Lucas


Sylvia, our Executive Editor Extraordinaire Lynzee is taking a much-deserved break this week now that we’re on the other side of the busiest three weeks in anime for the year, the overlapping Anime Expo weekend and the beginning of summer seasonal premieres! Which means that you and I can finally give a certain class of internet commenter what they’ve always wanted: our unfiltered opinions on this season’s isekai without any influence from ANN’s editorial team and their anti-isekai agenda!

Is what I would say if I were a conspiracy theorist with an axe to grind. However, the folks running this anime website have always given us a lot of rope in this column, and this season’s isekai offerings largely skew from strange-but-middling to bad if not outright offensive. Still, I’d love to go through our quarterly isekai roundup with you, and maybe get a little extra spicy now that there’s one fewer editor behind the desk to review this column before it goes live!

You know, Sylvia, maybe we did our column on anime moms too early! I’m sure if we had waited just a couple of months, the mom from From Overshadowed to Overpowered: Second Reincarnation of a Talentless Sage who’s introduced boobs first would have completely reframed that conversation.

A take on the “New Game+” sub-genre of male power fantasy isekai, Overshadowed to Overpowered is a really weird and whiny show, where the MC complains constantly about not being as good at magic as his peers, despite being celebrated as one of the four best magic users in his era. Maybe his tune will change when he’s reborn 400 years into the future when people suck at magic, but would this work even still be considered an isekai if the same-face protag-kun didn’t have a wholly unnecessary chip on his shoulder???

Sylvia, please, you’re not giving Overshadowed to Overpowered enough credit! These characters contain multitudes! After all, the MC’s cute surrogate demon daughter isn’t just his daughter; she’s ALSO on track to be a Big Sister type love interest after he reincarnates! Unless, of course, this MC ends up with the barely clothed girl he rescued from slavery! What riveting, original, definitely not scummy content!!!

But yes, studio EMT Squared can put as many layers of polish on Overshadowed to Overpowered as they want, but its flaws are too prominent to ever be overlooked.

He wears this suit in the second episode as well, and I’m beginning to think he’s hogging all the fabric in this fantasy world to keep it intact! After all, what other explanation could there be for supporting characters that are implied to be hardened warriors walking around in fantasy crop tops???

Also, why is there just a regular-ass couch in this video game fantasy world!!? Rearguard is so confused in its worldbuilding and execution that I’m genuinely surprised it made it to air.

To push that metaphor even further, to me Tomb Raider King screams “Solo Leveling but with a couple of changes so the TA doesn’t catch that you copied someone else’s work.”

There is just SO MUCH wrong with Tomb Raider King that I genuinely struggle to find a place to start. The MC does nothing endearing in the first few episodes and I have no desire to want to watch him succeed, there’s a plot hole in him traveling back in time and his apartment being swallowed up by a dungeon tomb that I guess he forgot appeared, and his first real fight after reincarnating has him fighting a giant CGI snake monster…after an almost visually identical giant CGI snake monster killed him in the first episode.

At my most charitable, I’ll say that there might be a hook in these tombs utilizing different fables across cultures in their challenges, but why would I ever put up with this edgelord nonsense when I can a far more entertaining application of these kinds of cultural ideas in works like Hunter x Hunter and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure?

Oh god, I think I need a palate cleanser after talking this much about Tomb Raider King. Thankfully, The Forsaken Saintess and Her Foodie Roadtrip in Another World feat. Dante from Devil May Cry is fun at least!

Sure, it continues the annoying trend of adding “-ess” to a gender neutral title to denote femininity, but otherwise it’s a pretty fun, dumb watch that focuses on a twenty-something going on a camping road trip in a fantasy world after immediately failing out of her role as a summoned hero. I don’t know if I’d ever watch this if it wasn’t assigned to me as a part of this column, but I at least liked it more than I thought I would!

Not to mention that it’s making a STRONG case for having the cutest ED animation of the season! Yeah, Foodie isn’t, like, “good,” but it definitely gets brownie points for not having immediately heinous social politics.

While I do agree that this one definitely maid a better first impression in its opening episodes than just about everything else we’re going to talk about tonight, All-Works Maid is so frustratingly close to being good that I think I have stronger negative feelings about it than most of these other anime!

A reincarnated gifted-and-talented kid choosing to follow her special interest and become a maid rather than the destined hero is such a good premise with the capacity to offer commentary on what kinds of labor are valorized by society, destined hero myths, and the tension between labor as fulfillment vs exploitation; that I can’t help but be upset when, at every opportunity to express something interesting, All-Works Maid instead choses to double down on being a parody isekai! All the pieces for a great show are here, and I’m so upset that there isn’t even an effort to put them together.

There’s also some capacity for some GL shenanigans to take place in All-Works Maid, and I’ll gladly take a kinder stance on this cozy watch if it transforms into a queer cozy watch!

Especially considering that the isekai (and romcom) with the highest production values from this season, Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life, is AGGRESSIVELY heterosexual, much to the dismay of the reincarnated demon lord and reincarnated hero who are sipped together by everyone around them despite being teacher and student (ew).

Yes! This is one of those rare-ish isekai/romcom genre hybrids that gets to appear in both of these seasonal round-up columns! While you and Chris did a great job covering all of the highs and lows of this show last week, the two cents I’ll add is that I’m probably setting myself up for failure by watching the English dub of this anime.

While I appreciate that every cast member is giving it their all, the localization uses “internet words” extremely liberally and, as a result, every character sounds like they’ve been building up their Reddit karma since 2013 (when the clearly influential here Devil is a Part-Timer came out), and this choice is actively distracting. Normally, I love when anime incorporate current slang into localizations to give them a more temporal quality, but in this case, it instead feels like this show was made by and for internet denizens.

Regrettably, I still have a conflict of interest that prevents me from voicing my opinion on The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System publicly, but I’ve been informed that a woman with a yandere vibe shows up at some point. That’s neat! I hope she and the jester girl get along!

Also, how about that hair! That’s certainly one way to depict hair in an anime!

I will say I’ve seen worse-looking horses in anime! However, if we’re going to focus on any isekai woman in this column, it should probably be Yuri Suzuki from the 90s shojo isekai Red River, which now has an anime!

Do the first couple of episodes of Red River make a great first impression? Not exactly…but it’s still neat that we’re getting a Red River anime in the year of our lord 2026!

Agreed, though for me it’s more the early narrative beats that frustrate me. I know that Yuri has a whole hero’s journey arc ahead of her, but did both the first and second episodes need to include Yuri nearly dying, lamenting not being able to see her family anymore, only for her to be saved at the last minute by a nearby man? I understand this was written in the 90s and should be graded on an appropriate scale, but it’s really hard for me to watch a woman be so passive in her own story in 2026.

Hey, if hitting the bottom of the isekai well means that the genre somehow reverts back into historical fiction and a means to empower women, I’m all for running this well dry!

And with that, I believe the only new isekai of the season we have to talk about is Thunder 3, which I am once again not able to comment on too extensively. Though, do I wish I could! A lot is happening in this title, and I have so much insider info that I wish I could share!

I actually sat in on a bunch of interviews over Anime Expo weekend where Thunder 3‘s director spoke to how they pulled off this overlapping art style, and I can’t wait for those pieces to go live! This is such a specific work, and I’m so curious to see how it lands!

And I think that takes us to the end of all of the new isekai for the season! Are there any returning titles that you want to comment on? For instance, I’m always down to remind people that effective worldbuilding does not absolve Jobless Reincarnation of its repeated efforts to normalize pedophilia!

Sylvia, I am a sucker for a good “politics of the court” drama, and I would love a good Freaky Friday spin on that genre! While the first two episodes of Inept Villainess are a bit expedited in their resolutions and characterizations, by the end of them, there are a lot of interesting pieces on the board, and I’m very curious about how the players involved manipulate them to their advantage!

Or, you know, if Reirin can best girl her way out of the (so far unearned and unexplained imo) prejudice directed at the body she now inhabits!

You’re right, Sylvia! Lynzee left us with the keys to this place, and I think she would want us to hype up works like Goodbye, Lara! Similarly, I’m sure she would want us to talk about anime like Chainsmoker Cat and the new Ghost in the Shell anime, which transport me, the viewer, to worlds where catgirls and weed and robot lesbians exist respectively.