At 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.
