Recommended
tl;dr I cared way too much when writing this review, and it’s really fucking long. However, you probably won’t find a more comprehensive and personalized breakdown of Mushoku Tensei anywhere on this website. The whole time I was working on it, I kept screaming to myself, “This is fucking stupid! No one’s ever gonna read this!” So hopefully you prove me wrong, and I didn’t do this all for nothing. I finally figured out why I was wrong about this show, why it’s actually good, and why my prior complaints were foolish. My reviews where I come across like a snobbish attention whore are where Imost often find success, but whenever I actually care and put genuine attentiveness into my reviews, no one reads them, so since I’m too jaded to think this time will be any different, I’m not going to feel bad about going into meticulous subjective detail and writing something WAY overly verbose. I was actually going to write a review for part one back in March, but by the time I got to episode eight, I had no idea how I felt about the series, and I actually ended up dropping it. Saying, “I got to episode eight,” though, is kind of a stretch, since I had spent the last three of those episodes falling asleep, getting drunk, or fucking around on my phone or something because I was so bored, but if for no other reason than the appreciation I had for its astounding production quality, I decided to give it another shot. Instead of picking back up where I left off, I figured I had zoned out way too much when I originally tried to watch it, and should therefore restart from episode one and actually pay attention. I can usually tell just by looking at the studio, source material, and staff list whether or not an anime I’m about to watch is worth my respect, which for me means no alcohol and no speed-watching, but this show was the first time my intuition ever missed the mark. The only person or entity involved with this project I had ever heard of was the composer, Yoshiaki Fujisawa, and while his music is incredible, that wasn’t enough reason for me to take seriously something which looked like bland copy/pasted isekai trash…which I guess is my excuse for judging this book by its cover, but when I gave it a second chance, there were many moments which stuck out to me which didn’t before. To explain why, let me first explain what I originally liked and originally disliked about the series. I absolutely loved the first four episodes of Mushoku Tensei, because they had gorgeous animation, gorgeous colors, gorgeous backgrounds, and gorgeous character designs, but because most of all, they were uncharacteristically well-written not only for an isekai, but for a light novel adaption in general. Good writing is hard to complement not only because 30% of the community understands what “good writing” even is, but because 99.9% of the remaining 70% don’t care to learn—let alone admit they need to.
I could gush endlessly about the genius and hilarity of episode four, and don’t be sure I won’t somewhere in this review, but for now I think the perfect example to make my point is this scene in episode eight where Eris plants herself on Rudeus’ bed like a landmine. She’s sat there in a night gown just stroking her hair awkwardly, and in his head all these red flags are going off. “What the fuck?! Why is she here? Is this a trap? Should I fuck her? What the fuck is going on?!” But when I first watched the scene, I don’t think I was really taking all of this in. I’m fluent in Japanese, so I can watch anime like a radio drama if I want to. So I was looking at my phone, and when I glanced up to look at the screen, I saw that first-person perspective shot of Rudeus breathing heavily, slowly looking down over Eris’ half-naked, hyper-sexualized, carefully shaded loli body and thought to myself, “Okay. It’s a fanservice scene. I know what’s going on.” And then went back to my phone. But on the rewatch, it quickly became one of my favorite scenes in the entire show, because the way it actually plays out is brilliant. When he comes in and tries to playfully shoo her away, teasing her with his perversion, she essentially says, “I’m here, so…you know. Do what you want with me.” And this fucking guy goes full Tomihiko Morimi. Do you remember that running gag from The Tatami Galaxy where the main character’s libido is represented by a literal voice in his head, a cowboy named Johnny—“Johnny” being a euphemism for penis—riding a bucking bronco? This scene honestly felt like that, because Rudeus, being a clumsy, horny, eager idiot with no sexual experience, fails to loosen her up or make her feel comfortable, so she kicks him off of her, goes “alright, you made it weird,” and just leaves unceremoniously. That scene is definitely loli fanservice, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also a better and more honest piece of characterization than most anime even have the writing prowess to include. That scene demonstrates that despite being a cynical, forty year old NEET failure at life who always acts like he’s too jaded to take his surroundings seriously, Rudeus can actually become a boyish, innocent virgin who’s completely at a loss when it comes to sexual tension, and it also shows us that despite always acting like a stuck-up, oujo-sama bitch who’s better and tougher than everyone around her, Eris can actually become demure, vulnerable, and emotionally honest when she’s around the guy she likes.
That scene was so brilliant in how it used a situation everyone in the audience can understand—that of clumsy, first-time sex—to instantly tear down all the characters’ false pretenses and expose them as the lovable, dorky, clueless virgins that they are and humble them to themselves, each other, and the viewer. It was immeasurably endearing, and this impeccable characterization which gives the cast so much more depth than the archetypes which I first thought they would forever embody is the number one reason why this show is so well-written. This extends far beyond just the characters, but Mushoku Tensei almost feels like it was made for the sole purpose of including tropes, only to turn around and flesh them out so comprehensively, the viewer is forced to invest despite any initial judgements of its decision to include said tropes. When Eris first showed up in episode five, I physically rolled my eyes, sighed, and completely checked out. “Oh, great. Here we go again. Another tsundere loli brat. How fucking unique is that?” But when rewatching the show and witnessing her subtle changes and growth over time, I had to take a step back and realize I was watching something which was fully prepared and able to subvert whatever expectations I may’ve had about how shallow its presentation suggested it would actually be. After all, my initial judgements regarding its generic presentation were the original source of my indifference. I hope I’m not alone on this, but I absolutely hate isekai. I hate just about every overused anime trope you can name with a fiery passion, and the second I think a show is dipping its toes into such territory, it immediately loses my respect, and if I don’t drop it, I just stop paying attention. Mushoku Tensei is an isekai, a really, really, REALLY generic isekai, and don’t try to tell me it’s not fair to call it generic because it’s the progenitor of modern isekai—as if I give a shit about the history of such a trashy genre—because while I can acknowledge the fact Mushoku Tensei is a trendsetter, and I can respect it for being a trendsetter, that doesn’t make it any less trendy, and I am so fucking bored of all these trends. This is why I originally stopped caring after episode four. The presentation was always generic, but its characterization was also always stellar, and I know I just talked at great length about how I only managed to appreciate the well-written characters on my second viewing, but that’s kind of missing the point of what I was trying to say.
You very much feel this show entirely through the lens of what has become a jaded, forty year old man, and it undoubtedly makes other characters feel like archetypes, which they sometimes are, but with the exception of Sylphie whose scant screen-time leaves her feeling like a generic soft-loli archetype, this doesn’t really become a problem until episode five. There’s moments after episode five where the in-depth writing really hits you in the face, like in episode eight when Philip offers to let Rudeus force himself onto Eris so he can enact a coup and win the succession battle between him and his brother, and you really get to see how dark his ambition truly is, but since I had already gone full bitch-mode by then, I only noticed the goodness of episodes one through four. Rudeus was not one of those handsome, young, one-dimensional, Japanese students who gets hit by a truck and finds himself in another world with a borderline sociopathic lack of attachment to his old life. He was a big, fat, unemployed, otaku NEET loser in his mid-thirties who’s emotional baggage comes along to haunt him in his new life. The first full-length scene we see of his old life is him skipping out on a relative’s funeral. Some of his family members burst into his room while he’s masturbating and are disgusted by what they see on his monitor. This is some of the most debasing, nightmarishly humiliating and degrading depictions of a protagonist I’ve ever seen portrayed in fiction, far from the generic, sanitized, uncontroversial cardboard backstories we’re usually treated to with young male anime protagonists. Then, when we actually come to the new world, we’re treated to Paul, Zenith, and Lilia. And this was clearly a very particular world the author wanted to portray. Zenith is a young woman with talent and promise who abandoned her life as an adventurer to become a mother and get happily fucked and felt-up by her perverted husband literally all day, Lilia is someone who internally admits to seducing said husband after growing unmanageably sexually frustrated hearing them fuck through the walls every night, and Paul, the main character’s literal father, is just a fuck machine. Everyone talks about this. Like, he’s fucking everybody. He fucked the beast girl, he fucked the maid, he fucks his wife, and he’s even implied to have made passes at the mother of the neighborhood bully, and I hate to break it to you here on on this pure, holy website, MyAnimeList dot net, but that’s realistic.
Since most otaku are men who are scared of real women, characters usually don’t fuck at all in anime—let alone parents and they’re doing it all the time—so I loved the boldness of this presentation, but a big issue I nevertheless had the first time I watched part one was my complete distaste for Rudeus. I know this show is controversial for reasons tangentially related to him and his exploits, and I know our contemporary culture of unmitigated narcissism and self-righteous preaching encourages people to moralize about these kinds of things, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I just genuinely didn’t like him as a character, because I thought his portrayal was dishonest. Rudeus is reborn as the most privileged person imaginable. He has two loving parents with plenty of money and connections, he’s good looking, he’s exceptionally talented at magic, and he’s surrounded by cute girls whose only initial excuse to fall in love with him is the utter depravity and maliciousness of every other male character in the series. He also retains all his memories while somehow simultaneously being a hardworking guy who's really good at decision-making and social interactions, which, to me, felt completely out of character considering his previous life. He should’ve been anti-social and lazy, right? The perversion stuff not being punished is just another extension of that, as he is conveniently reborn in a world where that's not seen as particularly offensive behavior. Again, I’m too old to care about this kind of thing triggering college kids and their need for a likable protagonist to fit their moral echo chamber, but while this may be the reason Mushoku Tensei is maligned, it’s not the reason I felt the story was flawed. I simply thought it failed as a redemption story, because Rudeus has everything given to him on a silver platter while the series seems to simultaneously play defense for his less flattering actions. It’s like the show has male characters who are perverted degenerates, but then shows their redeeming qualities as if it's an excuse saying, "See? Perverted degenerates aren't that bad. They can be really good people on the inside.” Which then makes the audience who are like him feel better about themselves. What I found to be even worse was how easily he got over his trauma. He shouldn't have so easily become fine with going outside, let alone dancing with a girl of high status in front of a crowd. The characterization in general was bold, but the development of Rudeus himself just felt lazy.
The biggest misunderstanding I had about this show is one I got over the second I began my rewatch and actually paid any attention at all, and I’ll get to that in a second (spoiler: it’s the part about being a redemption story), but by overcoming the issues I had with what I first saw as rushed, lazy character development, I actually gained a whole new level of appreciation for the series. I think I had failed to realize just how fantastical of a situation Rudeus was actually in. This is a grown man in his mid-thirties having to live MULTIPLE YEARS looking through the eyes of a baby’s body as a cognitive adult, functionally immobile and illiterate, but perfectly lucid and intelligent. Think about the mental transformation you would undergo after spending MULTIPLE YEARS with all your wordily possessions ripped away from you, trapped in a body you have little to no control over. Forget about losing his Earthly attachments, given these circumstances, if we time skipped to him as a three year old and he had become a literal Buddhist Monk at one with the universe who had completely put to rest all his past anxieties, I wouldn’t even bat an eye. Indeed, the fact he still had anxiety about going outside even after those MULTIPLE YEARS of introspection is itself a testament to how the series not only doesn’t make light of the trauma in the way I thought it did, but actually overdramatizes it to a significant degree. I’m honestly kind of embarrassed I even made that criticism in the first place, because I’m always the first person to call people out for missing details the author chooses to trust with the audience. The Sybil System in Psycho-Pass is actually a benefit to society overall, but since the show hyper-focuses on criminals who slip through the cracks, we’re presented with a warped view of how effective it really is, and Urobuchi Gen trusts the viewer to appreciate the millions of people on the streets whose lives are being actively improved by the system; Rudeus undergoes a whole process of transformation, but since the show jumps through the formative years of his new life in a few minutes, we’re presented with a warped view of how existentially agonizing such an experience would actually be, but the author trusts us to realize he’s been spending MULTIPLE YEARS fumbling around in this unnatural out-of-body experience, pining for his old life, and putting to rest his old addictions, constantly making remarks like, “I may be reborn, but I still want to play with a computer.”
As a depressed, suicidal loser who’s suffered from years of bulimia, self-harm, and alcoholism, I’m pretty familiar with what it’s like trying to drop addictions and break habits, and I think now is a good time to introduce a concept called “cold turkey.” This phrase is commonly used, but just in case you’ve never heard it before, going “cold turkey” is when you abruptly stop using an addictive substance as opposed to trying to quit by gradually lessening the amount you take/drink/do. Going cold turkey when you’re severely addicted to things like alcohol can be dangerous due to life-threatening withdrawal symptoms unfortunately for some of us (boo hoo please feel bad for me I need help), but generally speaking, anyone who knows what they’re talking about will tell you that going cold turkey is the best way to quit an addiction. It sucks at first, but if you can commit to it, you’ll empower yourself, gain resolve, and break your habits in the quickest way you can. Rudeus was literally forced to cold turkey his entire fucking lifestyle. Notice that after the initial time skips, he’s never shown to have obsessive compulsive longing for his old video games, anime, light novels, or whatever, but the second he has to spend ten seconds outdoors, he clams up. If this is failing to appreciate the severity of mental trauma, I don’t know what isn’t. It pissed me off so much that his mental hurdles were seemingly jumped over so easily after I had considered him a character whose trauma and anxiety I could actually relate to, but now I see how interpreting this as rushed character development was stupid. And while it’s true I still have social anxieties I can’t get rid of—like how I get paranoid about people walking closely behind me, or how I still can’t eat in public—so does Rudeus. Almost immediately after his big triumphant speech at the end of episode two about how he’s totally ready to go outside and be confident, he sees Sylphie getting bullied, and it sends shivers down his spine. He didn’t suddenly get over his trauma in episode two, but he was suddenly forced by Roxy to take the first step and realize it could be done. Of all the things he had to cold turkey when he was reborn, the safety and comfort of the indoors was not one of them, and training with Roxy provided him with the initial push necessary for change, just as her company provided him with the companionship necessary to brave it. As someone with no close family, friends, or even vague acquaintances, this was seriously touching.
So what about my issues with Mushoku Tensei being a misguided redemption story? Well, like I said, that one’s easy. Mushoku Tensei is quite obviously NOT a redemption story. It’s been made crystal clear to me that I’m far from the only person to give this show’s presentation of gender roles a lopsided glance, but I live in the Bible Belt, and I therefore know a lot of submissive housewives who are happy as can be spending their days at home, being mothers, pursuing no careers, and cooking for their husbands when they get home from work. Most of these women—people who I generally find to be much more at peace and fulfilled in their lives than most urban-dwelling, internet-connected individuals, myself included—have a strong distaste for the contemporary feminist movement because, to them, it seems to suggest not simply that traditionally male activities can also be undertaken by women, but that traditionally female activities shouldn’t be undertaken by anyone, as doing so would run them the risk of being deemed inferior. But this isn’t how they see it. From where they’re standing, women have the right to do whatever they want in a free country—simple as that—and if that means sticking to positions which were, in the past, promoted by a patriarchal organization of society, then that doesn’t mean they’re being taken advantage of, nor does it suggest, as is often implied these days, that they’re too servile, supine, and ignorant to choose a more “liberated” path in life. Again, my perspective on this may be a little skewed after having grown up in Texas, but the fact a nation as conservative as Japan would produce media which doesn’t share fanatical Western opposition to anything which even remotely suggests an older way of life may not be all that monstrously evil isn’t really that big of a surprise to me. And as far as the perversion and degeneracy goes, allow me to digress for a moment. Like me, my uncle is an alcoholic, but unlike me, he let his alcoholism destroy his life and devolve him into a wife-beating bum. After his wife ran out on him, he was able to coax her back with the promise that he would stay sober and get an honest job, so they remarried and moved back in together. However, over twenty years later, he still has yet to ditch the bottle or hold down a job. He doesn’t beat her anymore if you were wondering, but that’s beside the point: he never changed his initial habits and the world never punished his degenerate lifestyle. He is complete, irredeemable scum.
If your argument is you personally hate this show because its characters are disgusting people who aren’t fun to watch, then cool. That’s your opinion, and I respect it. But if your argument is a character being contemptible somehow makes them poorly written or unrealistic, then I’m afraid that’s where you’ve lost me. The problem, if anything, seems to be your thin skin and deep naiveté. Please also accept this friendly reminder that writing quality does not equal personal enjoyment. You can absolutely detest every single moral underpinning of Mushoku Tensei and still have the maturity to put yourself aside and acknowledge good writing. When I first saw episode four, I was like, “WHAT THE FUCK?! What a fucking asshole the dad is! How could they write in a bastard plot to this wholesome family show?!” But then I was like, wait a minute, this show IS fucked up and weird, and I kinda like it for that. Do I approve of Paul’s actions here? No, and Lilia seduced him. We get an inner monologue where she’s like, “I literally made this happen because I was so horny hearing them fuck through the wall every night.” And the way that scene was presented, my first instinct was to be like, “woah, that’s kinda rapey, he just walks in on her,” except we’re literally hearing from her perspective, “I did this on purpose to seduce him.” It’s constantly presenting me with daring pieces of characterization which proceed to make the characters compelling, memorable, and uniquely mature in the context of the show featuring types of people most anime don’t. Like, when Rudeus goes to live with Eris’ family, they just love bunny girls. We see her grandpa just fucking some bunny girl one day because, well, she’s a maid. Of course he’s gonna fuck her; he’s the Lord of Roa; he does what he wants; everyone’s cool with it; this is what’s known to be done. Some fiction are about morals, they’re about learning a lesson and watching role model characters, and others are not. This is very much in the later category, and you have to have the intelligence to be able to differentiate between the two. I mean, should you ever try and pull the panties off a twelve year old girl? No. Does it reflect poorly on our protagonist that he did that? Yes. But I’m an adult. I’m not looking for moral guidance from a cartoon. And maybe I shouldn’t be so blunt about this, because if a show can glean for me some valuable moral or life lesson, then great, but I can compartmentalize aspects of people and recognize the parts of them I don't like while also being interested in the story and world built upon where these flawed characters exist. I don't need the author to tell me something is bad. I can make that judgement myself, and it makes the experience that much more challenging and engaging, especially when—let’s not forget—the point of the story ISN’T moral redemption.
All I’ve done for the past decade is autopilot through life, devoting the majority of my brain capacity to fantasizing about the life I wish I was living. Ever since the whole “literally me” meme took off, I’ve always joked that Ringo from Mawaru Penguindrum is literally me, because despite our age difference, she and I are identical dumpster fires. You know when prototype planes crash, and the engineers collect their shattered pieces and reassemble the crash site in a controlled environment to examine the possible causes of failure? If you did that for the crash site that is my life, the debris would look exactly the same as Ringo at the start of that show, and unless you understand this mindset, I don’t think you’ll be able to fully appreciate Mushoku Tensei. This is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, NOT the redemption story which its critics insist it’s trying and failing to be. For those of you who need to use shitty translation tools to understand Japanese, the subtitle “Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu” may yield different results, but if you want me to localize it for you, I’d say the phrase is best translated as, “when I get isekai’d, I’ll get serious,” and the way people choose to interpret this I find highly illuminating. When people characterize this show as a redemption story, they always point to this subtitle or the end of episode one where Rudeus almost says it verbatim as proof, but I’m afraid people are misunderstanding the implications of “get serious about living.” He doesn’t mean “living” to say, “get a job, become a salaryman, be an adult, and make Abe proud,” he simply means—to quote all the lovely hate comments on my profile page—that this time around he’s going to touch grass. That’s it. He’s not saying he’s going to become a moral, upstanding member of society or whatever. He’s saying he’s going to go outside, pursue goals, and fuck bitches. Don’t ascribe to this show a noble purpose it doesn’t have, only to then criticize it for its ignobility, as its priorities are made very, very explicit. In episode four, Rudeus narrates the history of sexual deviancy between Paul and Lilia, goes on this whole laundry list of reasons why Paul is a scumbag, but then openly states he nonetheless respects and admires Paul solely because he’s a strong, buff, chick magnet: the personification of the man he always wanted to be, faults and immoralities be damned. His arc isn’t about becoming a good man. It’s about becoming the man he always wanted to be, which—yes—is not a particularly clean-cut gentleman.
Now that I’m finally done dissecting the characters and themes, I was going to jump right into gushing about what makes this series great, but I actually have a few complaints I want to get out of the way first. My complaints with the plot and presentation differ from my complaints with the characters and themes in that they’re not nearly as large, but also in that they weren’t inherently wrongheaded and therefore can’t now be excused. My issues with the plot and presentation are simply that the latter sometimes gets in the way of the former. Again, Mushoku Tensei is a really generic isekai, and while its execution is honestly amazing (and we’ll get to that here in a second), the foundation never really gets any more interesting. This would be fine, especially considering the stellar execution, but what’s annoying is the series will often include elements that play into the meta comedy way too much. There’s a lot of fanservice and ecchi shit, and I get that, half the cast is unspeakably perverted as I’ve already detailed at great length, but there’s also a lot of other pandering which, unlike the fanservice, doesn’t really follow from the setting or characters or anything. There’s small things that don’t really matter like a character in episodes sixteen and seventeen who wears a bikini for no discernible reason, but then there’s really annoying shit that takes up huge swaths of screen time like episode twenty. The entire episode is based around a joke where the antagonist is foiled by his brother coming out of nowhere and saving Rudeus in exchange for his Roxy figurine, and while this could’ve been really funny since they’d been building up Rudeus’ figurine trading monopoly since episode six, the way it was executed was just so overbearing and unfunny. Am I even describing this well? What I’m trying to say is sometimes the pandering otaku shit ruins my immersion when it doesn’t logically follow from Rudeus, a literal otaku from Japan, or something which makes sense in-universe. A good comparison would be how back in Roa, the Boreas family had an animal girl fetish. That’s an otaku thing in real life, but it works in-universe because beast people actually exist in-universe, and it makes perfect sense that some people would have such a sexual preference. It then works well as meta comedy since, again, furries actually exists in real life. However, in episode six when Eris does the nyan nyan shit out of nowhere before this fact is really established, it’s groanworthy. Do you see what I mean?
Other than that, the only other issue I could possibly take with this series is some inconsistent animation in part two. The first three and last three episodes are consistent with the rest of the show, but the mid-section can be a little shaky, especially episodes fifteen through eighteen. But wait. “Inconsistent quality? You mean the problem that plagues 90% of all anime airing these days? If the quality is dropping…then what’s it usually like?” Well, I’m glad you asked, because the quality is usually out of this fucking world. The staff behind Mushoku Tensei loved it so much and were so committed to doing it justice, they established their own animation studio and production house in order to make it, and their hard work and effort absolutely shows. Mushoku Tensei is easily among the highest quality anime of 2021, with the only shows I can think of to definitively match or outdo it being Ousama Ranking, Sonny Boy, and of course Production IG’s Kaizoku Oujo and Kyoto Animation’s Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S, with Wonder Egg Priority and Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song coming close. No matter how much someone like me may want to bitch and whine about it looking or feeling “generic,” anyone with even the slightest appreciation for the craft of animation simply has to concede the point that Mushoku Tensei looks captivatingly gorgeous. If I remember correctly, episode five was animated entirely by one person, and while this doesn’t actually reflect poorly on the production in the way a layman may think (at least assuming it wasn’t a decision made out of desperate necessity and the animator in question has the expertise and experience to pull it off), it requires a healthy schedule to do, and to say the absolute least, healthy schedules are hard to come by in the current industry landscape. The double split cour release schedule and the aforementioned inconsistencies throughout part two might suggest the schedule wasn’t as healthy as maybe the staff would’ve liked, but I honestly think it’s just a matter of ambition. Not only did they produce an incredible looking TV anime, but they animated separate PVs for each cour, both of which look absolutely breathtaking. I feel like the team has gotten more efficient in prioritizing their heavier work loads in the more important sequences, and the animation in the pilot episode was so jaw dropping, my jaw is still on the fucking floor twelve months later. What’s even better than the animation though, is the color palette, compositing, and background art.
Despite its generic isekai foundation, this setting is SO rich, it’s unbelievable. When Rudeus was still living in the village at his parents’ house, the backgrounds were great and all, but the setting wasn’t distinctive enough for them to really pop out at me, but the second he left and went to Roa, The Demon Continent, Millishion, The Shirone Kingdom—all the environments just blew my fucking mind. The art direction in this show is honestly so good, I’m tempted to compare it to Takeda Yuusuke’s work on Guardian of the Sacred Spirit, and the color design is equally outstanding and worthy of just as much fangirling. First of all, I love it when a show has the expertise to get dark, and I don’t mean conceptually, I mean when a director knows how to literally make the screen dark without making the show look like a muddy, black mess where the audience is constantly squinting at the screen and can’t tell what they’re looking at. There’s many instances of this throughout the show, but the moment which stuck out the to me most was this fight scene in episode fourteen where a guy with tan skin, brown hair, brown facial hair, black boots, a brown vest, and a black trench coat fights on earthen dirt in the dead of night against a backdrop of dark brown trees and blackened leaves, and every sequence of animation looked perfectly smooth and cohesive. Trust me when I say I could talk for hours about how much I love this show’s deep colors and constantly changing, unique palettes for each different environment—all of which pull from different architectural sources for the layouts and details in the background art, by the way—but now that I mentioned fighting, I simply have to move on to the action sequences. The action in this show is fucking sick. These days, anime action is all about shitty 3D backgrounds, CG characters, and epileptic ufotable digital effect spam, but Mushoku Tensei is a classic, hand-drawn beauty. There’s tons of training sequences and sparing matches sprinkled throughout the series, but instead of treating them as trivial, they often have ridiculously high-quality sakuga. There’s only like one real fight with actual narrative weight in the entire show, and it might just be the most nail-biting, heart-racing, intense action scene I’ve seen in years. What’s more, and what makes Mushoku Tensei come close to being a complete technical masterpiece, is how all of this meticulous and impressive animation production design contributes to enriching the in-universe world building.
I’m sure you’ve already heard everyone talk about this in every form and fashion, but I simply must gush over how astronomically amazing the world building is. In episode nine, Ruijerd kills this giant turtle, and I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s a big fucking turtle. You could probably make a house out of that.” Next fucking scene is this village of giant turtle shell houses, and I nearly screamed at how genius that was. You can tell that whoever put these details in—whether they be the original author, the director, or even the individual animation staff—actually put some thought into this setting as a medieval fantasy world. For example, when Rudeus is studying with Eris and Ghislaine, they're using reusable wax tablets. Any other cheap, thoughtless isekai anime would just have them waste paper for writing, and that would be glaringly unrealistic to anyone who knows their history. The same goes for the sex. What else are they supposed to do in their free time when they live in the country and own literally four books? Sex is free and fun, and in this world promiscuity is obviously much more acceptable for the young and those with power. I would take even the most problematic moments from Mushoku Tensei over some stupid, “Oh, no! My clothes dissolved because of the slimy acid!” trope or whatever other generic anime fanservice we’ve grown used to. Since I was watching this show seriously the second time around, I was wearing my good headphones, and barely eight minutes into the very first episode, I was already getting annoyed by how good the sound design was. Rudeus was reading Zenith’s magic book, and I kept thinking I was hearing shit in the background, like my neighbors being obnoxious or sirens blaring on the street, but in actuality, I was just hearing the countless animals around the Greyrat’s farmhouse. This show is so much more immersive than your average anime, it became momentarily unimmersive, and that’s an achievement. There’s a scene where Rudeus shoots a drill of heated rock at this character, and the sound it makes when that character deflects it and the shattered pieces hit the ground is a sound effect I don’t think I’ve ever heard in an anime before. Anime sound design is a dying art form, because most viewers don’t give half a shit, and since the studios know this, they usually chose to expend zero effort in this department. Most people just want to see flashy lights and lewd-able waifus. But whenever you watch something like this with actual love and care put into every facet, the competence and attention to detail on display can be such a refreshing reminder of what real anime can achieve.
There’s so much more I can say about a series this rich, but this review is already preposterously long, and I guarantee fucking no one is going to read this far in, so I’m just going to use this paragraph to collect some final thoughts, and then make my way to a conclusion. The first thing I never got around to mentioning was the incredible magic system. The magic system is so intricate and fascinating, but what’s impressive is that it never devolves into a Hunter x Hunter snorefest where the protagonists have to literally sit down for entire episodes and have a teacher explain it on a fucking white board. I always complain about how Greed Island made no sense, but only because I fell asleep during Heaven’s Arena. In Mushoku Tensei, you learn things naturally, piece by piece alongside Rudeus (who also knows nothing) experimenting alone in his room. This natural, non-infodumpish manner of exposition serves as the foundation to understand the later advancements he makes, so at the end of the day everything feels cohesive and gradual. Then there’s Hitogami. I saw a lot of people complaining and saying Hitogami was a deus ex machina, and while I see what they’re saying, I also can’t possibly be the first person to notice that this so-called God—even from the perspective of an anime-only such as myself—is obviously not a God, at least not in a traditional omnipotent sense, and also obviously duplicitous, so calling him a plot device seems to me like a dull-minded thing to do. Then there’s the romance, so I’m going to have to say a few spoilers. I appreciate how the sex scene with Eris wasn’t presented as romantic or erotic, and was instead genuinely contemplative, depressing, and awkward to fit the tone. I also find the overall approach to Rudeus’ harem to be odd, because given the show’s apparent commitment to developing each girl separately and given the fact we’ve already seen functional polygamy in this world, I have a sneaking suspicion we’re going to get a legitimate harem ending, but either way, that’s a long way off. Other than that, I guess the only thing left to do is reiterate how genuine of a personality this series has. In episode twenty one, when I saw the fireball change colors in accordance with Wein’s Displacement Law right after being reminded this show features two principal characters named Laplace and Ørsted, I was like, “this author must be a physics nerd.” In episode eight, when I saw how Rudeus scared Eris off by rushing the foreplay, I was like, “there’s no way this author is a virgin.” I’m talking about the subtle touches, the details that reveal things about the creator and make their creation feel human.
I really hope this show gets a second season…and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, or however many it needs to adapt all the novels, and I hope they stop trying to force a two cour show so they can keep consistent quality. They should do a one cour season per year, adapt three volumes per season, and pace it out slowly into twelve or thirteen episode cours so they don’t have to cut content. Given how gorgeous this show is and given how rich its setting feels, I wouldn’t mind a slower pace at all. The sequences we get of characters just walking from place to place, looking over a field or a hilltop, or witnessing an establishing shot of a new setting—they’re all so seductive to me. This world just feels good to sit in and experience, because it’s so fleshed out in ways few are. If I had been serious about watching this show back in March, I could’ve given part one as high as an eight, and while the general inconsistencies throughout the mid-section of part two will likely earn it a six, I’d still give the whole season an average score of seven. Since the animation is so good, there’s tons of delightful, expressive sequences of character acting in this show, and while my favorite example of this has to be Eris pacing around, trying to console Rudeus on the bed in episode sixteen, there’s a behind-the-scenes story I wanted to share about the scene in episode twelve where Rudeus meets Kishirika. The animation staff was so in love with Kishirika and so excited to work on that scene, they actually fought over who would draw it, and the description one of them gave on Twitter really made me smile. “I’ve told some colleagues that I witnessed a real ‘Waifu War’ at one episode I worked at, and it was indeed this one. The ‘War’ being the animators fighting over the new cute girl of the series. It happened that almost all the animators in the episode (including me) wanted to animate the Kishirika sequence, because it was simply hilarious and the character is so cool. So we began flexing and bargaining with PA-san so we could get the sequence. Things like: PA-san, I promise I can make this sequence faster, so please give it to me! It seems we put PA-san into trouble, because he didn't know whom to give the sequence, and we were all putting pressure. I think it even delayed the production like a week XD. So that was it, ‘Waifu Wars’ are real for some episodes. We might be professionals, but the weebness is stronger.” Toshiyuki Sato won the fight and got the privilege to animate the scene, but I’d say the real winners were us: the viewers. The sheer personality in each individual frame of that sequence had more love and character put into its creation than most entire anime do from top to bottom. Simply put, this show has soul, and in an industry that grows more cynical with every passing day, Mushoku Tensei radiates with the passion its creators so clearly have for it, which I guess is kinda funny, because if I never found the motivation to endure its tropes and find the surprising depth therein, I never would’ve gotten to experience its expertise, its flair, or its beating heart. I like this series, and though I’ll probably never love it, I would've missed out if I simply wrote it off as generic, degenerate trash. There's more than just fool's gold here.
Thank you for reading. I’m serious. If you actually read this far, I love you. <3
