Review of Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody

90% of my review relates to the story and characters, so I'm going to skim through the rest of the categories first. Art 3/5 Average, nothing stands out and this "magical" world we see consists mostly of wooden towns and rocks. Sound 2/5 Serviceable, although forgettable enough that I don't actually remember if there *was* music. And a very weird detail they have is that the magic language of the world isn't so much a language, as just speeding up a bunch of sounds until the wizard sounds like a chipmunk. It looks and sounds stupid and I don't know whose fault it is. Enjoyment 1/5 Anecdote time! Slight spoiler warning,but it illustrates my point: Satou eventually meets another reincarnated person who talks about being born as a princess, ruling a kingdom, then being overthrown by treacherous royals and sold into slavery, where she survives by virtue of her psychic magic. The first thing I thought hearing that was "Wow, I would give anything to be watching that story instead, right now".

Story 1/5
A lot of the arguments I've seen between critics and fans of this show are based around the defense that this is supposed to be a peaceful and cozy life in a fantasy world, not some action-packed RPG. Which is a perfectly fine pitch - I love slow road trip stories like Mushi-shi, and I've watched more purposefully cozy anime than I care to count. The problem here, being, 3/4 of Death March's episodes are devoted to Satou fighting monsters, demons, and evil wizards. It is barely the thing it claims to be! It takes 11 episodes to leave the starting town, on this supposed journey.
Now, I recognize that there is the angle of "Satou doesn't want to be some great hero, but the war still finds him". Nothing that happens seems to be related to an overarching story that I can identify, and even if it later turns out they are, all of it is so generic and uninspired that I'd rather rewatch a good show.
I even tried to give it the benefit of the doubt - you know, maybe the novel was adapted poorly...but no, the pacing is just as bad.

Characters 1/5
Alright, everybody has talked this point to death I'm sure, but...the slave girls. They're an anchor that drags this shit down. They have no personality. Oh sure, they individually have one or two character traits (mostly a shared trait called "Loves Satou soooo much"), but there are so many of them that they just blend together into a homogeneous moe-blob. Usually, with a harem, you try to have a few personality types for variety, but with Death March, you only have two choices: an actual child, or block of wood.
Satou is the real offender here though. He goes beyond/below being a self-insert isekai MC. He takes in all of these slaves under the pretense of "I'll treat them well, so better they're with me than at risk of ending up with a bad person", but he NEVER makes an attempt to free them or really treat them as equals. For Kami's sake, he gives the animal-girls literal pet names!
I mean, if he was openly racist about it, that would at least be some sort of personality, but he has none. I remember a humorous point where he gets a skill called "Poker Face" when he's trying not to react to something, and all I could notice was that it was the exact same face he had been making up throughout the show so far. I think his expression changes a total of two or three times over the course of the entire show; mostly he just stares vacantly at a point slightly off-screen, which is probably what you'll be doing after watching this drudgery for any amount of time.

Overall 2/5
On a technical level, Death March is serviceable. Heck, if you make an effort to avoid reading into things (and this is literally the first isekai you've ever watched), maybe you can enjoy it. At its core though, this is a lazily written harem show. The MC claims he loves and would never touch any of these girls, yet the show constantly goes out of its way to sexualize them (especially the underage ones). The show promises a magical world, but offers nothing imaginative beyond waving a D&D handbook in your face.
Instead of slogging through 12 episodes that MIGHT lead to something if this doubtfully gets a second season, your time would be better spent finding any other isekai. Even a bad one would have some value in the cringe factor; Death March doesn't even have the decency to be dumpster fire.