Yuji Sano works at a company that's harsh on its employees. After bringing some overtime work back home, he gets a message on his computer: "You have been summoned to an alternate world." It's a game-like world, complete with status bars and skills. Yuji tames a slime monster and thus becomes a Tamer. Then he suddenly attains a second profession, Sage, and awakens magical powers within himself.

Think of every single tired cliche that could possibly come to mind when an anime has a subtitle like "I Gained a Second Character Class and Became the Strongest Sage in the World!", and I can almost guarantee you that My Isekai Life plays that cliche as straight as a steel beam. Yuji is so lacking in personality that I expected his all-consuming apathy to be some sort of plot point that people would address, but no. This is just another of those "comedies" that's come to the mistaken conclusion that having a ludicrously overpowered MC with no concern for anything happening around him is somehow enough of a joke to carry an entire series. Oh, and of course he can track his stats and levels with a mystical JRPG menu, which I swear has to be the biggest red flag of all when it comes to telling whether these types of isekai anime are going to be creatively bankrupt or not.

So yeah, this is, in many ways, an unremarkable premiere for a played-out plotline. Office worker Yuji somehow went from being at home to lying on the ground in a forest, and he's apparently either tired enough or pop-culture savvy enough to be utterly unphased by the game stat window that's floating in front of his face. He's also already tamed a slime, who, for reasons perhaps best not pondered, immediately leads Yuji to an abandoned library in the woods and powers him up. But oh no, Tamers as a class aren't respected in this world's society because potatoes, so Yuji has to prove himself to different Guild branches while being as badass as possible with no discernable emotions about anything.

The first episode admittedly does put in some work to try and give Yuji's adventure a bit of mystery and atmosphere, but some halfway decent shot compositions and lots of generic rock music on the soundtrack isn't enough to make up for the fact that this is a story that lacks any meaningful stakes or conflict by design. The second episode is even worse, since a lot of the precious screentime that could've been devoted to more scenes for the wolf and the slime buddies instead gets wasted on introducing even more random side characters to be impressed by Yuji's taming prowess. The peak level of comedy writing in this whole thing so far is when the two girls that Yuji decides to party up with are baffled by Yuji's utter indifference to having captured a wanted criminal with a bounty on his head. Yes, we are dealing with a show that is convinced that having two characters stare at the screen with a "Whaaa...?" expression on their faces is all of the payoff we need for an otherwise pointless sidequest.

That said, I do like the approach this is taking to adapting the source material. While I can't speak to the light novels, the manga (which Square-Enix is releasing in English) is much more straightforward in its arrangement of the plot, opening with Yuji first arriving in Generic Fantasyland. The anime, on the other hand, gives us flashbacks while moving Yuji's adventures forward, and that works much better. I also very much like how a totally different artstyle is used for Yuji's life in Japan--it has a sketchy, realistic, kindaa rotoscoped look at Yuji's flashbacks to his pre-isekai life, which really emphasized the difference between the two worlds and how he moved from something more "real" to a fantasy game world, and it also takes a bit of the sting out of, say, the dryad's inexplicable horns or how dopey Proud Wolf's character design is. But the startlingly limited animation also contributes to the early 2000s feeling the show has. Everything moves rather choppily, with tons of stills, recycled frames and other obvious shortcuts. It's probably not going to be a dealbreaker for anyone, and it's definitely not a total production disaster, but it's subpar for an anime released in 2022.

The show also smartly drops us right into Yuji's new life once he's already established his Tamer-Sage powers and party of monster pals. There's minimal time spent sifting through menu screens or having our hero scratch his head at being in a fantasy world. Instead we're dropped right into the action, which leads into a conflict with an apparent doomsday cult and hints that the ever-corrupt JRPG Church is up to no good. Instead of spending multiple episodes explaining Yuji's powers to us, we're given just enough to understand his deal, then actually get to the plot. That might confuse somebody who's never seen an isekai story before, but as someone who elects to put himself through a lot of these for the sake of reviewing, I'm very thankful for the show getting to the actual story rather than fucking around and wasting my time.

Honestly though, I feel like I'm damning the show with faint praise. It mostly feels bland and harmless--or maybe that should be "toothless", because the evil cult just doesn't feel like a real threat to Yuji's super awesomeness. But the ending theme is cute, I'm unreasonably entertained by a slime with a mustache, and being dull isn't really a crime. Just don't go into this expecting to be blown away. Still, in a season as barren as this one's turning out to be, I'll take "bland" over nothing.