English Dub Review: In Another World With My Smartphone “First Journey, and Samurai”

Good thing Touya has his smartphone, now it’ll be easy to call him a Mary Sue.

Spoilers Below

Episode 2 and what I at first saw as a very fast paced and enjoyable series has now shown its true colors as a very routine fantasy harem anime. Or a better description, the bland version of Sword Art Online’s harem of girls. In Another World With My Smartphone has fallen directly into the Mary Sue archetype in the most inept of fashions. In today’s episode Touya, Elze and Linze are heading towards the royal capital to complete a quest when they come across, the next girl in line for his harem, Kokonoe Yae (Michelle Rojas), a samurai in training who happens to be heading there as well. She joins their party and the rest of the episode is Touya learning new spells that are perfect for every single situation they come across.

I could talk about how Yae comes across as a very nice yet dull character but I may tease the show for its clear love for making a group of girls all fawn over our main dude Touya but that is the exact issue. Touya has now grown in just 1 episode from a very simple nice guy to the absolute perfect nice guy. If you ignore how he’s so completely selfless and sweet that he is like the combined form of every boy scout in existence, every issue that Touya comes across is almost instantly solved by him because of his all-powerful magic. The most embarrassingly sacred of the examples of this is when the party comes across a duke’s daughter, Sushie Urnea Ortlinde (Sarah Wiedenheft), being attacked by lizard men. They defeat the enemy in a very disappointing fight scene but Sushis’s butler has been shot by an arrow and the arrow tip is stuck in his chest causing him to slowly bleed to death. Now how can Touya save the day here? Well, have no fear, because Touya learned a magic spell that can instantly teleport small objects into his hand. Plus, he has healing magic that closes up the wound. This crisis was solved in under 5 minutes.

This is the danger of making the main character too perfect and nice. It destroys any tension in the drama the story tries to bestow upon it and makes it hilariously forced. Especially when he can bring sight back to the blind you start to picture the Jesus levels of perfection that Touya is shooting for. This perfect kind boy though isn’t flawed from a narrative progression angle but from just basic characterization it is still all wrong. In the pilot episode, in an odd way, I could overlook the show’s odd tendency to gloss over why Touya is completely okay with being dead. The point of the show is just the characters in this new fantasy setting along with a smartphone. However now with these two episodes, I have to ask, why doesn’t he care that he died? What about his family? Friends? Pets? Twitter followers? Why hasn’t Touya made any sort of mention about his old life? Why would he be so accepting of his death?

It could be explained by saying “that’s the joke” but what is the true humor of the piece when at the same time as Touya being indifferent to his past life being gone, he is Mr. Perfect, helping everyone in need that he comes across like the best angel. Those two traits do not gel together and make Touya come off less of a character and more an avatar. A blank slate that the audience can put themselves in to enjoy the imagination of you having a gang of fantasy girls following and loving you. In my personal opinion though, that is just the height of lazy character writing. If a character acts and reacts in the same exact way all the time how can that character have an arc? Progression? Dynamic with other characters? Unless that is acknowledged you can’t.

Even though Touya’s perfect character may be the root of the show’s upcoming flaws I do find In Another World With My Smartphone is struggling to showcase an identity for itself. From animation to design everything comes across very derivative of several other fantasy settings but even if you ignore that, when you take into account the stiff and dull fight scene animation it makes it hard for myself to recommend this series past an average rating. It’s a Mary Sue power fantasy and it knows it is so if you like the sound of that you can go nuts and have fun. But if you need more than that to your story then I would suggest going to another anime instead and take your smartphone with you.

SCORE
5/10