Review of Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody

Isekai is, to me, a genre that is of low quality anyway. But that isn't the genre's fault specifically, but more that isekai tends to be a vessel for self-insert power fantasies, where the main character doesn't get into any issue and everything always goes right for them. Fantasy sort of falls under the same bracket, but I think isekai is the worst contender for this because it's more fun to imagine yourself getting transported over to a fantasy world, in a sort of escapist way. That being said, isekai has so much potential. For example, we have Re:Zero, an isekai which places some focus onhow the transportation to the new world affects the main character's mental wellbeing. Mushoku Tensei, despite its controversial bits with the main character's... interests, has absolutely fantastic world building. Like Re:Zero, Mushoku Tensei also has some focus on the mental health of the protagonist, but in this case, it's more in relation to how he was in his past life.

Unfortunately, I wish I could praise Death March for capitalising on the potential of the genre. But instead of delving into the many interesting pieces isekai has to offer, Death March appears to stay within the realms of the norm of the genre, which can be fine if played off well. After all, most genres or tropes, no matter how outlandish they can be, are usually still good as long as they're done well in the context of the show.

But Death March doesn't play anything off well. At all.

Instead, what we're left with is one of the dullest, most boring, and even frustrating, anime that I've seen in my life. In hopes of exploring more of the isekai genre, I turned to Death March for some idea of what a "generic" isekai would be, and I was severely disappointed with what I came across. What could have had some potential as a fairly average, but innovative enough, fantasy slice of life with some iyashikei moments thrown in, is instead a tropey, inconsistent, ugly and boring mess of an anime, that frankly, I'm just happy I'm finally done with.

The entire premise is flawed upon beginning the show. We have 30ish year old Satou (it's actually Satuu but where I watched it, it was always Satou) who is a stressed and overworked programmer, having to deal with multiple different projects at the same time. When going to sleep after staying up for days to work on this, he finds himself transported into an RPG world, which appears to be an amalgamation of all the games he made. Very soon after, Satou, who is currently level 1, is attacked by an army of lizardmen who average about level 47, so he... launches a very convenient attack that wipes the entire army out and levels him up to 310?

So now we have a conveniently overpowered Satou, who can't just leave the game because of a "bug". You could argue the attack was also just a "bug", but that idea that bugs exist in this world is not brought up once since then. But now that he's so overpowered, he can pretty much put points into absolutely any skill, only having to do an action related to them before he can learn it, and then can instantly master it. He starts to explore the world after getting this, meeting people (mostly underage women) along the way.

Straight away - I don't like Satou. His overpowered ability means he never gets into any struggle. Except he does, because he's overly nice and humble, to the point where he has no discernable personality traits outside of them. Despite being level 310 and knowing how to power himself up, Satou struggles against enemies that are, without exaggeration, OVER 10X WEAKER THAN HIM. This happens so often that I wonder if his physical strength is even a plot point that needed to be addressed, because he comes off as so useless in these situations that it's hard to believe.

He's very inconsistent though. At other times, he's suddenly a mastermind and a genius, knowing exactly how to play the system and the game to get what he wants or to protect his party of children that are in love with him. In fact, he's so inconsistent that there are scenes where he will do nothing to someone when he could easily just defeat them with his strength, get himself into a tougher situation because he did nothing, then reveal that he actually did something cunning instead. It feels like the writer pretty much just wrote Satou in however he was feeling about him that day.

Going back to his personality a little, I think the reason he has no personality is because he's supposed to be a self-insert of the highest kind. He never struggles with anything, he gets all the women upon meeting them, and everything he says and does is apparently charming to everyone. He goes through problems with ease and there are no stakes. It also doesn't help that the name "Satou" is the equivalent of the English "Smith" - the most common surname in Japan which, to me, kind of represents that he's supposed to just be the person watching. I can't self-insert into characters, so watching this from an outsider perspective was just boring.

The rest of the cast is no better really. Everyone pretty much only has one of these three character traits:

- They are in love with Satou.
- They are a kuudere and are either cold or aloof.
- They like to eat meat.

Not to mention that half of the cast consists of slaves that he bought. The show falls into the same pitfalls something like Shield Hero did, where it didn't consider the impact of speaking on a topic this heavy, as the characters are bought as slaves, but Satou doesn't free them because "they seem happy so they like this :p". This is very disrespectful of course, to communities where slavery has been issues in the past, but also because we as an audience are supposed to see their Stokcholm Syndrome as a good thing.

My dislike towards the cast isn't helped that the cast all being more affectionate towards Satou. Because of this, you get this sense that Satou does develop. But Satou hasn't developed at all from the start, it's actually just that the cast's affection towards Satou has increased. It gives a false sense of development for him, as in reality, he has zero development at all. None of the other members of the cast do either really, except maybe for Arisa to some extent (but I found her story to be a stretch based on things we know about the world).

While the cast are dull in itself, the most dull part is the horrendous pacing of the anime. You spend nearly 3/4 of the anime on the same point and in the same place, with it covering around a week in anime time. There's so many unnecessary points, like the constant bombardment of food exposition that adds nothing but seems to just pad out time. One particularly bad example of this is early on, where there's a scene where Satou just sits there, eating every dish he's been given in the pub, and pretty much just saying how he likes every single one. It lasts for way too long, and it's just really boring to watch, and for some reason there's many scenes where the writer thinks describing the food is integral to the plot.

Because of this slow pacing, when something finally does happen, it feels like a breath of relief. But the climaxes are very short and underwhelming, with every single one of them ending exactly how you expect, because this anime appears to be allergic to genuine stakes for its cast. These scenes also make me feel like it isn't fully trying to be an SOL iyashikei, making me feel that it doesn't actually know what it wants to be a lot of the time. The worst part of this to me is the fact that this supposedly adapts four chapters an episode. I can only imagine reading it is even more slow and dull somehow.

I think the big factor of why a lot of this is so poor is the writing quality. I don't think any effort to remain consistent was given to this anime. Subplots come and go at please without ever being resolved. We have mentions of pieces that could result in a mystery about the world, but they are mentioned two or three times and never again. Satou has some sort of discomfort about this world, but that's never spoken about again after episode 2. A mystery that gets mentioned a couple of episodes in with Arisa's entrance doesn't really make sense. But worst of all, because of how poorly the cast is written, it feels like much of the time, the tension created is very forced just for the sake of it, and it feels shallow as a result - the tension is entirely artificial to me most of the time as the characters, if they were written consistently, probably would have solved this already.

On the production side, wow. The art and animation are horrendous. The style is incredibly generic and I wouldn't be able to tell you how a single character looks in a week's time. When Satou is thinking to himself or using his game console thing, the art gets so exposed and glossy that it looks horrendous and ugly, and it's hard to tell what you're even looking at in the scene. Not to mention the really poor CGI, the awkward cuts into the OPs at times, constant still frames and episode 11 for some reason not even being in 16:9 on anywhere I looked. This anime has had absolutely no care put into it.

But overall, I think Death March really does seem like something that had *some* potential somewhere. Through the poor writing and pacing, I found some elements genuinely interesting, like the possibility that Satou may not be the only Japanese person there, or the considerations into making every race speak a different language. I think the show needed to not let Satou be so humble and instead make him lean more into his strength, keeping him consistent throughout. Although that wouldn't be enough to solve the fact that the story still sucks, the characters still suck, and the production was doomed before it even started.

Maybe one day, people will realise isekai harem power fantasies are not what people want to see.

Story: 4/10
Characters: 2/10
Animation: 2/10
Art: 2/10
Music: 5/10
Enjoyment: 3/10