Review: Isekai Cheat Skill
A review of season one¹
Isekai Cheat Skill is pure fantasy fun: the lightest of light comedies, an exuberant adventure full of warmth and charm on an animation budget of two nickels and a banana peel. Like Keijo! or Domestic Girlfriend, it’s completely serious about being utterly ridiculous, devoting roughly every minute to fun characters and fan service.
It’s normal to sprinkle in moments of pure fun, like a beach episode or a Chika dance. It’s a form of fan service; it’s icing on the cake. Isekai Cheat Skill is a cake made entirely of icing, a fan service apotheosis, and it works improbably well. Light comedies look downright mean-spirited by comparison. There may be no series more eager to please the viewer. If a scene isn’t pleasantly surprising, it’s at least predictably enjoyable.
To illustrate, I’ve just written a new episode: the hero goes to the zoo; obviously, an escaped lion attacks; using his isekai cheat skill, he chucks it into a lake, saving a cute girl with enormous eyes — let’s say the prime minister’s daughter; she takes him on a date, and the rest of the episode can just be a close-up shot of her eating a crepe.
The theme was well chosen as a fan service comedy delivery system: the nicest guy in the world gets everything he ever wanted, and he has to learn to let himself be happy; which is to say, the conflict is internal. Aside from that, the stakes are hilariously low: threats ranging from intramural sports to escaped lions are introduced, defeated, and dismissed in five minutes flat, leaving plenty of time to watch a cute girl eat a crepe.
In light of its tone, it’s difficult to fault the pacing. Yes, we spent an entire episode at a shopping mall. On the other hand, that episode was delightful. I will absolutely take a trip to the mall with fun characters and fan service over the finest hand-crafted generic fantasy fight scenes, which in any case the show could not afford. Plenty of heroes have faced off against greater perils, but did any of them go out for crepes?
Actually, yes: there are crepes in Trapped in a Dating Sim (episode five) and Chivalry of a Failed Knight (episode three). So, granted, the stakes could have been higher — the adventure and the comedy more balanced — but it’s okay that they weren’t, because those series already exist, and I don’t expect a balance of flavours when I order an all-icing cake. Isekai Cheat Skill went overboard, but at least it fell off on the warm and charming side. I have tried to rewatch episodes without smiling, and I fail every time.
(For the record, I fail as soon as Kaede, the redhead, enters the frame in the opening credits. Watch episode five; gaze into those enormous vermilion eyes: you can really tell when both of Kaede’s brain cells are operating at maximum capacity.)
With a good-natured hero and a pleasing eagerness to let good things happen to him, Isekai Cheat Skill consistently achieves a kind of easygoing joyfulness that shows with bigger budgets and more reputable pedigrees have struggled to deliver even once. In an age of irony, it’s Candide minus the irony: every episode is a beach episode, every girl is the best girl, and all is for the best in the best of all possible fantasy worlds.
[1] Reposted from my Substack, where I post all my content: https://reincarnatedcritic.substack.com/p/isekai-cheat-skill
