(11 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Adaptation of yet another light novel series about a gamer dude being transported to an heroic-fantasy world with RPG-ish mechanics.
Characters
Kazuma, our protagonist, was your typical obsessive and reclusive teenage gamer, barely getting out of his flat once in a while to buy the one store-exclusive special edition of a game. On one such fateful day, he saw a female classmate of his about to be run over, and jumped to push her out of the way. And died. Well, technically she was in no actual danger from the slow-moving tractor, and he died of cardiac arrest, so it was a really stupid and pointless death. Nethertheless, he wakes up in the afterlife in front of…
Aqua, one of the goddesses dealing with triage. Once she can stop sniggering at his totally lame death, she mentions the standard deal : either he goes to heaven (really boring, with no games), or gets reincarnated as a blank slate. Or he can take the special offer : see, there’s this one heroic-fantasy world under the threat of a terrible Demon-Lord, to the point that few of the locals want to reincarnate there. So the offer is for Kazuma to reincarnate there, with his memory and skills intact, PLUS a special bonus ; here’s a list of possible talents, he can choose anything in here.
Being a rules-lawyering gamer to the extreme, Kazuma choses to take Aqua with him. Cue hilarity as it’s technically a valid choice, and she gets shanghaied with him against her will. Her only way back is for them to defeat the Demon Lord. And hey, a goddess is bound to be useful, right ? As it turns out, not much, actually. She’s got no combat skills, knows next to nothing about the world because she never bothered with the small stuff (Kazuma barely gets by on genre savviness alone), and she didn’t have time to get any money. Also, INT and LUCK were her dump stats, if it wasn’t already obvious. (In contrast, Kazuma has very puny stats asides from INT, and a super-high LUCK which is actually said to be useless in this setting.)
The OP sequence playing at the end suggest our heroes are going to be joined by a Paladin and a Mage in their quest very soon.
Production Values
This is another Deen show that looks much better than the studio’s reputation would have you think. It’s especially good at body language and facial expressions, which is essential to selling the jokes.
On the minus side, the camera seems to be quite obsessed with Aqua’s crotch and ass. Especially her half-see-through skirt.
Overall Impression
Hey, this was really funny ! The two leads have amazing chemistry together, and there were actually a few jokes I hadn’t seen before (such as the starting town having no weak mobs to grind with anymore, as they were wiped out ages ago). Even the usual ones are sold by the very good comedic timing.
This looks like a ton of fun ; I’m in.
