Despite all the hate it rightfully received, I really enjoyed the first season of In Another World with My Smartphone. The English dub of the first season brought self-awareness to the characters, injecting humor into an otherwise insipid storyline. This season, that spark of life from the English voice actors is sorely absent. Everyone goes through the motions, counting the days until their paycheck arrives. Season 2 is purely an abysmal descent into the depths of mediocrity, doubling down on the repulsive misogyny and complete lack of creativity of its predecessor. The episodes are a disgraceful showcase of women reduced to objects. To start,we should get the animation out of the way—or should I say, the absence of it? Instead of breathing life into the action, they serve up mind-numbing still shots that make a snail’s pace look like a Formula 1 race. Who needs fluidity when you can have a slideshow of stagnant scenery? And the art? It’s a mishmash of confusion and chaos. Character designs morph into distorted monstrosities, mocking artistic coherence. You’ll play guess-the-character as they transform into unrecognizable blobs before your eyes.
But hold on, we can’t overlook the anime’s defining trait—the abominable off-model faces. When our forgettable protagonist Touya and his harem dare to look sideways or tilt their heads, brace yourself for a roller coaster ride of contorted faces. Their faces twist and warp into grotesque abominations giving the impression that the animators were overworked to exhaustion. As if character designs were inspired by a deranged dadaist.
The compositing is equally inept when the characters use their invisibility power. Instead of employing subtle visual cues to convey their appearance, the artists opted for a shockingly horrific eyesore. The resulting effect is a jarring combination of poor color grading, sloppy filters, and clashing layers. The characters appear hastily glued onto the scene, disregarding proper lighting or integration.
Now, let's summarize the story—equal parts mind-numbingly dull and painfully predictable. In this pitiful season, we witness Touya’s shameless pursuit of multiple engagements, and his harem of indistinguishable girls expands. The show stumbles through a series of contrived scenarios, presenting forgettable female characters solely to satisfy our protagonist’s romantic interests. Along the way, we witness coerced relationships, absurdly imbalanced power dynamics, and endless sexualization, all woven together in a quilt of tastelessness. The only time he rejects a girl is when a child flirts with him. Her father offers her hand in marriage, but Touya respectfully says, "Wait until I AM eighteen."
This season fails to rise above the misogyny cesspool established by its predecessors. It revels in reducing women to objects of desire, forsaking originality, and engaging storytelling. The abomination continues with episodes that range from cringe-worthy to appalling. We witness the main characters frolicking in a hot spring, girls non-consensually kissing Touya, and fanservice while dismissing any semblance of storytelling or character development. The plot introduces female slaves, miraculously transforming them into “employees” for our esteemed hero. What a good guy! And let’s not forget the fascination with Yaoi-themed books because nothing says respect for women like reducing them to fetish objects.
And what about humor? Prepare yourself for a tidal wave of juvenile jokes and stale innuendos, the sort that make middle schoolers laugh. The writer’s misguided comedy attempts only amplify the show’s overall pitiful quality and reinforce its grim treatment of women.
Political intrigue in Smartphone, or so it's meant to be, dissolves into a mishmash of forced engagements and the protagonist’s relentless pursuit of romantic conquests. The show’s obsession with accumulating wives and establishing kingdoms reaches nauseating heights. This reaffirms its status as a prime example of the harem genre at its most repugnant. The plot, if it can even be called that, lingers in a wasteland of predictability and worn-out tropes. The dialogue is contrived, lacking depth or meaningful exchanges. Instead, we’re subjected to endless vacuous relationships centered solely on gratifying the self-insert protagonist’s ego.
In Another World With My Smartphone’s second season is a seething pile of excrement. Its abhorrent misogyny, creative bankruptcy, and absence of character development make for a hilariously awful twelve episodes. Protect yourself from this animated accident and seek out a series that treats women with a modicum of respect, subverts stereotypes, and offers an engaging story worth your time.
Mixed Feelings
Tension is, supposedly anyway, the result of creating conflict in a story, and no story is complete without at least some of it. There are of course numerous ways to execute these ideas, and there is no singular “tried-and-true” method that applies to all stories. But *In Another World with My Smartphone* season two opts to try a daring experiment – create a show in which any sense of tension is thrown out the window almost entirely, where plots that have the capacity to shape the face of a nation are resolved within twenty-three minutes at a time, and the guy always gets the girl.Perhaps this could be thought of as the power fantasy’s final form, having ascended to a new plane of transcendent understanding after six years of dormancy that our “critically-minded brains” could never dream to comprehend.
Or, maybe it’s just woefully inept storytelling. Either or, really.
Truth be told, I’m not going to waste my time (nor yours, for that matter) trying to convince you to try watching this franchise if you haven’t already done so. If its sense of stupidity built into the premise is not for you, nothing the show offers will change that. Visually, the show does not dazzle, either in regards to its standard animation presentation or its effects. While it might have a good character design or two interjected somewhere, there’s not much to grab the eye, which is to say nothing of its lackluster music that doesn’t escape beyond the blasé.
As such, this show—and this season especially—are a thing that one actively seeks out when you know precisely what it is you’re getting into, and do not care in the slightest about the faults within it that you acknowledge are right there in front of your eyes. In some realm of your anime-viewing mind, Touya inventing ice cream in this new fantasy world and breaking familiars by causing them to constantly trip and fall amused you. Yumina’s enthusiasm at Touya having his own harem of wives, the unusually-horny gynoid Francesca, and boob jokes ruled the roost and had you chuckling more than you’d ever care to publicly admit. The second season does not disappoint in this respect. Everything that made the first season tick or fall completely flat, depending on who you ask, is alive and well here. The series therefore offers no tension, and as a result, no illusions about offering surprises beyond dime store gags. When it seems like something will come along to provide a shock to the system or status quo by turning it upside-down, the anime snaps itself right-side up again lickety-split, all without breaking a sweat.
There’s something to be said for *In Another World with My Smartphone* delivering precisely what its audience wants, even if it results in a product that could be called “by-the-numbers” at-best and “creatively bankrupt” at-worst. There is indeed a function for anime’s indulgences in junk food, and much like the endless sea of snacks in a supermarket aisle, everyone has the flavor that they flock to in order to get their fix. So, when Touya spontaneously creates a public bathhouse in the span of about ten seconds, finds out that there’s a substantial request for yaoi fiction in-universe, or doesn’t need to worry about jealousy because his future wives are so excited to add another to their group, it’s a feature of the show rather than a bug. It is not aspiring to be anything more than an excuse to indulge in silliness for a half-hour every week. It will never enshrine itself in the annals of anime fantasy, but if a third season is on the horizon, I’ll do exactly what I did with my friends – happily answer any question about the show’s paper-thin lore like an eager fool, enjoying my own gluttonousness while I get bewildered looks.
Just remember one thing – *In Another World with My Smartphone* got a second TV season, while others like *No Game No Life* and *Deadman Wonderland* never got theirs. The industry has perhaps never pulled a funnier cosmic joke.
Not Recommended
The guilty pleasure of Isekai trash is back! Boy, oh boy, would I have never entertained the thought to see Isekai Smartphone make a return after almost 6 years since Season 1, which while everybody complained that Isekai has reached peak mediocrity at the time in 2017, I find myself quite enjoying the show. In the post-era where Re:Zero reignited the fuel the year before that more than it exploding in popularity almost overnight, the anime industry has earned a cash-cow in the process that would proceed to slowly decimate the quality that we've come to expect from the seasonal Isekai trash, with only 1 or2 shows out of the many others that stand out in the best of ways.
Literally, NOTHING has changed since Season 1 all those years ago, maybe except for the long-awaited reveal of the supposed side character Ende, as well as the harem king of Touya Mochizuki winning the hearts of the same group of girls and even more to become his wives in the process. A chad, Touya is not. I'd thought that the girls would have more power as compared to Season 1 when they were just walking tropes onto a literate human "god" in the process, and indeed they have gotten stronger, it's just that the love is accepted as one whole heart of a family instead of polygamy, which they are totally fine with. The smartphone gimmick is still there, sadly, though it seems to have found more use this time because of more dastardly attacks ranging from the Phrase monsters to literate kingdoms having in-fighting against each other. And that's all I can say from a sequel that more often than not, surprises and shocks people with its resurrection from the perils of time, but for what reason it did justify that, I cannot tell you why.
Rather than the kind of perfect pacing of the first 3 volumes of Patora Fuyuhara's now infamous LN, this adaptation, led by the now recent rom-com director Yoshiaki Iwasaki, has proven that rom-com source materials can flourish under his belt, with the caveat that this all comes at the sacrifice of quality. Mainly, the anime rushed through the remainder of Volumes 3 to 7 of the LN; almost the entirety of the staff refresh from the prequel is gone and replaced with new people, and the drop in quality in the animation department since Production Reed (now Ashi Productions) is replaced by J.C.Staff (with ENGI as production assistance), not like Isekai Smartphone had any big reputation to begin with.
The music, however, is a noticeable downgrade this time as the idol group AŌP has disbanded since 2021, and the remainder of the once prolific group (along with Hio Sano) comes back to perform Season 2's OP, it's just not as good as Season 1 is. However, I am glad that the ED returned to the character-focused song (which is as enjoyable as Season 1) that's just one song made into different versions with the various VAs attached, although you don't get 6 versions of Season 1's ED this time and have to settle for the 3×3 grouping version instead with Season 2 here.
But seriously, if you ask me: "Is there ANY merit to even watch Isekai Smartphone nowadays?" to which I'll answer: "Nope. Isekai Smartphone was fun back then, when the criticism didn't amount to the social media backlash and cancel culture of today. But as of today, it's a shell of its former self, despite being an obvious follow-up as one of the most hated Isekai works seen over the last few years."
If you ABSOLUTELY have to watch Isekai Smartphone, be my guest, because I'll actually recommend Season 1 over the sequel, which is just bland and serves nothing new in its slate. Otherwise, be on your way, there are other shows that can fill up your time better than this trash.
