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(All episodes watched): I love anime about people being trapped in virtual reality, at least the ones that are done well, like SAO or Grimgar. It opens up a whole new dimension to explore and have fun with, and hopefully this exploration has barely gotten started. So I was delighted to learn that the main character here is a frustrated shut-in gamer. Not so encouraging was the fact that it quickly became clear that bouncing boobs and ribald humor would play a large part in this show--you could summarize this show as 'Tits & Ass & Sword & Sorcery'. That is usually a clear sign that a show has gone into a death spiral in which little effort will be made to tell an interesting story and instead it will rely on the borderline porn to attract viewers. But Isekai managed to remain fairly interesting, in part because it had little competition during a luckluster season. Where is this? Some fantastical alternate reality that happens to exactly match a video game here on earth? Players boast of their 'skill levels' and stuff like that that is basically video game terminology, and it's hard to believe that that is just a coincidence. Somehow Diablo still has magical and combative skills in direct proportion to the ones he laboriously earned while becoming the ultimate expert at Cross Reverie. But other rules do not apply; for example, apparently you cannot revive if you get killed here, so people tend not to take risks and be satisfied with the low skill levels they have managed to earn. Of course, as is often the case little effort is made to explain this. I wish Diablo would take the obvious step of asking his underlings if they have ever heard the term 'Cross Reverie' or something like that. I guess I was searching for plot to fill the hole that had been left by the not outrageously funny humor. But I doubt if this world will ever be completely explained or if the explanation will be all that clever, not when the show could simply display more mammary glands. Fortunately, Diablo is a likeable guy; despite his frustrations he isn't an asshole and doesn't know what to do when he finds himself in awkward situations, like a harem of hot girls coalescing around him. He finds himself in a Conan the Barbarian-like situation: he can pretty much kill anybody he doesn't like and screw any girl he pleases. But he doesn't just run wild, because he's not a bad person at heart. He protects his girls when problems turn up, and it isn't his fault that naughty situations occur. Diablo and his slave girls have some personality and it can be fun to listen to them banter things about. It's sort of like the situation in Overlord, except here comedy plays a larger part. The show is by no means brilliant; I noticed one sign of how intriguing this show is (or isn't): when a new episode began, I had a hard time remembering what had happened in the last one. At times it was almost like I was watching a new show. The end result is a thoroughly disposable product that is modestly amusing but isn't worth remembering a day later, and certainly isn't worth watching a second time. The incongruous situation of the Hikkomori gamer Sakamoto finding himself with a harem of hot girls seems tailor made for comedy, but instead it seems to have been virtually forgotten while Diablo instead jumps from one episode where he finds himself rubbing against a girl's breasts to another. Come to think of it, I had virtually forgotten about the hikkomori angle, since it gets so little mention after the first couple of episodes. To be fair, what with all the fanservice I wasn't expecting there to be much attempt to tell an interesting story, but a modest attempt is made after all. Actually, things almost get interesting and moving in episode seven, where elf princess Leena in Diablo's harem is lured away by a brainwashing trick played by her evil brother. There's a touch of friendship and loyalty in addition to the usual T&A, and it sort of works. There's also an underlying theme that a terrifying demon that is hibernating within Ren, another of his girls, must be purged in order to free her. That's definitely better than nothing, although the means by which the demon is drawn out in episode ten were typically raunchy. Cheaply raunchy, that is; not much effort was put into making it genuinely pornographic. In the final arc I sometimes wondered why Alicia, an observer sent by the government to keep track of Diablo, was acting so contrary to the way she was supposed to, and why nobody seemed to notice (Or was it that they just didn't care?). The mixed signals--is she going to betray Diablo and his girls, or is this just a crudely written show?--were annoying, but the answer is finally revealed in episode 11. Like the series in general, the conclusion was satisfactory but not outstanding. We have gotten to know the characters well enough that we can feel good when things work out OK, and in spite of all the nonsense and corner-cutting, in the end I didn't regret watching. Last updated Thursday, September 27 2018. Created Tuesday, July 31 2018. | ||||||||
