English Dub Review: The Water Magician “The Slow, But Dangerous, Life”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Ryo Mihara is isekai’d to another world and given the ability to control water magic, as well as eternal youth. After training himself well enough to fight, he leaves his house to travel this new world and meets a talking dragon.

OUR TAKE

Well, it’s been a couple months, so I guess it was only a matter of time before I covered another Isekai anime. And just like all the others, this has some of the typical tropes right off the bat. Human character dies for vague or entirely unexplained reasons, is told by some supernatural waypoint creature about the situation, and starts his new life from scratch as a baby or, in this case, a standard model teen anime protagonist body. To be clear, this is not necessarily a bad place to start your story, it’s just that I’ve seen SO MANY ITERATIONS of this same sort of beginning that it’s pretty easy to tune out. I will say, however, that this episode is pretty much just focused on Ryo getting the basics of this new world, told entirely from his perspective as he learns how to use his water magic, trains with a weapon, and encounters several supernatural beasts, all while trying to keep himself alive in the…I guess court appointed starter house he was given out in the country. Makes me really curious what the protocols are for reincarnating people into these new lives. We don’t know anything about Ryo’s life before this (once again making me wonder why this is even an Isekai to begin with) but I guess he did okay enough for himself to start here, as opposed to starting off as a rich powerful heir or a destitute beggar.

As such, this is a…sufficient start to the show, but it really feels like it could end up going either way at this point. It’s not a terrible start like Re:Monster, but it’s not really playing around with the genre conventions like No Longer Allowed in Another World. In fact, this more bare bones approach to a first episode reminds me of the start of The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash. And WOW I have covered a lot of Isekai to be able to compare them all like this. At the very least, this is well animated enough that it’s nice to look at, but time will tell if this was a sign of bigger things to come or just the high point of a mediocre story. If anything, there’s already a hint of something as Ryo fights off the same bird long enough for it to evolve a bit, though that may be because he has Eternal Youth, unbeknownst to him. Let’s see where it goes.