Anime

Jitsu Wa Ore, Saikyou Deshita is your isekai comfort food of the season.

Our hero is the dude on the couch, playing what looks remarkably like a Switch despite having reincarnated in your typical medievaloid fantasy world. The blonde girl in the mahou shoujou costume is his sister, who he accidentally taught about the wonders of anime. The red haired wolf maid is a monster girl who tried to eat him at first when he was abandoned in a forest by his real parents. He wants nothing more than to recreate the NEET lifestyle he had before he died and was reincarnated; his little sister wants him to be a hero of justice like in her shows. But all that is for later. In this episode all we saw was him getting reincarnated as a baby and what happened when it turned out he only had a magical potential of …2.

In true isekai anime fashion he is of course actually so overpowered that the usual magic measuring methods cannot handle it and of course he is also incredibly creative with how he handles his magic, making him the strongest in the world. Luckily his new family just want him for who he is, not how strong he is.

I read the manga version of this and the anime is a huge upgrade, art wise. This will very much be a chill, low stakes series, with little to none of the more unsavoury aspects of isekai series: no slavery, no harem, not that much fan service in general. Comfort food.

Hey, remember that romcom series a few years ago? The one about the smaller than normal Japanese office lady and her annoying, much bigger & taller senpai? Well, what if we twisted it around and made the senpai the shorter than usual office lady and her kouhai the tall guy? Wouldn’t that be hilarious?

To be fair, the two protagonists in Uchi No Kaisha No Chiisai Senpai No Hanashi are not nearly as extreme as the couple from Senpai ga Uzai Kōhai no Hanashi. Shinozaki is maybe a bit taller than the average Japanese dude, but not that much, nor is Shiori that much shorter than most Japanese women. It’s all a bit normal and that’s the problem. Everything about this series is just …normal. Shinozaki is a bit in love with his senpai and has the occassional fantasy about her. She mentions her shoulders are stiff and she could use a massage and in his mind it becomes an erotic scene, complete with the usual porn music. That sort of thing. Tediously predictable and completely unfunny. As are the scenes in which Shiori acts a bit airheaded and he catches her at it. Everything she says comes out in the same tone, which means these just don’t work. You never get the impression she really is embarassed when it’s the same tone she uses when she’s teasing him.

It’s all a bit meh, including the animation and character design. After all the amazing romcoms of last season, this is a disappointment.

It’s good to see that the most important element of the Ryza no Atelier games has been kept:

I think I recognise this first episode as basically the game’s tutorial mission, from when Kiara streamed it a few years ago. A good idea to get all the setup out of the way, even if it did take a double length episode to do so. The plot so far is simple. Ryza is a farmer’s daughter with no interest in taking up the family farm. She has two friends, Lent, a muscular himbo and Tao, a weedy bespectacled book worm. She drags them into an adventure leaving their home island to explore the mainland, something that’s taboo and end up rescuing a visiting merchant’s daughter before being rescued themselves by the merchant’s ad-hoc bodyguards. One of which turns out an alchemist, which leaves a deep impression on Ryza and by the end of the episode all three friends have become the duo’s apprentices.

The story is okay, the animation is decent and there’s a lot of emphasis on Ryza’s thighs and other physical attributes. This is an adaptation that knows why people played this game. It is somewhat equal opportunity fan service however. The first shot we see of Lent is also focused entirely on his waist, penis bones and all. I liked this first episode but do hope they tone down the fan service a tad.

One of the hidden strengths of anime are its backgrounds and how just a simple shot can convey a setting or mood. Case in point, this shot from episode ten of Yamada-Kun To Lv999 No Koi Wo Suru:

This perfectly captures the feel of the city late at night. Darkness only broken by the artifical lights of the lamp posts, passing cars and shop windows. There are still plenty of people out, but they’re all on their way somewhere, nobody’s just hanging about. You can tell that the day’s heat hasn’t dissipated yet. No need for clock or caption to show what time this takes place. All of it shows just how odd it was for Yamada to show up at Akane’s apartment that night because he was worried for her. It immediately lends an intensity to the episode in a way that your average ‘your crush cares for you as you’re home alone sick with the flu’ just doesn’t have. The scene later in the episode, where he has to take her to the hospital in a taxi? I’ve been there.

An almost diametrically opposite mood is set in this scene from the same week’s Skip to Loafer episode, nine. It’s the Summer holidays and Mitsumi is back with her family, gotten out of bed late on her second day staying there, just munching on some water melon and letting her thoughts drift. As she eats her melon, she idly looks at her mother doing the dishes, before looking out of the window. There follows a series of landscape shots, with only the sound of her eating the melon for company. Again, it perfectly sets the mood. Haven’t we all had those moments of laziness, slowly waking up when you know there’s nothing that you need to do but relax?