Summer 2022 First Impressions – My Isekai Life

Streaming: HIDIVE

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Episode Summary: Yuji is a tamer – what that means to those around him is that, though his heroic abilities are interesting, they aren’t especially powerful. He manages a small group of slimes that help him to defeat monsters in creative ways. This makes Yuji appear to have a knack for completing missions, but despite some rumors of certain slimes that are able to breathe fire, most folks around town don’t think much of Yuji.

That changes when the town comes under attack from a huge group of demons. As the horde approaches the outer borders of the city, Yuji uses his slimes to conduct a remote magical attack. The truth is that Yuji isn’t just a tamer – he has the abilities of a sage as well, which includes a bevy of extremely powerful magic spells. This allows him to wrap the city in a barrier and let loose with some terrifying flame magic, eventually defeating the enemy. In the aftermath of the encounter, evidence appears that seems to suggest the involvement of a certain cult in the attack.

Impressions: As has been said many a time, there’s nothing more difficult to review than something which is aggressively mediocre. The word isekai at this point in the anime trend cycle has come to encompass a great deal of trope-y baggage that only its most creative variations can even hope to overcome. My Isekai Life most certainly does not seem to play with the formula at all; its hero is a product of the desire to escape real-life overwork, a very specific fantasy that speaks to absolutely dire workplace conditions that are endemic to certain companies. His powers are above and beyond what’s typical for his new home, naturally, and the video game interface he uses is extremely familiar as well. He’s a character already clearly in his prime, born from a bubbling tar pit of extremely low expectations.

The summaries I can find for the book seem to indicate that Yuji has a backstory. The choice to join up with him as he undertakes a major conflict as a fully-formed OP hero is an odd one, mostly because it removes most reasons why we would care about watching him save people and look cool. We haven’t seen him have to get his bearings in this world or struggle to gain control of his new magical abilities. Observing a character’s weaknesses and watching them overcome challenges is one of the joys of this kind of straightforward story, and bumping that part of the narrative to later in the series just does the whole thing a major disservice.

Instead, I think we’re meant to be wowed by the power on display here, as well as the logistics of Yuji’s clever plan and his self-sacrifice for the greater good of the town. This may have worked if the depiction of the magic or any of the battle choreography were more thrilling. Instead we’re presented with an episode which is, on the whole, storyboarded and animated to the same sort of average quality that one would typically expect. It’s fine, and it does the job. But when it comes to a story that I’m not personally otherwise invested in, it would take much more impressive production values to really keep me engaged in a meaningful way.

As I said, it’s difficult to review mediocrity, especially when in the world of anime ratings, anything considered below a “7” or so is considered a complete failure (something I don’t agree with). Mediocrity leaves very little to comment on in an interesting way, and I’m sure lots of what I’ve written here sounds harsher than intended just out of a desire to keep things interesting for myself and readers (which I doubt I’ve accomplished anyway). This episode isn’t bad. But it is boring, especially if you’re just not into the entire isekai base formula.

Pros: The high points in this episode are Yuji’s creature helpers – the group of several little blue slimes, each of which seems to have a distinct and charming appearance, and a white wolf who has a bit of a snarky personality. Slimes are just cute on principle, but I really appreciated that the wolf was given a lot of character in a relatively short amount of time.

There were also moments of pretty good character animation, mainly when Yuji was about to invoke some especially powerful magic spell.

Cons: I’ve voiced most of my criticisms already, so I don’t want to harp on them again here. What I’ll say in general is that the RPG-ification of fantasy anime does it no service whatsoever. Judging only by this episode, this story could have been told without the video game interface or the isekai tropes without changing it much.

Content Warnings: Violence/gore. Depiction of suicide.

Would I Watch More? – Setting aside my other criticisms, I think I would have a very difficult time remembering anything about this series from week-to-week, which would make it too much of a challenge for me to want to watch any more of it.