YoshiKyon

4/10

Saw a thing for books that I took for anime in my stream Discord, that was "12 [books/shows] in 12 months" - these are listed in the order I thought I'd enjoy them, most to least.

• Shinsekai yori
• Plastic Memories
• Vivy: Fluorite Eyes Song
• Kaiba
• Bloom Into You
• Princess Tutu
• Redline
• Monster
• Saint Onii-san
• Haikyu!!
• So I'm a Spider, So What
• In Another World With My Smartphone

This one, Isesuma, came courtesy of Felix, who's a good friend with a reputation for watching only the worst shows - it's his fault that I watched both Ladyspo and EX-ARM too. Thought I'd get it out of the way early, and it wasn't quite as terrible as those two, but it certainly wasn't good.

Some minor spoilers below, in as much as this show can even have spoilers, I guess.

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I've never been big on the isekai thing to begin with - just make a fantasy setting within itself, there's rarely ever a reason to make it someone from our world being transported. On top of that, I grew up playing jRPGs, so I'm more than familiar with a range of fantasy settings, and putting the most generic characters possible into them just doesn't cut it. Something like Re:Zero at least did a good job with the supporting cast, as well as making the surrounding premise interesting enough that the isekai element didn't feel like just a weak excuse for people to self-insert.

And here we run into the most egregious part of Isesuma. It really isn't subtle about what it is - the main character is overpowered from the first moment, with the most generic personality ever, and none of their strengths are ever tied to their character (and instead to the fact that they have a phone in a fantasy world and can use any and all magic with no restrictions). It's a harem show intended for little more than projection, and it never pretends to be anything else.

If what you're here for is a generic comfy harem show, then it's not bad at that, but that's a low bar. The best this really gets is "comfy easy watching that does nothing interesting", and at its worst, it's what non-anime fans think of when they hear about anime - awful jokes about perversion, a total lack of world-building or character writing, and a whole cast of characters fawning over the most bland of personalities. That honestly annoys me the most in all of this: everyone acts as though Touya is this perfect beacon of morality for... helping a lost child? Using his literal god-given abilities to prevent an assassination? None of the things he does are beyond basic decency, so it's just another excuse for people to presumably see themselves in him. I really hope this shit doesn't work, but I'm sure it does on some people somewhere.

It's nowhere near the worst thing I've watched, but it's not good in any way, and the biggest issue is that it's still doing nothing notable at its best. There are countless other shows with similar premises at this point - probably too many, in my opinion, but that's irrelevant - and there's no reason to watch this one over any of the ones with actual world-building, good characters, or the most basic of plots.