New season means new shows. New shows means new ways to be disappointed. I can’t wait. 

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That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime

Honestly, I found this opening episode kinda boring, but first, a little context. Satoru is a 37-year-old virgin who has never had a girlfriend. Even so, he’s happy with his life, and he seems nice enough. Boy, was he ready and willing to protect his kohai/coworker from a random knife attack! The only problem is that he’s now dying as a result of his heroic efforts. As life slowly ebbs away from Satoru, our main character is also simultaneously going through a character creation process. Why? Beats me. Maybe the story will explain this one day, but judging by recent isekai adaptations, that time will probably never come in anime form. But because he’s complaining about feeling cold, his new character will now have cold resistance. Because he just got stabbed, his new character will take reduced damage from stabbing attacks. It just goes on and on like this until the dude finally bites it. So what do you get when you take all these individual elements and blend them all up? A slime, apparently. Next thing you know, Satoru has awaken in a strange, new world as a genderless, faceless slime.

Dying is pretty traumatic enough as it is, but now he has to be a slime? Satoru takes it in stride, though. This ain’t your “I have no mouth and I must scream” situation. Instead of body horror, we get yet another isekai anime. Talk about boring. The novelty wore off pretty quick as soon as I started watching Satoru acclimate to both his new body and environment. He has the ability to digest and analyze everything he eats, so when he munches on a medicinal plant, he decides to go and make potions out of them or whatever. He then quickly turns his attention to some valuable ore. Last but not least, Satoru eventually stumbles upon a sealed dragon who provides a tiny bit of lore (how many dragons there are in this world, how he was sealed, what summoners are, the fact that there might be others in this world who are also originally from Japan, blah blah blah). If this sounds like another generic RPG, that’s because it probably is another generic RPG. There’s also a built-in AI who seemingly exists to help Satoru understand the “gameplay mechanics.” Despite being a huge JRPG fan myself, I don’t find any of this interesting. Rather, it just felt like a huge drag.

Every asshole who ends up in an MMORPG always goes about crafting potions. We’re just tired of human assholes, so our main character is now a genderless slime instead. Everything else, however, remains the same. I don’t feel as though all that much has changed. At the end of the day, Slime Satoru still has human thoughts, human reactions, and human conversations. All that’s different is his ability to absorb stuff. On paper, reincarnating into a slime sounds kooky, but the story had 24 minutes to give a good first impression, and I felt like they bombed the execution pretty badly. Last but not least, I think this show is trying to be funny, but it keeps falling flat. For instance, Satoru’s last request as he slowly bleeds out is to tell his kohai to go to his apartment and delete his hard drive. Hahaha, ’cause we all download some dirty ass porn, right? And then for some reason, his new dragon companion is kinda lonely, kinda arrogant, and a whole lot tsundere. Why? Because it’s supposed to be funny, I guess.

Maybe when the rest of the story opens up and we meet other characters, this anime might not be so dull. I wouldn’t put my money on it, though.

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The Girl in Twilight

Anime characters are also so nonplussed about everything. Magically transport yourself to some weird world? Eh, no reason to freak out. Get mobbed by a bunch of cute bunnies? Shrug. Cute bunnies are now vicious, potentially man-eating creatures? Okay, let’s scream a little, but not too much. Watch hero girl who happens to look a whole lot like one of us go through a transformation sequence to get armored up and beat up on a bunch of mean, interdimensional serpents? Wow, am I in an anime or something? Now, let’s return to our world, let the main character take care of the strange girl who looks like her, and call it a day! Dude, if I were in these girls’ position, I’d be losing my fucking mind. But they’re anime characters, so like Satoru in the previous show, it’s whatever. It’s cool, don’t worry! It’s anime, baby! Crank up that insert song!

Anyways, five girls in the Radio Society like to do mock rituals for funsies? But one day, performing the ritual with a mysterious rock and a certain frequency sends them all into a space between dimensions? Twilight? After being attacked, another Asuka comes to save them, and she also has a dead brother. Unfortunately, there’s only so much story you can tell in a single episode, so this is all that we get for now. Looking ahead, we’ll probably get various versions of every girl. So far, we have Genki And Thus Kinda Dense Asuka and Serious, Battle-hardened Asuka. Maybe there’s an evil Asuka, a depressed Asuka, a furious Asuka, so on and so forth. The battle in this episode wasn’t bad, but it was also against boring snake things so the stakes weren’t high or anything. This show also seems to have a thing for butts, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But to sum this up, at least the first episode wasn’t super boring.