Review of I'm Standing on a Million Lives

First off: Please watch season two because the source material gets much better from there and the anime is very faithfully adapted. Or at least be on the lookout to see if it's good when it comes out. Don't let this first season turn you away, please. So, I'd written a review on episode 5 since I thought the early backlash was mostly a result of cynicism against the isekai genre and the fact that this series decided to do mostly all set up in the first few episodes. If followed through on, I think those early episodes would've been looked at as pretty good, becauseby themselves those episodes don't do anything.

However, the later episodes just didn't do anything. Each episode spent it's time on one or one and a half mini-plot points - if you couldn't tell by watching it, the specific events in the isekai world are not what the story's focus is. The pacing ground to a halt, and what was the final episode should've been on seven or eight.

I just realized I haven't really summarized it, so here goes, without spoilers.

Mc and a few people get transported to a sort of isekai, are given some quests that they need to fulfill within a timeframe. Once the quest is done, they go back to their own world with no time having passed - if they fail, they die.
This is immediately a really solid premise - it should be the core of the show, but it isn't. And that's where a lot of the problems come in.

A lot of everything else is like generic isekai, but with just enough of a twist to keep it potentially interesting. For example, the respawn mechanics and pain nullification make room for potentially incredibly brutal strategies, and the level down mechanic from hurting people in universe means human conflict rather than monster conflict is extra deadly.

This almost goes somewhere and is played with slightly in the beginning, and even less later on. It's not leaned on as hard as it should be, because it's one of the main differences from generic isekai.

In between each of the quests, one of them gets a mini-quest in world to find another person to join them on their missions. This is handled a bit unclearly - at first it seems like they get to choose, which is how the mc was 'accidentally' chosen. But when we follow mc on his miniquests (yeah he gets them by himselves after, the others have nothing to do with them anymore) he doesn't get to choose and is rather given someone to recruit.

So you see the structure, right? Quest, some stuff happens in the isekai, return, recruit someone, go back, see how the isekai was changed from - wait, that's a spoiler. Why is that a spoiler? Because the very second quest with our MC, the first two girls, and the fourth girl that gets recruited, ends up taking 3 or four episodes longer than it should have - all the way up to episode 11.

And that's where the entire structure is broken. We no longer have an interplay of real world and isekai - instead, the second half of this season is all isekai. Which is not the focus of the story - all the minor conflict in that universe is nowhere near as interesting as the meta conflict of going back and forth, and their end goal, what happens when they finish enough quests and recruit enough people, etc.
^ This is foreshadowed by one of the questions they get to ask after finishing each quest, which is actually pretty cool.

Notice how I haven't said anything about what the conflict in the isekai is yet? Because it's literally not relevant or fun.

On episode twelve, they recruit the fifth guy - a 19 yr boy with some clear issues and interesting backstory. If only we'd gotten to him earlier, this anime could've been so good.

With this all said - season two has already been planned, for July 2021. So yeah, episodes 6-11 are a bore. But there's a core of great and interesting ideas that might be tackled in season 2 - or they might spend another half season on the boring, useless, isekai world again.

I had high hopes for this anime, and they weren't fulfilled. 4/10. But I'll definitely be watching season two, in hopes that they get to the interesting part.

Update after going through the manga: Wow it's a shit ton better, but also the anime adapted it basically page for page. Basically, author was figuring out their stride, as it were. This anime is barely if at all indicative of what the series is about - I wouldn't mention this if it weren't for the fact that it's getting a second season, and that might be really amazing if they continue with the faithful-ness they have here.

Although, I'm not entirely sure the second island arc is long enough to fit a complete 12 episodes, and there's no way they're getting through the drug war arc.

So yeah - this series takes the parallel world/isekai concept to its core themes- the situations our heroes go in after this arc are directly parallel to current/several years ago modern events. The author does their research and doesn't make any presumptious (aka idiotic) claims about what should work, just uses literally what we have. The time skip means they don't even have to guess at what happens in the medium/long term (which would be quite a bold statement) and instead deals with it in isolation. Some people might dislike that because it's basically avoiding the issue, but I'm not sure there's any good answer when it's so closely tied to reality.

If that sounds incredible to you, it's because it is. If it sounds very basic to you, it also is - but its done incredibly thoroughly - at least for anyone who isn't actively studying the topics, I guess - I'm not one of those people so i can't speak on their behalf.

If you think the religious war part of this season was kinda like that - no, no, not even close.