Trapped in trapped in fantasy anime

There are three trapped in fantasyland anime series this season: a boring one, a goofy one with mecha and an actually interesting one.

Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni: every screenshot of this is dull

The boring one is Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni, which I talked about before after having watched the first episode. Seven episodes later, it is still as bland and predictable as it started. Every episode some challenge or problem is solved almost immediately, without any tension, while every other episode or so another girl is added to the harem through some random kindness on protag-kun’s part. At one point in an early episode, he and his starter’s harem were escorting some merchant or other and ran into a bandit ambush. But it was okay, because his smart phone could detect them all through “GPS” and then he sent his sleepy time magic through the phone to knock them out. Dude’s so ridiculously overpowered his phone is just a prop, so nothing is a challenge and he keeps getting rewarded for stupid shit, to then teach his harem to ride a bicycle, as in the last episode.

It’s all pure wishfulfilment, but without any tension or danger whatsoever, yet it’s stupidly popular, if we can believe Crunchyroll. Perhaps, like me, everybody else is using it as a soporific too, moving wallpaper to be mildly diverted by while doing something more interesting? Certainly puts in context the over the top criticisms of Sword Art Online, which if bad, despite its many restaurant infodump scenes, was never anywhere near as dull as this.

Knights & Magic: mecha fan gets to design magical giant robots

The goofy one is Knight’s & Magic, dodgy spelling and all. A salaryman Gundam fan and plastic model builder is reincarnated into a fantasy world courtesy of Truck-kun, then discovers it has magical mecha. He starts training magic at five or something stupid, discovers his past life’s programming experience comes in handy, enrolls in magic school and becomes infamous as a (wannabe) Silhouette Knight designer. All his Gundam/giant robot fanboy knowledge coming in handy for inspiration for increasingly overpowered designs. The first two episodes were a bit of a mess as it skipped/abridged a lot of the source material to move quickly beyond the magic school setting into more serious stuff, but it has settled down quickly as a light hearted adventure series. The whole past life angle is more or less superfluous at this point, but the protagonist is likeable, there’s no harem, just a childhood friend who likes to use him as her hug pillow and the series doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Isekai Shokudou: dwarves like good food too

The actually good isekai series is Isekai Shokudou, in which a Tokyo restaurant has a magic door that opens on a fantasy world once every seven days, for various fantasy types to stumble across and orgasm at its food. It’s a reasonably well done fusion of the isekai and foodgasm genres, with each episode having two short stories about one of the customers coming to visit the restaurant. It’s not just cute elf girls or fairy princesses either; the latest episode has two dwarves visiting for fried fish, beer and whisky. It’s this mixture that keeps the series fresh. Apart from that, it also does what any food based series should do: make you hungry.

Trapped in fantasyland/isekai series have been coming out at a regular clip ever since Sword Art Online, but three in a season is a bit much. Especially when none of them are anywhere near as good as frex KonoSuba was. There really is no need for such low grade fodder as Smartphone.

Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni — First Impression

Quick, who ordered the season of utterly generic trapped in fantasyland anime?

Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni: bland

Look at this dude, just look at him. Black hair, bland face, even more bland personality. Is there a more generic protagonist imaginable? Even his clothing, freshly bought in the fantasy world he reincarnated in, looks like a school uniform. Anime viewers may complain about all the Isekai/Trapped in Fantasyland series we’ve gotten the past few years, but the reality is that series like Grimgar, KonoSuba, Re:Zero and even much maligned Swords Arts Online are the cream of the crop. The other ninety percent as covered by Sturgeon’s Law, the series that don’t make it out of the light novel or manga series it started in, is much more like this. Bland, generic and lacking even the bite that SAO did deliver.

Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni: no challenge

I’ve read so many of these series and they’re all exactly like this one. Some hapless fool (always a dude, almost never a girl) gets killed in some sort of accident, God or a reasonable fascimile takes pity on him and reincarnates him in some fantasy world, complete with some god level crack cheat to make up for his troubles. Sometimes he gets to redo his life the hard way, starting from scratch as a baby (as in this season’s Knight’s & Magic (sic)), but usually he’s dumped straight into the world as he was. At any rate, we then get to spent some chapters with him exploring just exactly what his cheat power is, as well as figuring out the inevitable game like status menu, while our protagonist also rescues or encounters the first of what will turn out to be a long line of damsels in distress who end up falling for him. In the process legions of low level fantasy monster scrubs are wasted, as well as the occassional human bully. Once the hero and the damsel reach civilisation, the next step is for him to register with the adventurers guild, so he can spent the rest of the story doing quests for which he is once again ridiculously overpowered. There may or may not be some demon lord lurking in the background, but even if there is, there’ll be dozens of chapters of protagonist-kun just puttering around having not particularly interesting adventures and gathering a harem of various archetypical fantasy girls. Important is that the hero is never actually challenged or in any real danger.

And that’s what you’re getting here. Combined with less than stellar animation, there’s literally nothing here that’s interesting or not generic. It’s so generic that it becomes interesting agai– naah, not really.