Happy Fourth of July! I may not be an American, but I’m celebrating like all Americans most assuredly do – watching bad anime and telling people all about it. …That is how people celebrate around here, right?
Yurei Deco
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t totally sold on Yurei Deco at first even though I dug its bold art style and direction, just because I didn’t think it’d be my cup of tea personally. The more I continued to watch though, the more impressed I felt, in large part because of the setting. Don’t get me wrong, having to be constantly uploading photos and whatnot for likes (sorry, “loves”) and using those loves as currency for, it seems, everything, is quite literally my worst nightmare. However, the fact this that is basically an extension of how a lot of people already live today, just taken further in terms of the commercially-available tech, is really damn cool and makes complete sense. It’s the logical next step for the future as I see it, and as horrific as that sounds (at least to yours truly), it’s also kinda awesome to see play out in anime format.
I’m still attempting to warm up to the characters, particularly Hack, primarily because her speech mannerisms tick me off – I’m sure there’s some reason for it but I usually just can’t stomach too much “little kid”-like talk. That aside though, I’m looking forward to seeing what more Yurei Deco has to offer, especially if it keeps up this saccharine-colored dystopia the series has got going on. (Whether or not the show counts or is even intended as dystopian doesn’t really matter – it still speaks to me.)
Score: 7/10
My Isekai Life: I Gained a Second Character Class and Became the Strongest Sage in the World!
I normally wouldn’t have bothered with this one – as I’m sure plenty of my readers are, I am done with this isekai shit. What intrigued me enough to try a first episode anyway was the premise. A guy who’s transported to a classic sword-and-sorcery isekai world but is actually longing to get back to all his mounting paperwork? Color me intrigued! I imagined following around this salaryman-turned-annoyed-magician who just follows his party around whining about how killing monsters suuuucks, can he please just get back to his overflowing inbox?
The gaping problem here is that My Isekai Life is apparently not a comedy at all. Nope, it missed its chance completely and plays everything generically, 100% straight (yet with a marked lack of enthusiasm or energy, so it’s not even funny in an intentionally over-the-top kind of way). The best I can say for it is that the main character is not an asshole, but he’s still ridiculously OP like almost every other male isekai hero out there. He also has all the emotional range of a teaspoon. Yippee. Pass.
Score: 4/10
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Ha, I was interested in My Isekai Life for that exact same reason… and then the first episode doesn’t even set that aspect up? It barely alludes to the fact that he’s portalled in from another world, let alone address the joke that was central to all the synopses I read. DEFINITELY a missed opportunity.
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Right? I think there was one scene, maybe 5-10 seconds, that provided that aspect of the plot – and even that sounded very unlike the premise, because it didn’t seem like he had a very fulfilling or happy work life at all. I felt like the anime didn’t deliver at all on its promises.
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A real womp-womp all around.
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I am looking forward to Yurei Deco but I also tend to get annoyed with baby talk. I haven’t watched the first episode yet so I don’t know how much it will annoy me but it’s abit of a red flag.
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Who knows, maybe that part won’t be as bad for you. To be fair, it doesn’t make up the bulk of the episode or anything, and the pros of the series definitely outweigh the cons for me, at least at this point.
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Yurei Deko was fun, but I can’t say it was anything special for me. The art style is within the parameters I’ve come to expect from Science Saru, so I’m seeing it instinctively more as branding than art at that point. To top it off, I don’t like the colours, and CGI rendered geometrical shapes are unpleasant harbingers of potential motion sickness triggers down the line (though the episode was mercifully free of that). Everything here is just okay for me. In terms of likes-as-currency… I’ve been burned too much on such SF tropes in anime; I’m expecting something more in line with Gatchaman:Crowds Insight or DecaDence or Listeners, than something that’ll speak to me. I don’t particularly like or dislike any of the characters, but I do like their energy and interaction. Things keep moving enough to be fun. I expect this to end up a middle-of-the-pack show for me. Fun, but not memorable.
I went into My Isekai Life as blind as you can go into something called “My Isekai Life”. It’s a pretty standard isekai. Two things stand out: I liked the slimes (I was worried they’d annoy me at first, but they grew on me), and I’m intrigued by the stylised real-world flashbacks. I’ve seen two episodes so far, and I didn’t get the impression he wants to get back. Rather I get the impression that he gets uncomfortable when people thank him, because he associates thanks with more work down the line, on to exhaustion. If they mine this, this could be interesting (and would make the slimes his own ever-cheerful corporate slaves?). In any case, it’d still be a generic isekai. I can’t see it being anything else.
Oddly enough, both shows fall roughly in the same enjoyment tier so far, with Yurei Deko having more potential in both directions, and the Isekai Life being so firmly middle-of-the-road that it doesn’t really matter if mines or messes up its slim potential, it’s still going to be middle-of-the-road. I do find the real-world segments in Isekai Life more visually interesting than Yurei Deko, though.
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God forbid it’s anything too close to Listeners. That one was a total bust, at least for me (although I do still have a special place in my heart for Eureka Seven). Never watched Gatchaman Crowds – it’s somewhere on the very long to-watch list.
Yeah, the slimes in My Isekai Life were pretty cute. I’d maybe watch an anime just about those lil guys.
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