English Dub Review: In Another World With My Smartphone “Awakening, and Another World”

If you were transported to a magical world by God, wouldn’t you want your smartphone?

Spoilers Below

Over the last few months, I’ve covered the demonic breast fest better known as Seven Mortal Sins. It’s very crude, juvenile and just inept in the presentation so I’ve been looking forward to another odd sounding show to cleanse my mind of that. In Another World With My Smartphone has done a wonderful job at that. Based on the light novel by Hobby Japan, it is the story of 15-year-old Touya Mochizuki (Josh Grelle) is struck by lightning and killed by God accidentally but being astonishingly fine with death Touya meets God (Barry Yandell) who wants to apologize to him by resurrecting him into a fantasy world. Touya, again, is nonchalantly ready to be whisked away but asks God for a special favor. If God could let him keep his smartphone.

Just the very pitch of the series based around that sounds so absurdly paper thin; how can you base a narrative structure around that? Well, surprisingly enough it works fairly well if at times falling into a cut-throat pace to lay out the world building of the magic system. However, Touya even in the framing device of the fantasy world is a true outlier. God dropped him in the middle of nowhere without any ability to read or write the native language but made up for that by giving him over powered magical and physical abilities. It reminds me of the character Kirito from Sword Art Online in terms of power balance but not in terms of characterization because right now Touya is a wet blanket.

It is not that Touya is coming across as a bad, annoying or reprehensible character but at the moment due to his magical and physical abilities, every fantasy world conflict he has come across comes across as a walk in the park. Plus, with his smartphone in the average life segment outside the fantasy and guilds, Touya is now one of the most intelligent in the land with a limitless supply of knowledge to pull from his phone. He starts off as a character with no dimension to him as everything is just going his way and he passively accepts everything weird happening to him with no big reaction. Now, this isn’t a point saying every character needs to have big reactions to be a dimensional character. But I hope for Touya’s sake that as the series progresses he will be allowed to have more a range of actions and reactions to scenarios rather than in this pilot where he just nicely is agreeable for everything.

Maybe I wouldn’t have such a problem with Touya though if the pacing of the episode was less spastic. After almost everything 5-7 minutes, the show will cut to a cute chibi drawing of Touya and the first two girls in his harem of magical girls, Elze and Linze Silhoueska (Leah Clark and Jill Harris), and it chops off any scene that can allow for my character dialogue. It instead shows just the pure bare minimum shots we need to see to setup the world aspects, Touya’s abilities, and the girls’ basic personalities. As a setup, this is fast and efficient but for a narrative structure, it feels flimsy and bland for an initial impression. The anime lets us see its cool premise and characters but like as if it had its eyes glued to its own smart phone the emotional connection is lacking.

I’m still very excited for more of In Another World With My Smartphone as even with its break neck pacing the show was still imaginative enough to make it visual and conceptually interesting. My hopes for the show though as it opens itself into the harem genre more and more, give Touya more character dimension, allow the girls to be their usual archetypes but add interesting conflicts between them to make a more interesting connection with everyone and finally keep the balance of fantasy and daily life tasks. Unlike Kirito who broods so hard Touya’s bland nice guy atmosphere makes both the mundane daily tasks and fantasy tasks, he and his group partake in enjoyable. So keep your cell charged for the net episode from Funimation as In Another World with my Smartphone is simple, fast paced and enjoyable.