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Oct 15, 2023
The problem with trying to review Seija Musou is that it elicits very little feeling, in that it's neither especially good nor especially bad. Trying to describe why it's so average is also difficult as the descriptions could apply to a dozen other shows, some of which aired in the same season.
By now the premise is so played out it barely needs mentioning; A barely developed cardboard cutcoat human being gets transported into a typical western fantasy RPG setting with guilds, dungeons and a leveling system which serves as a lazy shortcut to let the audience how strong the characters within the setting are. To
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it's credit, Lucien, the main character, avoids the usual genre cliche of having an overpowered combat skill that let's him overcome every challenge with little difficulty. He does however fall into the convention of being a faily uninteresting character with little to distinguish him from other characters, other than his apparent masochist attitude towards physical training that the show milks for comedy at every opportunity.
The actual plot of the show itself blends in with the rest of the isekai genre as well.The most interesting thing the show does with its world is the contrast between Luciel's selfless attitude towards helping others with healing magic with how other healers in society have formed a cartel to profit off the need by adventurers to access healing magic. Had that been the core of the show, it would've at least helped distinguish Seija Musou from other shows. Instead, most of it is focused on Luciel undergoing physical training in order to actually be able to fight, an arc which takes up a good chunk of the show's runtime and leaves many of the potentially more interesting elements by the wayside.
Ultimately this is another forgettable show that does nothing particulary well or particularly bad.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Apr 2, 2022
There are standouts in every season. Good shows that faithfully adapt their source material or deliver on a concept. On the other hand, there are bad shows, incoherent messes or poor adaptations that blatantly serve as an advertisement for their source material. Then there are shows like Kenja no Deshi wo Nanoru Kenja.
Kenja no Deshi wo Nanoru Kenja (I will be referring to it as Double Kenja from now on) is neither a good or a bad show. Rather, it’s one of the many shows that air every season that barely leaves an impression and is forgotten as soon as it finishes airing.
That is
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Double Kenja’s biggest problem, it is neither good nor bad enough to stand out among an increasingly crowded field of mediocre shows, which makes reviewing it difficult.
But one can try. Double Kenja stars Dunbalf, a player within a VRMMO with an old man avatar who is hailed as one of strongest players in the game alongside a group of players known as the Nine Wise Mages. The show properly begins when Dunbalf one day wakes up with a new cute girl avatar, only to discover that thirty years have passed, the VRMMO has somehow become “real” and that the Nine Wise Mages have disappeared.
If you were expecting that the show would then explore how a VRMMO suddenly came to life and the psychological impact of thirty years in a game world, you clearly haven’t watched much isekai over the past five years. While Double Kenja technically doesn’t fall into the category of a traditional isekai it shares much of its tone, setting and overall style of the many cookie cutter isekai adaptations over the past five years. That includes the main character hardly caring about the fact that he’s now trapped in another world with no way back to his old life, the main character being overpowered, and a general sense of aimlessness. To give the show some credit, it at least doesn’t waste time engaging in tiresome harem antics like some many others in its genre.
At this point I’d talk about what happens in the show itself, but considering I’ve already forgotten most of it, it speaks to how unengaging the whole experience of watching the show was. The overarching plot of the show revolves around Dunbalf, who takes on the name of Mira in her new form and explains her powerful abilities as being the pupil of Dunbalf, being tasked to hunt down the missing members of the Nine Wise Mages in order to ward off a impending threat to the kingdom.
What follows are a series of average, forgettable vignettes with a number of side characters who fail to leave any impression. This overall lack of anything interesting happening plot wise is compounded by the mediocre art, animation and music, all of which fail to make up for the show’s plot failings. This show does stand out in having some of the worst CG in recent memory, with stiff models straight out of the early 2000s.
Overall, this is a show not worth wasting time on. It’s neither good nor bad enough to stand out or be remembered, and will be destined to join the increasingly large pool of throwaway light novel adaptations that fill out each anime season.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Aug 1, 2018
I'm putting about as much effort in this review as was put into the anime.
Pros:
- OP isn't Slide Ride.
- Smartphone usage is much better than in Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni
- Basic attempt at introducing battle tactics.
- MC actually has a goal beyond just fucking around.
- Ucchi OP
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Cons:
- The development of the phalanx is wrongly attributed to Alexander the Great and Oda Nobunaga (??????)
- Most of the female cast are the MC's adopted sisters. Naturally, all of them want to bang him.
- Awkward CG
- Tactics only work because everyone else is brain dead.
- "Oni-sama" is abused to a much greater degree than Mahouka.
- Based on Norse Mythology my ass.
- The katana being the most powerful sword in the world.
- One-dimensional characters.
- Stilted animation and direction.
- Poorly defined world.
- MC just happens to be the most compassionate, smart and charismatic guy around.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Mar 31, 2018
Everything comes in cycles. Just a while ago it seemed like the “traditional” isekai was on the way out, with the most notable entries in the genre being subversive takes on the premise of being transported to another world such as Konosuba or Re:Zero. In hindsight, they were mere blips, as it appears we are living in a new golden age of isekai anime, given the upcoming adaptations of Isekai Maou to Shoukan Shoujo no Dorei Majutsu and Hyakuren no Haou to Seiyaku no Valkyria. If Death March is any indication of the quality of these upcoming shows, we’re in for a rough ride.
At
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first glance, Death March’s premise is somewhat interesting. An overworked game developer gets transported into the world of one of the games he’s working on, complete with a standard MMO UI. Those ten minutes in the first episode, in which the viewer learns about how shitty the MC’s job is, ends up becoming the most interesting part of Death March. As well as being a much realistic take on game development than New Game, it firmly establishes a reason for the MC to want to stay within the new world.
However Death March quickly squanders whatever goodwill it built up when the OP begins.
The Opening
There’s no sugarcoating this. Slide Ride is one of, if not the worst, anime openings I have ever experienced in my life. The song itself is terrible; A cobbled together mess of various elements that fails to come together into any sort of coherent melody or rhythm. Instead of complimenting each other, the instrumentals and vocals actively clash, exposing each other’s flaws more so. The whole song comes off as cheap, as if the whole thing was put together after one take.
The animation and structure of the opening don’t fair much better. The quick flashes of the girls of Satou’s harem fail to establish them as distinct characters, whilst the show’s titlecard is interspersed with annoying shots of the MMO’s UI and menus. And yet the worst is to come.
While Slide Ride’s chorus does its best to make your ears bleed, the action sequence chosen to show off how badass the main character is merely consists of him walking up a cliff and shooting a giant rolling boulder, saving two of his underaged slaves in the process. By contrast, Smartphone’s OP, even with its poor animation, at least showed the MC and his harem fighting together against various monsters, doing a much better job at building audience expectations.
Death March’s OP does none of that. By pure accident, it ends up becoming a perfect symbol of the show itself.
Plot and Characters
Death March can best be described as slice-of-life isekai, with the series largely consisting of short vignettes of Satou and his harem, broken up by occasional attempts at a story arc. The problem is that the show makes these little vignettes boring as hell, failing to take advantage of the fantasy world setting in any meaningful way.
But it’s largely down to the characters. A good cast can turn even the most mundane situations into something worth watching. However, this is Death March.
Once again, we have a bland, nonchalant, over-powered male protagonist. The fact that he was an adult prior to being transported to a fantasy hardly plays into how Satou reacts to situations around him, and generally he feels like any other teenaged male isekai protagonist.
Him being overpowered also robs the story of any sort of tension. We know, from a hilarious sequence early on the first episode in which Satou levels to over 300 by dropping meteors on CGI lizardmen, that nothing in this world offers much of a challenge. When anything appears that might present a challenge, Satou simply dumps points into a relevant skill and resolves it without much issue.
The rest of Satou’s harem, fails to make much of an impression either, with personalities ranging from non-existent to one-dimensional. They also contribute to the increasingly irritating isekai trend of being slaves of the protagonist, in order to give them an easy justification to follow the MC. To Satou’s credit, he does refuse any form of sexual contact, but the ultimate effect is to make him even more bland.
Because of all this, the show’s various scenarios simply flow past without any meaningful impact. I frequently struggled to recall the events of the episode just minutes after I finished watching each episode.
Animation
Death March’s one unique gimmick, that of Satou being able to see a MMO UI, ends up being a distraction from the other things that are happening on screen. Aside from a few bits of visual comedy, the menus mostly exist to introduce characters and settings in a lazy manner, and reinforce the increasingly ridiculously long list of MMO titles Satou has acquired, reminding the audience of how much an overpowered badass Satou is.
Unintentionally, having Satou resolve things so easily is a blessing in disguise, as it saves the audience from having to withstand Death March’s action scenes for any longer. The show’s already limited animation really suffers during bits of action, with stiff movement, poor direction and CGI that would have been laughed at ten years ago.
Even in normal times, the show fails to rise above mediocre in the art department. Death March has a strange pastel-like quality to the colours, and the overall design of the world could be from any medieval-themed game or anime. Most irritating is the filter that is slapped across the viewer whenever we see Satou’s perspective. Meant to emulate depth of field, it ends up distorting the image and making everything seem like a blurry mess.
Conclusion
Death March fails as an adaptation of the light novel, and neither does it stand as a standalone product.
It, along with Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni, serve as examples of the worse traits of isekai stories, with blatant wish fulfillment, non-existent plot and flat characterization. Normally, such a show would be merely forgettable, but in a season stacked as Winter 2018, it's flaws stand out even more so.
Basically, if you want mundane but comfy slice of life, just watch Yurucamp. Don't waste your time on Death March.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Oct 1, 2017
At this point the prospect of another isekai anime is greeted with a mixture of bemusement or a loud collective groan by the anime community at large. Ever since the concept was popularized by the likes of Sword Art Online, nearly every season has seen at least one take on it. Derided by detractors as nothing more than wish fulfillment for otakus, the space for isekai played straight has shrunk to almost nothing. In this it parallels the trajectory of battle harems, another brief staple of the anime scene that has largely faded away. It’s telling that two of the most popular isekai stories in
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recent memory, Konosuba and Re:Zero, are a parody and deconstruction, respectively.
So when a series like Isekai Smartphone comes along and seemingly plays the isekai premise completely straight, I wasn’t going to welcome it with open arms. Still, it did have one unique hook, that of the protagonist bringing his smartphone into the fantasy with him. Perhaps, I thought naively, that would at least be interesting enough to hold my attention.
The problems with Isekai Smartphone are myriad. The most glaring issue is its characters, or to be more specific, the lack of any compelling characters for the audience to get attached to. The worse offender of this is the protagonist, Touya. He greets every situation with a nonchalant cheerfulness, from his sudden death at the beginning of the series all the way to discovering an ancient floating sky garden. The only instances in which demonstrates any real emotion is the prospect of seeing his numerous harem members in underwear or any other skimpy clothing. Not helping his case is the appalling ease through which he overcomes challenges. Simply put, he starts off overpowered and ends the show even more overpowered. By the end of the show, he has crafted a working gun in a fantasy world, gained two high level spirits as familiars, has ownership of an ancient floating island and is effectively a de facto member of the royal family. This bleeds into many aspects of the show, reducing every fight scene to a boring wait for the protagonist to solve the problem with a single spell or previously inconceivable strategy. That being said, the sheer overpowered nature of the protagonist somehow manages to be entertaining rather than aggravating. The whole show is so light in tone that it’s impossible to truly get mad at it.
The other characters, mainly comprised of Touya’s harem mates, don’t fair much better, rarely distinguishing themselves beyond their attraction to Touya and the diverse archetypes they represent. It says something about their lack of character that I can’t remember half their names even after twelve episodes with some of them. Wish fulfillment harem fantasies don’t work when the girls feel less like actual people and more like a creator went down a checklist of character templates to add. That by itself is not an inherently bad thing. Princess Principal, from the same season, also starred a group of standard character archetypes yet gave them real depth through backstory and developed relationships between them so that the audience could invest in them throughout the story. No such thing happens in Isekai Smartphone.
Compounding the issues with character is the show’s story, which largely focuses on short vignettes rather than an overall arc. The slice-of-life approach can work if the characters and situations are sufficiency amusing, but save for the slime castle mission, most of them serve as means to give Touya even more abilities or harem antics that get repetitive fast. This is also a series that opts to tease future in lieu of any sort of climatic confrontation at the end of the series. Instead, the final “conflict” is whether Touya will agree to marry all the girls he’s accumulated throughout the series. Despite literally having God on his side and everyone in his harem being ok with polygamy, he refuses, citing his unwillingness to take such an “adult” responsibility. Given that at this point he’s escorted a diplomatic delegation, saved a village from a rampaging dragon, foiled an attempted assassination of the King and ended a war, this comes off as laughable.
I haven’t even mentioned the smartphone itself because very little would change without its inclusion. Sure, it gains increased prominence and usage near the end, but considering it’s prominence in the title this was a seriously missed opportunity to distinguish this show from other run of the mill isekai shows. Later episodes do make better use of the smartphone, mainly in combination with Touya’s magic to resolve every bit of large scale combat off-screen.
Isekai Smartphone, in summary, is an example of a show that does the bare minimum required. It’s worse sin is that it is merely boring without being infuriating. As such, it leaves very little impression in mind, even compared to its contemporaries. If you ever wanted to know why isekai anime are greeted with such trepidation these days, Isekai Smartphone neatly encapsulates every critique of the genre into a singular forgettable package.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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