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You know the "three episode rule"? This show was a clear 10/10 at that point. Hell, I didn't even need three episodes, just a single scene from episode 1 of our goofy princess's "escape plans" or even a single frame of her angry expression was enough to win me over.

It would have been a great show it it was actually about that goofy princess, or about travel and adventures, or about pirates vs. ninjas, or solving a legendary mystery, or any of the things the start of the show leads you to believe it is about. Instead, all those things turn out to be irrelevant, ... obviated by an absurd nonsense ending. It's impossible to explain or justify my disappointment with it without spoiling it, so I will just stop here.

I guess different people can handle that to different extents - just like willing suspension of disbelief for ignoring plot holes and weaknesses in other shows, perhaps some people can also ignore a bad ending and still enjoy the trip to get to it. Sadly, I can only do that for unimportant element, but not for the thing that the whole show builds up towards and should be centered around. Thus my verdict remains - don't bother watching it if you are not willing to forgive a massive disappointment eventually.

I remember stumbling upon the manga a while ago, slightly intrigued by the premise after having read "Sore wa Rei no Shiwaza desu".
My thoughts back then were that it seemed interesting at first glance but potentially quite unpleasant if dragged out. I skimmed through the chapters and there were no hints of the heroine making any progress in overcoming her situation. I decided that I neither wanted to suffer through an endless "daily-horror" psychological torture myself, nor even cope with empathizing with a heroine suffering through that. So I dropped it.

For the same reasons I didn't have high hopes for the anime as well. ... But now that I've watched it I have to admit it managed to surprise me. At just 12 episodes it is short enough to not become the endless psychological torture that I feared, and it also manages to include enough side content to actually hold my interest from episode to episode. It's a show where the value comes from the episodic stories, side characters and other extra fluff and not from the main premise which will probably never see any development at all.

I could see myself watching another season or even giving the manga a second chance now.

This is pretty bad. It's about an eternally grinning idiot kid stumbling his way through a zombie apocalypse just thanks to convenient writing and plot armor. It has NTR in episode 1, it has a blooming naked bromance while every potential female love interest that's not in the OP song is killed off along with all episodic characters, sometimes inches from the mc without him doing anything and worst of all, him forgetting about it 5 minutes later and going on to grin and spout bs like he'll save people from zombies as if what just happened no longer counts because it was in the ... last episode and not the current one. It is all just utter nonsense. If you want some timewaster show it's got you covered, just don't ever take anything in it seriously.

Isekai is gonna be isekai no matter what. Some shows pretend to be different with some twist or other at first, but ultimately they all end up the same. Same old tropes and cliches we've seen a million times are inevitably going to be here again. If you expected different, then I guess you must be new to anime or I don't know what could be wrong with you.

I loved the first season of this one exactly for not pretending to be what it is not, but instead running with the tropes that are center stage of the genre. Save the princess, marry the princess, ... rinse, repeat. Coming from modern Japan to medieval world? Introduce revolutionary technology! Or at least bicycles. The world has special rare magics? Master all of them! Wait, not overpowered enough? Have God on speed dial before you even start. 10/10 would watch again! Well, to be fair, it was also one of my first isekai so I was not too tired of the genre yet.

The second season mixes in a few new things with a lot of "more of the same", and some things may have reached a level of "too much". In particular, the harem grows beyond the point where I could convince myself he genuinely cared about each waifu like I did in season one. There is a mix of new old and tired tropes like create-your-own-country, mecha, secondary harem of robo-girls, more inexplicable waifu overpoweredness-by-association, etc. The novelty of being in a new world is gone now and replaced with routine, and the focus shifts slightly from being on the hero more towards the overarching plot concerning the whole world. About damn time if you ask me, and actually it's not enough. We'll have to wait for a third season, just let's hope it doesn't take another 6 years again.

I still rate this high because of subjective feelings, like the fond (even if by now vague) memories of season one. I do see its drawbacks more clearly too, but... if you want an isekai, you have to face the music. You have to accept the drawbacks. You have to want the drawbacks! If you want an isekai, you got the grandfather of all isekai right here.

Complete waste of time. I really can't imagine how this season can claim to cover 3 whole volumes of the source light novel when all its content boils down to a showoff joke of a "war" and little else. I guess it just means the light novels are not any good either. There is only one noteworthy event in all of it, the so to say "origin story" of a potentially interesting character combo in the future, Princess Renner and her pet.

There are also a few other countries which the MC accidentally conquers as he stumbles around, but that feels just like a side ... story, completely not serious and not worth mention.

The whole season could've been reduced to one or two episodes for the "main" war+origin story event and one other episode for the accidental side dishes and nothing would've been lost.

Since this is season III already, writing or reading reviews is quite pointless. What else do you expect them to say than simply "more of the same"?

If you watched the previous ones and found them at least somewhat bearable, you will watch this one as well regardless of reviews.

I actually thought this season started much stronger than the last one. No silly lizard love stories and soap operas, no pointless battles between hard-to-keep-track-of characters and downright made-up villains... Until suddenly, the utterly stupid and annoying "Foresight" arc happened. So of course the score for this season can not be anything but 1.

"The nothing isekai"

A show literally filled with nothingness. It borrows some ideas from various other shows, then does nothing with them.

First up of course is the farming aspect, since it's already right there in the title. Well, it's just as interesting as one wave of the hand with a magical "All-purpose Farming Tool", then pretending you actually did some work. Nothingness incarnate.

Then for another example, it pretends to have a harem aspect at first, with tons of different races and personalities for the waifus-to-be, directly talking about how they need to repopulate their tribes and stuff, then we just see the MC complain about ... being the only man in the village and seek ways to bring other men in and do nothing of the situation. The whole topic is completely avoided for the most part except where absolutely unavoidable. In the manga we are told about the number of waifus on "night duty" in one text bubble when the first pregnancy is found out of the blue and then the topic is forgotten again. Here in the anime even that is skipped so you'd actually think he only does that one girl.

So, instead of harem, you may think it's turned into a romance then? Nope, even that's reduced to nothing somehow. When the first girl shows up and saves him from loneliness and they start living together it sure looks promising, but as more and more girls come around that aspect is just forgotten. He's never shown to treat any girl like anything special until the sudden pregnancy announcement. There were never any romantic moments or interactions, let alone discussions about their views about marriage, exclusivity or such.

Another aspect is village/city/country building/governance, but it again feels just barely glossed over and lacking details or common sense. It's just there, it happens, and that's all that can be said about it. The politics and interactions with neighbors are even more absurdly trivialized. Everyone is just automatically in awe of the new country's might and power and thus best buds by default, there is no conflict and clearly there never will be, so that aspect too leads to nothing.

You can watch this if you want to kill some time, it's not completely terrible. So long as you expect nothing from it, it will deliver.

A weird bad mix of mostly good things.

Half of the show is a good run-of-the-mill fantasy, showing potential with a mix of quest-of-the-week filler, save-the-world overarching plot, interesting characters with character-specific intro or origin story episodes and goals of their own (i.e. side quests to earn loyalty points) and so on. Unfortunately, in this season we only get the intros and quest-of-the-week, while the other elements are just hinted at for the future. Bummer.

Another 15% of the show is an epic ancient intelligent magical-swords conflict and collection saga with a weird main hook of MC's sword being Yu-Gi-Oh's Polymerization card and giving them hero fusion. ... It seems like a very promising main-story material and could've been combined quite well with the rest of the show if the focus on it were bigger, but instead is limited to like 2 episodes, feeling disjunct and undeveloped as a result.

Then we have the remaining part of the show turning into a weird idol otaku show or IDK what, wasting time with nonsensical inspirational thoughts or philosophical nonsense. Like, seriously WTH. Admittedly, even this aspect might have been good for the right audience, if it were not completely out of place in the middle of a swords and magic fantasy.

If there are more seasons, and the ingredients get mixed a little better in them, it might still turn into a pretty good show. But what it showed in this season was a let-down.

tl;dr: chuunibyou's wet dream made manifest
tl;dr. 2: according to a poll I made on the forums, "have you ever fantasized of saving your school from terrorists?", at least 65% of users will love this show, so go watch it.

This show is the closest I've ever seen an anime get to the essence of teenage boys' fantasies. I know we've had the genre of overpowered-main-character isekai power-fantasy since forever, but it's never seemed this perfect to me before.

In its essence, the show is still the "same old" representative of the genre. Our main character breaks some of the conventions by actually training to become quite ... strong and cool even before being isekaied instead of being given some cheats, and continues that in the magic world too, but still gets plenty of plot-driven, accidental or downright unreasonable powers, buffs and successes. He is sometimes serious and cunning, sometimes pretentious and knowingly faking everything, sometimes just delusional, and yet the new world itself seemingly aligns to make some of his delusions a reality and thus blur the lines between those cases.

There are a ton of side characters, mostly various hot chicks as expected of a boy's fantasy. Their roles may often be flat and tropey like is typical of the genre, but at the same time it still feels like they have fully fleshed characters somewhere off-screen and off-story; they just are not the focus of the show. The focus always remains on the main character.

To me this strikes the perfect balance in so many aspects. Most other shows have been either taking themselves too seriously despite the obvious silly tropes needed to be part of the genre, or too focused on parodying those tropes to an extent it starts to insult the fantasies or the boys that have them; overdoing story and worldbuilding or side character backgrounds to an extend both distracting from the main fantasy and presenting more area to find flaws into, or taking those aspects so lightly that it ruins the experience before you even get into it. This show finds just the right mix.

Of course it is not without drawbacks, and I'll list some of them, though I think most of them can be forgiven.

The first disappointment is caused by the very first episode, showing us how cool the main character is in the real world, before even being reincarnated. Showing a great potential for a modern-world power fantasy and then suddenly switching to the isekai genre was a bit of a disappointment. This is then further amplified by the opening song sequence we see before every episode: it shows the supporting characters and other random fantasy world demihuman races living in the modern world. This concept is so cool and makes you really want to see it happen, but is not part of the actual show at all yet and there are no other hints it might ever be.

Another drawback is the lack of detail on the many side characters. I talked about it above, and it is indeed both a plus and a minus. There are so many characters that covering all their stories would certainly have distracted too much from the main focus, but at the same time they seem interesting enough that I still want it to happen. Perhaps some spin-off shows or other seasons can address this.

Lastly, I want to point out that the show is unfinished. The next season is confirmed so hopefully they will lead it to a nice ending, but even that seems uncertain. I've not read the novels, but my understanding is even they are unfinished.
Aside of not really ending anything, the last episode of this season disappointed me in another way - by being the first time I felt the MC was just being stupid and lame instead of cool. It's hard to explain without spoilers, so I'll just say I fully loved 19 out of 20 episodes and each of them made me want to watch the next as soon as I could. My rating would've been 10 if it ended on any other episode.

The season has two parts, but they are not split between arcs like it would make sense, instead cutting off in the middle of the second arc. If you wanted to binge it, wait for the second part to be finished too.

It is full of your typical nonsense attempts at drama through stupid monologue/dialogue and all the tropes we're already used to and mostly willing to accept and forgive from the last 3 seasons. Not much point in even reviewing it really. Though the writing falls to new lows even for my lowered standards in the setup of arc 2, so I may have rated ... it a 5 or 6 instead of the last season's 7. Anyway, it's still forgivable. And if it didn't cut off but finished the arc with some good fights I might have even forgotten that and been back up to 7.

Unfortunately, there is one other big difference in arc 2 compared to not just arc 1 but all of the previous seasons making me lower my rating to 1. People dying in the dungeon isn't a big deal, but until now it's been nameless and faceless redshirts mostly off-screen or in low detail (not talking about the gore detail but the character itself). Now in arc 2 we suddenly get detailed CUTE WARRIOR GIRL REDSHIRTS! What gives? Unforgivable! I did not sign up for this!

This transgression has to be punished, hence the rating drop.