Otome Game Sekai wa Mob ni Kibishii Sekai Desu

Title:Otome Game Sekai wa Mob ni Kibishii Sekai Desu
Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs
乙女ゲー世界はモブに厳しい世界です
Overall:Watch
Keywords: , , , , , ,
Notables: Animation - ENGI
FAIROUZ Ai
ICHINOSE Kana
OOTSUKA Takeo
One day, Leon Fou Bartfort experiences an unsettling realization: the life he is living is the scenario from a dating sim video game that he played in his last life. What's more, it was a game he hated--it was extremely difficult, frustrating and designed for women. He had only played it because he had been blackmailed by his sister. Now he's a minor background character, a 'mob'. At least he has an idea of where events are leading and can take advantage of that.

12 episodes
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Watch Stretch [series:4463#628]
(Watch+ or Rent-)

(All episodes watched):

When I started watching this show, I suspected it would be another isekai series which has a potentially intriguing premise, but would tell the story in a half-hearted, generic fashion, as if any sort of sophistication, any sort of an attempt to be really good, would be pearls before swine. This is another isekai series with a joke premise: the main character is trapped within a video game he hates. But it's already been done: Full Dive from last year. Of course a really good show may re-use any premise, but initially I did not sense all that much quality here. I wasn't even sure if it was supposed to be comedy or drama, because I don't recall any serious laughs and the plot seemed unexciting. This is a strange world where swords are still used for hand-to-hand fighting but spaceships exist as well; I guess this was a sort of a joke to show what a crappy game it is based on. But something must have been done right, because at the end of episode one I remained slightly curious about where this was going. The story had barely begun. So, I watched episode two as well. Leon (and his wisecracking AI assistant, Luxion) arrives at the magical academy and gets an idea of who's who and what is considered proper and what isn't. He is scoffed at by the students who are of noble birth as a commoner who just happened to get rich. For the most part things go as might be expected by a person who has already seen this scenario play out countless times in the video game, but something is also distinctly different. I just had little idea what, or why it would matter. Episode two didn't exactly excite me. Will watching this show be any more fun than watching somebody else play a video game? Does Leon have any reason to believe that if he 'wins' he will be returned to the real world? Does he want to? He hates this game, doesn't he? As usual, he never agonizes over things like how the situation in a video game could have become very real. While it was modestly entertaining, things didn't seem very focused here. A number of things happen, but I didn't discern much of a pattern to them.

Nevertheless, I found myself curious about the situation in this series and watched episode three. Leon has been established as an underdog, a mere 'mob' character, and I felt I could root for him, at least to some extent. It was kind of fun to see Leon stand up to the arrogant (but handsome) clique of noblemen who rule the social life at this school. He volunteers to duel on behalf of a Princess who has been treated like crap by these assholes. I enjoyed episode four in which one by one these high-and-mighty guys face off with him in their stylish, tailor-made mobile suits and promptly get their asses kicked. It is hinted that Marie, the girl who is stringing these guys along, might actually be Leon's real world sister, who forced him to play this game. Or maybe I was reading too much into this show. But that would be intriguing. I had no idea which way the duel with the Prince himself would go--things were seeming to be going too easily for Leon, and perhaps it was time for a setback. So, this show hadn't fallen into the rut of being excessively generic and predictable, as I had originally feared, and I felt I had a reasonable grip on who's who and what's going on, so I could honestly say I looked forward to new episodes of Otome Game.

Episode six is largely a joke involving a cafe Leon attempts to run as part of a school festival, and seven is about an 'airbike' race he competes in. I sort of wish the story would concentrate on the main plotline of the dating sim, and how Leon is tampering with it, rather than go off on these tangents, but oh well. It looks like Olivia is supposed to be the main character--the protagonist in the dating sim--(I had missed this important point previously). Leon agrees to help hunt down 'air pirates', and a couple of the pretty boys do as well. It turns out that they are not complete jerks. Leon asks one why they adore Marie so much, which was a question which had occurred to me as well. Surely she will have something to do with the climax, though as of episode nine I didn't sense any such thing approaching. Olivia's mind has been played with by a bitchy girl, and she is distraught. Leon, Olivia, Angelica and others are all taken hostage in episode ten, but their captors must be pretty careless because Leon accesses a new airbike for an escape attempt. The thought occurred to me, what will happen when this story reaches the ending point of the video game, i.e, when Olivia finds a lover? Will life go on in unexplored ways, or will it reset, or will Leon return to Japan, or what?

Things seem to reach a climax in episode 11, the next-to-last one. I thought the fight against the kidnapping princess and her allies was rather corny, almost ridiculous (what was the deal with those flying, fish-like monsters?). Maybe that was the idea. At least we learn that there's an ocean at the bottom of the seemingly endless sky (if there is no land or sea in sight, wouldn't it be easy to become disoriented?). But Olivia makes a startling confession which up-ends the assumptions that Leon has been working with. The conclusion felt somewhat incomplete--Leon's romance has barely begun, and there is no resolution of just who Marie is. It felt like the plot had come from an incomplete manga. But it was complete enough. For all the silliness, the nonsense, the corny-ness this had in fact been a fun show. It must have been modestly good, because I was sorry to see it end and wished it would continue. Regardless of what I had wanted and been expecting, the makers had done what they wanted to do, namely tell an amusing tale with likable characters.

Last updated Wednesday, June 29 2022. Created Saturday, April 09 2022.

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