From our friends at Sentai Filmworks comes the 12-episode fantasy adventure series My Isekai Life a.k.a. I Gained A Second Character Class And Became The Strongest Sage In The World! (Yea, these isekai names are out of control…) Anyway, I hope you have your slimes prepared to execute your next spell because we’re comin’ in hot! FIREBALL MEDIUM!

Yuji, once an office drone in Japan but now finding himself transported to a fantasy world, on the surface appears to be a low class monster tamer, but thanks to some slimes he has tamed, he has inadvertently absorbed a massive amount of knowledge from a powerful sage, granting him near God-like magical abilities. This is good news since he will soon find himself crossing paths with giant dragons, vicious monsters and a crazy suicide cult. With his slimes and his giant wolf he tamed as well as friends he meets along the way, will he be able to overcome all adversity thrown at him while stopping the end of the world?

If you’re a n00b and find yourself not knowing what an isekai is, fret not, dear heart! For I shall explain all! To keep it short, isekai is a quite common and increasingly popular genre/trope that involves a character from our world being magically transported to some other realm, usually some kind of fantasy world. Sometimes they die and are reincarnated, sometimes it’s through the use of a portal or magical being that transports them. As for this series specifically, we never really discover how exactly Yuji gets to this fantasy world, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Like a surprising number of isekai protagonists, Yuji is right-off-the-bat ridiculously overpowered, taking down monsters and even a giant blue dragon with what seems like minimal effort. Over the course of the series, he does encounter increasingly strong antagonists that offer more of a challenge, but this general trope seems to drain a lot of the suspense out of a series. If it was done to draw more attention to character development, that would make sense. The problem here is that Yuji is basically a cipher with little emotion and no real character arc to speak of. We do see interestingly rendered rotoscopic flashbacks of his previous life as a computer programmer and it does allude to a burned out dissatisfaction Yuji had with his job and the people around him, but this also just doesn’t feel that fleshed out. On the positive side, the pacing of the series is pretty brisk, so if you’re looking for a show you can turn on and watch some big monsters being killed, this would do in a pinch. Additionally, fans seem to really dig Yuji’s slimes (I can already see the merchandising opportunities) and find them adorable. I would have liked to have seen more on the motivation of this Blue Moon of Salvation cult which the series only scratches the surface of (I assume it ends up being fleshed out in much more detail in the light novels that this is based on). I do wonder if they have plans for another season. From what I gather, there is certainly a lot more content out there to fill out the story and world more.

The A/V specs are typically solid of a newer series from Sentai. The animation itself is pretty stiff and cheap-looking at times but does improve over the course of the series. The audio is offered in both English and Japanese DTS-HD 2.0 Stereo tracks and both sound fairly robust for a stereo track. The extras are a bit light on this one with just the usual OP and ED animations and some Japanese promos, but there really isn’t other material I’m aware of that could have been included so that’s fine.

If you’ve never watched an isekai series before (and if you haven’t and have watched any anime at all then that’s a little surprising), My Isekai Life actually makes for a pretty reasonable introduction to the genre. If you’ve watched a lot of isekai though, you may find much of this very familiar and somewhat inferior to other series out there.