In the past year or so, my intake of anime was trending down steadily, being displaced mostly by the isekai manga. I literally went to a pirate scanlation site and searched all manga with "isekai" in the name, as well as "dorei", "tensei", collected the results, and been busy reading ever since.
The Death March kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyousoukyoku was caught in the big sweep, too, obviously. And it was okay. Not one of my favourites, but it had some good features. The harem with a (wobbly) sacred cow was relatively well designed, in two layers: 3 possible interests: Zena (sacred cow), Arisa (foil), and Lulu (for the outside), surrounded by the backup dancers: beast children, Liza, Nana, etc.. It had some balance problems: the main foil, Arisa Tachibana, was much too overpowering (I thought she was a redux of Elf Yamada), whereas Lulu was so worthless that author even had to manufacture a couple of chapters to make her do something artificially. So, an okay manga. Not stellar, but okay.
Imagine my surprise, when someone selected Death March to lead the invasion of the isekai into anime. When the idols burst into the scene, it was a real flagship, The Idolm@ster. This, though... Well, it's not like there weren't any kinda-isekai shows before: Dog Days, Campanella, SAO. Log Horizon came very, very close. But they were different. Maybe I was wrong expecting a similar establishment of a new genre and its attributes. Just like a Magical Girl anime offers specific things like secret identity, animal companion, transformation sequence, talisman, and so on, I thought a proper isekai anime had to arrive at last, bearing level system, cheat abilities, adventure guild, and above all -- the slave harem.
Well, it looks like there's not going to be a breakthrough. The Log Horizon made it 70% through, and now we're going to receive middling series that chip at the niche. So, Death March is just a footnote in this journey. It was quite bad, honestly.
About the only good thing to be said about Death March is that it follows the manga rather closely. But it does so with such poor writing and direction, low production values, that I cannot see many people enjoying it. I only finished it because I wanted a representative isekai.
I think the only good moment was when the dude wanted to give a name to the homunculus No.7, and he named her "Nana". Arisa is the only other person who speaks Japanese in the other world, and so she's appropriately horrified (pictured). The only decent moment was when the dude visited a brothel, and Arisa was steaming with "why did you have to do that when you have us?!" I'm surprised they didn't cut it away from the broadcast.
Liked: No
Rewatch: No
And so. But yesterday, Faust tweeted that no less than 4 isekai shows are scheduled to run in the Summer season. The journey continues, even picks up the pace!