Story is a 6 for me, and I think i'm being pretty generous here if i'm going to be honest. The story is split into multiple separate arcs (which i'm guessing make up each of the various light novels) in which our protagonist Rimuru Tempest experiences troubles while adjusting to this new world he's been transported to. Like I said earlier, the pace is extremely quick, so by the time we get to the 4th episode, Rimuru has already become the leader of a village of goblins. I can see why so many people would get hooked by these early episodes, as a kind of turn your brain off easy to watch junk food anime. I actually had been enjoying it myself, and if the show had kept to this level during the duration of this show's airtime, but by the score i'm giving here it's pretty obvious that at least to me, it didn't.
Halfway through the first cour, Rimuru meets another person who had been isekai'd into that world named Shizue Izawa, and for some reason, everything that had been previously going on just got dropped to focus on her, but only for two episodes for some reason. Rimuru apparently had been seing her in his dreams and thought they were "destined to be together" or something, but he literally knows nothing about her, until finding out her backstory via an episode long exposition dump, in which she subsequently dies. I seriously did not know what to take of this, with Rimuru for some reason absorbing her body being surrounded by characters we had just met and didn't know anything about crying like this was supposed to be some important landmark event. This event seriously dampened my excitement for the show, and it never really went back up to where it was before; with storylines being dropped just as quickly as they are picked up, resulting in a deflated, boring, power-creeping plot that has no clear path. This can be seen most clearly with the fight with the Charybdis, in which this monster, who was described as being able to destroy kingdoms, gets killed in one hit one episode after it had been brought up. This is when fast pacing becomes a detriment, not a positive.
Don't know where to add this, but I forgot to mention just how jarring the ending was. 16 minutes into the 25th episode, with Rimuru heading back to his town of Rimuru(lol) after being gone for like 5 episodes, the song for the 1st OP begins playing and the rest of the episode just becomes a recap of what had happened so far. I was audibly shocked by this, and I couldn't stop laughing for a few minutes after this had happened.
Art i'm giving a 7. The character designs are inoffensive enough, if a bit crazily sexualized, Rimuru is cute enough as an amorphous blob, and the background art is just the same bland characterless background art that's seen in every fantasy anime nowadays, but hey, at least they didn't use CG. The animation can be pretty good during action scenes, but the character animation is nothing to really write home about, and there are no scenes in particular that i'd really credit as "amazingly animated" , so overall it's just good but really nothing else-- well at least aside from the openings. those were pretty nice.
Sound: I'm going to be honest, I don't remember any of the songs from this show. That's a bit of a shock for me, because I tend to pay a lot of attention to anime OSTs, usually really enjoying their sound palates and composition styles. It's not like I didn't like the OST, but nothing stood out to me at all, except for the aforementioned openings (I loved both of the openings, with the second OP tying for my favorite of the winter season alongside Dororo). So sound wise this is a relatively harmless show, with nothing that will really wow you, as well as nothing all that grating or unenjoyable. Besides the OPs. 7/10
Character is really the section that bothered me the most, because to be blatantly honest, most characters don't really have that much. As much as I liked Shion and her design, we knew nothing about her besides the fact that she liked Rimuru and carried him around all over the place. The same can be said about basically all of Rimuru's groupies, and this is a huge problem as they are the characters we spend the most time with besides Rimuru himself. Besides that though, even if we were to learn more about these characters, they just get dropped like the stories get as Rimuru meets new people and travels to different places. Now, I 100 percent expect to see these characters again in the recently announced 2nd season, but that doesn't excuse how flimsy and 2 dimensional the characters are right now. Ranga is ok though. 3/10
With how much I ragged on this show so far, it's not liked I HATED it or anything, but it was definitely extremely disappointing to see everything I liked about this show in the beginning kind of just unfold on itself. That being said, the show was an inoffensive enough watch that I was able to kind of just binge the show and forget about it not feeling like i'd wasted my time. i'll give my enjoyment a 6/10
Overall this show is a 6/10 for me, but you have to understand how I rate anime. The only kind of show i'll rate a 5/10 or under is either something i absolutely hate (Akashic Records, SAO, Kino's Journey remake), or something that is just so obviously bad I have to give it a low rating, no matter how much I enjoyed myself while watching it (Ousama game, Hajimete no Gal), so giving Slime a 6/10 really isn't saying much for this show. I know I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anybody, and if I were to grade it I would give it a failing grade, but it's just so middle of the road and forgettable by the end of it's 25 episode run that I didn't really feel anything by the time the credits showed up, except for confusion, and a lot of disappointment.
