u/littlehobbit1313

Omg, episode 1 is out and I am hyped after watching it? This adaptation is delivering so far!

The animation is good quality, they didn't wash all the detail out of the character designs, the voice acting is well done, and most importantly the pacing seems solid. Nothing about this episode felt rushed, and I was afraid they'd be tempted to speed things up given the length of the series.

The only major deviation I noted was swapping to Truck-kun and Ho-oh as her means of transport, and actually I think that was a solid choice. I feel like "terrorist bomb in a neighborhood" probably wouldn't go over the same way today, given the state of the world. (And tbf, it was an odd choice even in the 90s lol.)

I was really impressed with how smoothly they addressed the language issue. I felt like that was going to be a big hurdle because they tackled it with distinguishing dialogue bubbles in the manga which obviously would not work for animation. It was always such a unique element of this series, since every other isekai just finds some reason they automatically know the language, and I'm glad they didn't try to write it out somehow for convenience. I'm eager to see next week's episode, how they choose to represent Noriko deciding she'll make the effort to learn the language. Again, done with dialogue bubbles in the manga, so we'll see how they handle it.

Izark and Noriko are living up to why I love them so much. Noriko is so endearing. She's lost but managing to make the best of it, and she uses her head to think things through even if she's physically in over her head. I think new fans with their impossible standards for FLs will be able to appreciate her. (And shout out to her VA because I feel like those were some of the most realistic screams I've ever heard in anime??? Like yeah, wow, I believe this girl is terrified based on those screams.) Izark, equally, is living up the vibes that led me to crush on him so hard when I first read this story lol. The anime did not do him wrong on the ML energy.

I have a great feeling about this adaptation based on this first episode. It captured the original style and series uniqueness better than Hana Kimi's adaptation did. It's stuck to good pacing and clean animation better than Red River has. Time will tell, but I already feel way more positively about this adaptation than I did the others after one episode. The vibes are right, the animation is good...I'm happy.

With Red River coming out, and From Far Away later this year, I'm reminded of just how much more dangerous 90s shoujo isekai were for protagonists compared to isekai today.

Sure, maybe you land in the villainess role and there's the threat of "novel said you're fated to die", but most isekai now still largely revolves around people landing in cushy socio-economic settings as nobility where they don't have to struggle against the world itself. In most cases they're handed the cheat sheet of what's going to happen so they can work their way around it to a better ending.

By comparison, 90s isekai protagonists lived a much more "trial by fire" experience. They didn't speak the language. They didn't know the customs. They had no financial means to survive on. They had to explain their whole existence in the world in order to get help. Friends and allies could die and did die along the way. They either adapted quick or bad shit happened.

And there's nothing wrong with the current isekai style, but with a number of 90s series getting made/remade this year, it really made me realize how much I miss when isekai had more life-or-death survival energy to them. Really kept you on your toes as the audience about whether or not the heroes were going to be able to get out of situations unscathed.

So basically that's a long-winded way of saying I'm super excited to revisit some of my favorite isekai in anime form this year!

Major or trivial, doesn't matter.

What's something Millennials got stuck with that you feel is particularly bullshit?

I would say one that bothers me a lot is "Millennial Gray". We didn't pick these colors. We had Lisa Frank and see-through rainbow tech growing up, for cryin' out loud. How did some landlords and corporate marketers decide to start painting everything in gray and somehow we got held responsible for it???