Anime: Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken (2021)

I went in expecting the worst, and it did not disappoint. As with the first anime, it is nothing but a power-tripping main character defeating your generic super evil villain which is designed solely for the viewers to hate. There is nothing of value to this anime, it only exists for the viewers to live vicariously through the main character.

The characters are bland and shallow; there’s your generic female sidekick, another girl whose only personality is her breasts, and two generic males who we know nothing about. They all exhibit sameface; the only way we can distinguish them is the gaudy color palette used on each character: the main character is a bright blue, the main female sidekick is pink, the other girl is purple, and one male is red. They have no backstory; there is no emotional attachment to these characters, and as such, they can only be distinguished by their hair color.

The animation is similarly of low quality. In one scene, they allocate two frames for a tiger-drawn carriage. Their paws just go up in one frame, and down in the other. In other scenes, you have your typical still frame fights, and panning shots of similarly still frames. I'd wager that this video https://youtu.be/240Vq6tIxio has more keyframes than the two seasons combined. It's also obvious that the penultimate fight scene involving the main character is lazily animated. The main character's attack seems to have been designed to avoid having to animate complex moves.

Let's talk about the story. It's your typical overpowered character power-tripping fantasy. We meet a few villains; most of them are framed as edgy, pure evil, with no complex personality; just someone that presents a barrier for the main character that everyone roots for to be crushed. The main character first faces off against a villain who overpowers him. He retreats and as he lost his sidekick, he suddenly gains more power, to the point where he can just massacre the tribe that said villain belonged to. After the initial confrontation with the main villain, she is nowhere to be found. Her entire tribe is massacred with her nowhere to be seen. She was only there to provide a minuscule bit of tension and nothing else.

Obviously, the conflict within the anime is weak, as the main character is overpowered. When some of the supporting characters died, there might’ve been hope for some tragedy in this story, to provide a little depth. But as expected, their deaths were not permanent. Through some plot device, the main character's sidekicks are magically revived, and all goes back to normal. To some extent, it plays out much like a sitcom. The laziest plot device of this entire series is "the sage", a voice in the main character's head that is nothing more than an exposition machine. It powers the main character and grants him increasingly powerful abilities, in addition to spitting out verbatim exposition, with no attempt to integrate it into the story. The anime doesn't even attempt to animate an actual character to deliver said exposition; it's either a voice in the main character's head or a glowing sphere. He doesn't make much of an effort to acquire his superpowers either; they are just granted to him by the sage when the plot deems it necessary.

All in all, this anime was nothing but another generic isekai designed for the viewers to live vicariously through the main character. It has no value; it's just another cash cow in a sea of mediocre anime. It's the poster child for modern anime: poor plot, terrible animation, bland characters, fanservice, nothing but pandering to a wide audience.

And to the person who said it was good enough to pioneer the Isekai genre, tell me: what value has that genre produced? Other than the same type of power tripping anime providing escapism to the depressed with cheap storylines and poor animation?

My overview for the first season of the Slime isekai was well received in every site I uploaded it. And yet there were a lot of people at Anime-Planet who kept commenting about how wrong it was, because I didn’t read the manga. Why should I? It was an overview about the first season of the anime, not a much later arc in the manga. Do I really have to point out how stupid this is? How would you feel if I was going on every person’s review of the first season of The Promised Neverland and I was telling them they are wrong in everything they wrote, because the manga is different later on? It’s that sort of mental gymnastics that can make an average person to give up on reviewing, because he wouldn’t be able to tolerate the insanity of the fanboys. Luckily for you, I am not average and I watched the next season where the big twist happened. And no, it doesn’t contradict anything I said about the first season, because it’s a different season and it’s definitely not an ongoing manga. Holy crap, anime community, why do you suck so much?

Anyways, I had said about the first season that it was a bland power fantasy about an overpowered protagonist who solves all the problems in a breezy, wholesome way. He does the same for half of the second season as well, until a bad guy cancels his hax powers with a barrier and a lot of his allies get killed by an invading army. Things are no longer hunky dory, he has to take his position more seriously, he has to realize he can’t solve every problem with hax powers, and he has to accept that he can’t save everybody all the time. This sounds like a great twist and all the author had to do was to not go back to the bland power fantasy.

…And then he goes back to the power fantasy and completely destroys the twist, thus making the show even worse than it was before, because now it comes off as pretentious. The only thing the protagonist had to do is to get even more overpowered. The invading army that seemed unstoppable was easily annihilated by his hax powers, and all his allies who died were magically brought back to life. Hooray for taking things more seriously where there is still no tension or negative consequences. The fanboys of this bland power fantasy will insist it’s deep because he was forced to kill a lot of people and to be more serious hereon, but who gives a damn when he can easily solve every problem with his completely broken powers and to dragonball back to life anyone who died? Oh, as for the part where he is forced to kill people in order to protect his friends, did everyone forget the hundreds of creatures he has killed already, including the father of the wolf who carries him around like a pet?

Therefore nothing really changed and all those idiots who were making fun of me for not reading the manga when I was reviewing the anime were full of crap. The show is still lazily written, it’s nothing special, it’s a run of the mill trash isekai for people who hate their lives and want to escape in a videogame where they are amazing and solve all their problems without having to actually work hard or sacrifice a thing. For a much better version of the same (supposed) twist, read my book. I also have a guy who becomes a leader and who doesn’t have hax superpowers for wiping out entire armies, nor he can resurrect anyone he likes, whenever he feels like it. It’s what the author of the Slime isekai can only dream of writing, because all he cares about is creating a bland power fantasy for gamer dorks, who will rush to defend his trash by making fun of anyone who didn’t like the anime, because he didn’t read the manga. Defenders of this trash, you all suck and I am both a better analyst of anime and a writer of better fiction.