this very season!), but having some other plot as well definitely helps things feel more fleshed-out and lived in. In general, I’m fond of this current wave of yuri isekai manga, and I hope that Executioner is not the last to get an anime adaption. Stories like this are built on old foundations, but Revolution Princess is a breath of exhilarating, magical fresh air.

Update: If you liked this article, be sure to check out my writeup on the anime!

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.