Yet another story in which a poor schoolgirl gets summoned to another world. As always, she’ll cry about missing her family. Boo hoo, I wanna go home! But look, there are hot guys here! Hot guys with steely gazes and angsty backstories! Hot guys who might have to kill you one day because you are the Awakened. This is for all the people out there who don’t get a yummy feeling unless the hot guy also has a mean, twisted streak to him — someone you can tame with your love. As a result, our heroine will eventually change her mind and want to stay. I mean, it’s already happening. Noriko initially refuses when Izark wants to discard her schoolbag. After all, it is her only link to her old world. Maybe she even has pictures of her family in there. Who can say! When he relents, however, she relents. She relents immediately, because she’s chosen to trust him! The next thing we see is her schoolbag floating down a waterfall. So, uh, what were all those tears for?

Y’know, when I was young, I couldn’t understand Escaflowne‘s ending. What do you mean Hitomi’s going back home? After all that? After finally falling in love with Van? She went through all those ordeals with him just to separate anyway? Because they’ll be linked via their minds? What does that even mean? But the older I get, the more I just feel for the people who are left behind. This is what the isekai heroines don’t get. You’re not supposed to have a happy family. You’re supposed to be a loser with no emotional ties to your old world. You gotta be a sack of shit ojisan, working a dead end job as a corporate drone. This way, when you get stabbed or run over, you have no regrets. You have no reason to want to return home. But isekai heroines keep leaving families and friends behind. How can you throw all that love and support away for the first hot isekai hunk you see?

Anyway, I was somewhat reminded of Red River as I watched this first episode, but the similarities run out pretty quickly. After all, this is a pure fantasy world full of dragons and bizarre, wiggly monsters. I feel bad for this little critter who had to die just to demonstrate how dangerous the world is. Also, Noriko isn’t meant to serve as a blood sacrifice like Yuri. Instead, she can single-handedly tip the scales of power in her new fantasy world. Whoever controls her also controls the… Sky Demon? Shrug, whatever that is. As a result, we see various factions rush to Noriko’s initial location, hoping to acquire the invaluable game piece. Unfortunately for them, hot guy Izark got to her first. Womp womp.

As boring and cookie-cutter as the premise is, I hope this show ends up having better pacing than Red River. I also hope Noriko being an Awakened means she’ll one day have powers of her own or whatever. It drove me up the wall that Yuri kept getting kidnapped. She was literally nothing but a damsel-in-distress in half of Red River‘s episodes. I’m not going to get my hopes up for Noriko, though. At least the animation looks slightly better?