Review of Suicide Squad Isekai

I want to like this series more than I do. As pure turn your brain off fun, it's not a bad time by any means. The sakuga goes hard when they go all out, the characters are varied and have the kind of zany personalities you would expect for something like this, and the setting lends itself to some ridiculousness. The trouble is two-fold. One, and the lighter of my complaints, I just don't think it does much to justify the setting beyond "wouldn't this be cool!?" Maybe that's kind of the point, that this fantasy world is a playground where our characters can havewild adventures, but they keep hinting at deeper dynamics with its monsters, kingdoms and magic that just never manifest. Worse yet, at least from where I'm sitting, they don't use that setting to the fullest. You would think that bringing these characters into a magical world would mean we'd get to see all kinds of crazy interplay between magic and their various powers and skillsets, but there's surprisingly little of it until very near the end. It's a wasted opportunity to make this as crazy as possible, though admittedly when its at its craziest, there's not a lot you can make out behind all the magic circles and colorful attacks.

Two, this series is based on existing IP. The Suicide Squad has canon behind it, and while I don't know a lot of it and don't expect this series to mirror everything (I personally don't mind that the relationship between Harley and The Joker is significantly lighter and more loving on his side - the abusive relationship has been done to death), I think it should get some of the major beats right. Haven't given my thoughts on this one up til now, but generally speaking, I expect three things from my Suicide Squad content: characters should die, their allegiances should always be in question, and they should wreck some shit. On all three fronts, I'd say this work fell short. It never felt like any of the main characters were in any substantial danger, though I'll hand it to the show that they're not exactly kind to the villains who they defeat. The characters just align with the main kingdom and there's rarely an indication that they're even considering working their own angles beyond doing what they have to in order to stay alive. And while they do cause a good deal of damage, it's usually to the enemy. There's generally very little sense that our main characters are or were villains.

I think hitting these marks were the low-hanging fruit to make this anime work, and while it hits some of them from time-to-time, but misses more often. So while this was a decent enough popcorn watch, it's almost all empty calories that surprisingly doesn't go as hard as it could while failing to capitalize on the best parts of the IP.