{Atuhor's Nose: This was supposed to go up yesterday but I forgor <:3 Note that the original posting date on the submission version later on will reflect this.}


Here's the deal: There's this guy named Ryota Sato, he's from Japan, he gets overworked to death and reincarnates into a generic RPG fantasy world with stat windows and crap, and then he meets a chipper girl named Emily Brown who's got low stats. Ryota's vital stats are low too, and his level is capped at 1, but he's got S-rank drop stats, which means monsters give him a lot of stuff. Some of that stuff helps him get stronger vital stats, which means that Ryota, in essence, is overpowered even though he's stuck at Level 1.

There, I just explained in three sentences what My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 takes an entire episode to cover, and I saved you a precious 23 minutes of your life to boot. Go forth now, and use that liberated time to explore nature, spend time with your loved ones, try out a new recipe, catch up on your favourite video game you've neglected for awhile, or even just watch a better show than this one. Almost any show will do, provided you avoid keywords like "skill", "level", "reborn", "overpowered", and so on. You're welcome in advance.

I'll save you the spiel, this is another bland, poorly produced batch of near-identical isekai filler. It looks bad animation-wise, the characters have little to no personality outside of explaining things to the protagonist, and the setting is more boring "video game mechanics and UIs taken 100% literally" bullshit, complete with goddamn stat screens. So instead of harping on all the same shit, I want to use this part of the review to talk about how goddamn mortifying the thematic message of this series is. Characters dying from overwork only to be reincarnated into video game worlds where they can make it through life on NG+ Easy Mode is a standard of the subgenre and often part of the explicit appeal. These are ostensibly escapist stories for the many disillusioned working adults who want something simple and indulgent for their entertainment, where they can imagine themselves going on adventures, meeting improbably sexy girls, and briefly forget about the dehumanizing drudgery of an exploitative, thankless workplace. I can sympathize with that much, even if this particular escapism feels increasingly hollow and patronizing.

However, there comes a point where these stories become so blatant about that message that it becomes morbid, and this one crosses that line. It's all well and good that Ryota is happy to finally have a life where his effort pays off and he has people to share his good fortune with, but watching him sob into a young girl's chest while she comforts him by saying that this new afterlife is his reward for working so hard... That just made me feel sick. Perhaps unintentionally, it was the only moment of this show that felt sincerely, intensely depressing. Is the message here really that if you struggle for long enough at a soul-draining, hope-destroying job with no chance for anything better, you'll be richly rewarded in the otaku afterlife once you drop dead from overwork or, God forbid, speed the process along, if you catch my drift? Jesus, that's grim. I hope that's just an accident of poor writing, because if it's intentional, it makes this show distressing to sit through. And really, there's something VERY telling about the fact that overworking to the point of death has become an often-used trope in isekai stories. I mean, what greater condemnation of modern Japanese society can there be than the idea that doing constant hard, manual labour in a fantasy world, often with your life on the line, is not only the better option, but a literal escapist fantasy? Some of the show's more comforting aspects are swinging for a Helpful Fox Senko-san vibe, but then it swerves straight into borderline propaganda territory, seemingly positing that the people who come home from their horrible dead-end jobs to watch anime should keep working harder with the prospect of an RPG-themed overpowered reincarnation as a reward. It's like an exploitative religion if the heaven they were promising was just repeatedly killing Leaf Rabbits in the fields outside Narshe for eternity.

Ryota is clearly still suffering from his past life. Having a proper, hot meal with another person is such a novelty to him that it causes him to break down and cry. Then, to repay Emily for her kindness, he decides to find her a house and pay the rent for her indefinitely so she doesn't have to keep camping out in the dungeon. This is how much having someone listen to his woes means to him. Unfortunately, while his heart is in the right place, he's so conditioned by his past life that he falls into old patterns, overworking himself massively for Emily's sake, despite her never asking for nor expecting any kind of repayment.

But while the character work for Ryota is above average and makes me genuinely feel for him, the same can't be said for the rest of the cast. We know next to nothing about anyone else who shows up, including Emily, who Ryota is literally living with before the end of the episode. The remaining focus is just introducing us to the world, its levelling system and how Ryota's cheat skill works.

There's also something particularly unsettling about how the female characters have been written that goes hand-in-hand with the frictionless writing. Emily instantly and eagerly starts waiting on Ryota the moment she moves into their new house, like they're in a prettied-up fantasy version of one of those "free room for pretty girls" Craigslist ads. I know these shows are primarily wish fulfillment for a generation of men who feel they've been left out of a narrative of economic and familial security that may have always been a fantasy in the first place, but they aren't all so brazen about it. The way Erza Monsoon, the receptionist at the guild hall, tries to ask him out makes me think of how particularly stupid, mediocre guys assume service workers are flirting with them when they're just trying to do their jobs. Then there's Eve Callusleader, a girl in a Playboy bunny suit who bops him on the head in a cheaply-animated, zero-impact way for being low-level, and then shows up at his door and professes her love out of fucking nowhere. True, they're not slaves or falsely accusing him of rape, but they still feel like more insidious versions of how some men see women as prizes to be won rather than human beings trying to navigate the world in their own ways.

So yeah, Ryota's harem is already building up. If the opening theme is to be believed, more girls will keep being introduced. Ryota and Emily have a nice enough relationship, I suppose. That he gets her a house as a repayment for giving him a hot meal is a little over the top, but that seems in line with what we know about his personality so far. Regretfully, none of this is interesting enough to make this easy to pay attention to, and the visuals are sterile and lackluster, particularly the dungeons. Even if you're into this brand of isekai, this should only be your last resort. Its jokes about no one being able to pronounce Ryota's incredibly simple name for some reaon and a dungeon that only Japanese people can benefit from (seriously, it's the "Nihonium" dungeon) are nowhere near enough to prop this up.

There's really a lot of wasted potential here. The story of a guy who can get rare drops but never level up could make for a creative story. As he'd be unable to kill monsters alone, it could be centered around his social interactions and how he works to find a group of people who'll work with him and not exploit him. Of course, in this story, he just finds a magic seed that lets him upgrade his stats directly, which means he does level up for all intents and purposes but in a different way than most. Thus the majority of the inherent dilemmas and drama are stripped away instantly.

The idea of a world where literally everything comes from dungeons is insane, by the way. People with high drop rates for plants replace farmers. Those with high drop rates for weapons replace smiths. Basically, all jobs outside the dungeon would be the infrastructure for those going into it. Fully exploring this thought experiment would honestly make for an interesting fantasy story. What kind of government would arise in such a world, and what kind of culture, art and religion? And since everything comes from the dungeons, how would technology advance, or would it at all? Then, on the isekai front, you could look at what would happen if someone from our world taught people how to farm, breaking the dungeon-industrial complex's stranglehold on the agricultural economy in the process. It's a playground for ideas. It's just unfortunate that it's used in this anime as nothing more than a single passing line to explain why slimes drop bean sprouts.

While Ryota is a slight step above many isekai protagonists, the rest of the show is not, to the point that I couldn't help but think about how some of the ideas in it could benefit from being explored correctly in a more cleverly written story. So it should go without saying, but overall, this is one I won't be picking up this season.