English Dub Season Review: In Another World With My Smartphone Season One

Transported to a magical world by God, given overpowered abilities and a harem of ladies falls into your lap. Why do you even need the smartphone?
Writing an overpowered character and trying to make them relatable can be a tricky feat. It is so simple to write them as an unstoppable and perfect Mary Sue and call it a day but it takes real time and dedication to get it right. Characters like Saitama from One Punch Man and Mob from Mob 100 exhibit how it is possible to have two impossibly strong people but make them both feel human and on our level. In Another World With My Smartphone doesn’t do that… until the very last episode.

OVERVIEW (Spoilers Below)

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. From there he meets a harem of girls, enlists godly animal summons, stops wars, solves Scooby-doo murder mysteries and gets into sexual hijinks with his mid-teenage girlfriends/wives. Oh dear.

Just the very pitch of the series based on that sounds so absurdly paper thin and yet it tries to do all of that list of narrative elements. Not to mention those were just listed for a joke, there are several other story elements that are trying to fight for attention in the anime. Don’t worry though the anime has such little interest in those aspects that you’ll quickly forget them like the show does. What is important though are the characters… well, just Touya actually. For the grand majority of its runtime, each episode is just a parade of moments showing just how incredibly perfect and gifted Touya is. That becomes dull so fast. Touya’s character reminds me of Kirito from Sword Art Online. Not only in terms of insane power and BS confidence but in terms of characterization they are as engaging as wet blankets. Touya’s journey throughout the whole series never challenges him in any capacity. There is no adversity or anything that can’t be easily solved by his fix all magic. Even in fights, Touya literally creates a long-distance air strike attack in which he can carpet bomb any enemy he sees fit from any distance. How can we invest in the struggle of someone like that?

Our engagement in Touya’s journey though isn’t helped by In Another World With My Smartphone having no idea what sort of show it wants to be. It’s not a simple slice of life fantasy story as the epic narrative portion pokes its head in to make the slice of life’s meandering. It’s not a deep and engaging fantasy epic as the slice of life stories rob the contextualization of the “epic” so that we can be invested in it. It is a harem anime though but that’s less about the tone and genre of the piece but rather the aesthetic of showing underage girls blushing in naughty scenarios. The best I can describe it is that the anime is attempting a balancing act of all three types of shows but fails to blend them together and instead smashes them over and over until we get what we have presented to us. An uneven mess.

However, by the end of the season, something remarkable happens. Touya becomes more likable, the tone of the series becomes solid and even the girls become more dynamic and develop a funny comedic backbone. How is this possible? They introduced a sex robot. No joke when the series just turned up the raunchiness of the harem aspect and let that be its aesthetic choice it somehow led the writers to focus more on the awkward romance between the girls and Touya. And it wasn’t a horribly written mess, it was genuinely cute and charming. If the show stuck at that writing level it first would have been more consistent but it would have been a more endearing show because despite the raunchiness of the later episodes it showed more heart than the rest of the episodes combined.

OUR TAKE

In the grand scheme though I enjoyed the In Another World less on an actual quality level and more ironically because of how unashamedly amateurish it was in the beginning. Trying so hard to show off its “super cool” main character Touya winning all the fights and getting all the ladies. It’s a childish fantasy and one where after thinking about it I don’t really hate. The show even at its worst still held a lot of heart to it. Like it was written by a hyperactive kid who just wanted to show off his amazing overpowered character, picturing all of the imaginary barely connected adventures they would go on. I don’t hate the show by any stretch and I can see why people will enjoy it but if it held onto a more solid tone then I can see more people liking it without needing ironic mocking.

Score
4/10