English Dub Review: In Another World With My Smartphone “Slime Castle, and New Functions”

It’s a slimy adventure this week as the act of undressing underage girls becomes the ultimate non-punchline.

Fan service in anime is nothing new in the slightest. Removing the stigma that some have for anime, being just big breasted girls shooting magical lasers or any variety of that overly simplistic stereotyping, fan service has become a key trope used in the anime market. From over the top balls to the walls exploitive body angles in Keijo and Free to the awkward and exploitive harems featured in Love Hina and boat loads of other harem shows, fan service has entrenched itself as a major component used by the industry to draw readers and viewers into consuming their media. In the case of In Another World With My Smartphone, I’ve already railed against the show for being the bare bones harem anime with a Mary Sue protagonist but now this episode comes along to finally answer the question of if In Another World can tastefully do fan service humor. It can not.

OVERVIEW

Touya and the girls go to a castle with slimes in it where the girls lose their clothes. That’s it. There are definite story elements they bring up but boiled down episode 5’s first act is all about bringing a conclusion to the running gag in the series to the close. That being the tired back and forth where Touya asks the girls if they want to fight slimes, they say no because they’ll eat their clothes, Touya gets a pervy vision of the girls and then drops the subject. Rinse and repeat. It is just as I stated when the jokes came up in previous episodes this paints Touya in an even worst light because Mr. Perfect Touya not only is all of these girls’ dream buy but he’s also the guy that likes to see tentacles violate them and expose their bodies. Makes Touya sound like a despicable creep if you put it like that, right?

There can be the argument made that it’s all meant to be played tongue and cheek to lambast the fan service nature of this sort of anime. However, the buildup to this punchline is just the equivalent of saying “Boy I sure hope I don’t slip on this banana peel today” and then you slip on the banana peel. It telegraphs the joke so far in advance it lets the audience truly dissolve the actual implications of the punchline. For me that would be Touya is a despicable Mary Sue.

Does the episode have anything else worthy of note? Well, Act 2 is all about Touya being the perfect nice guy to each of the girls to have all of them have crushes on him so… no. A nice guy character is fine and dandy but making Touya so unambiguously non-offensive makes him the dullest to follow as a protagonist and its detrimental to the girls as their characters play back seat to Touya’s perfect actions. So, it is the bland leading the bland to even more uninteresting directions.

OUR TAKE

Ever since the pilot episode, I have been going down in the scores for these episodes for clearly obvious reasons I’ve laid out in my episode reviews. But truthfully In Another World With My Smartphone isn’t anger inducing or even all that bad. It is just painfully uninventive and boring. At this point, there’s really nothing that this series does that hasn’t been outdone ten-fold by any of the other anime out this season. If you want a dull watch then sit down and watch In Another World With My Smartphone. If you don’t want a dull watch than watch anything else this season because even a really bad and heinous anime would be more interesting to view than this.

SCORE
3/10