Common Name: Tensei shitara Slime Datta Ken
Alternative Names: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, TenSura
Score: 6/10, 2/5
Length: 24 Episodes, 1 Recap Episode
Genre: Isekai, Fantasy, Comedy, Action, Magic
Summary: After being fatally stabbed to protect his junior office worker, Satoru Mikami finds himself reborn in a fantastical world as one the weakest monsters in fantasy worlds--a slime. Yet, due due his lack of any social or romantic life in his previous world, he has been gifted with a number of special buffs ranging from dulled pain receptors and invulnerability to fire to the power to absorb the powers of anything he eats to an assist AI in his mind called "The Great Sage." So, thanks to all these perks and his quickly earning the friendship and will of the mighty dragon Veldora, the slime now named Rimuru Tempest is actually pretty powerful. Whether he'll use that power responsibly to aid his fellow monsters or use it to conquer the world, only time can tell.
Review: Considering the overwhelming popularity of this quirky but charming show, I'm going to enforce my right to keep this review short--or at least shorter than my usual fare. As to what I'm going to do with this relatively short review, I plan to put forward what I understand to be a fairly unpopular opinion. And that opinion is this: at its best, TenSura was only ever OK as a show. At its worst, though, it was absolutely atrocious. Thankfully, the sources of this issue and reasons why the show's quality tends to rapidly fluctuate are rather easy to identify. From its very beginning, this show has fundamentally struggled with two distinct problems. The first is that it often struggles to manage any kind of consistent pace that could effectively meter out the highs and lows of the plot in such a way that the show as a whole reached some kind of tonal consistency. The second is that the show's story utterly failed to establish any kind of stakes that could reasonably match the drama of each dramatic arc. So, rather than getting an action-packed romp full of laughs and amazing action scenes, all we got was a fairly competent comedy with anticlimactic fights that never felt like they served any purpose. In other words, as I said during the Season Wrap-Up, TenSura peaked early and failed to deliver on the hype the first couple of episodes promised.
Or at least no purpose beyond honoring the might and intellect of this world's new god, Rimuru "Man Among Men" Tempest.
These two problems are, of course, nothing new to isekai power fantasies and certainly not a novel issue for anime in general, yet I cannot think of any anime in recent history that botched things this badly. The signs of the plotting issue were pretty obvious from the start, considering that it took a good third of the first episode just to deliver on what the show's title already stated--that the show's main character was, in fact, reborn as a slime. But, to be fair, that third of the show was filled with great visuals and visual puns that at least made the dragging revelation entertaining. For the most part, though, the plotting issue doesn't crop up again until Rimuru effortlessly deals with his first real fight against Ifrit. Up until that point, actually, TenSura actually manages to be a fairly interesting look into the effort of community building in an isekai. After winning the friendship of a sealed dragon, acquired a number of useful skills, and endeared himself to the local goblin village in the Great Forest of Jura, Rimuru effectively becomes the budding Overlord to a community of monsters. In this manner, we were treated to an aspect never really considered before in the isekai genre. In SAO, the towns, villages, and communities were already established facts of the world that players simply occupied. In Log Horizon, the alliances and camaraderie had already been established in the guild system. And, lastly, in Overlord, Ainz already had the beginnings of his kingdom due to the sheer overwhelming power of his monstrous army, turning his world conquest into a question of "when" rather than "how." Apart from his established over-power base, Rimuru is coming into this world with no real network to build off of. So, watching him uplift a small goblin village and build upon it with treaties and alliances makes for something fairly novel in the over-saturated isekai genre.
Even if those alliances ultimately end up being a cheap and easy
access to titillation, at least it's something.
That hype and intrigue of building a world from the ground up only grows as Rimuru turns his eye toward alliances with other nations. Though it is still an easy solution for him to solve, Rimuru's interactions with the mercantile empire of Dwargon and botched first impression is actually the only real failure Rimuru encounters throughout the series. While the consequences of his actions are quickly forgotten in the interest of moving his "plans" forward later down the line, he still doesn't fully achieve his intended goal in that one instance--a fact both he and the king of Dwargon momentarily lament. But, following that botched trade agreement, the hype only builds further as we are properly introduced to this world's adventurer faction and the catastrophically deadly political intrigue of the Demon Lords. With Shizu's introduction, we actually get a good glimpse at the heart of this show that is normally buried beneath a mountain of tropes and cynicism. In fact, one of the show's few legitimately affecting moments is Rimuru's miraculously photographic memory to project everything Japan has achieved since Shizu was summoned as a little girl. In that moment we get to see Rimuru's kindness toward those like himself as well as the bare bones of what he wants to lift this fantasy world up to. All the better, he adamantly claims that he wishes to do this through peace and symbiotic prosperity between all the beings and nations of this world, rather than brute force and tyrannical conquest.
Of course, it's naive to assume such grand plans can go off without any...complications.
Touching and meaningful as Shizu's introduction might be, the end of her arc is ultimately what I consider to be the beginning of the end for this show as a whole. It is at this point that all the world building, alliances, and potentially great character moments are just thrown out the window for the sake of repeating this show's pointless action arcs ad nauseam. I say these arcs are "repeated" mainly because, from this arc onward, they just follow the exact same pattern with little to no variation. For example, let's take a hard look at the show's first real fight against the higher spirit Ifrit. This is a foe that is given some buildup thanks to the status that Shizu's status in the world lends it, considering that it is the source of her power. Moreover, it is one that could understandably do a great deal of damage to Rimuru's budding nation of monsters. Narratively speaking, there's obviously no question that Rimuru will triumph but there has yet to be any statement of what he might lose from this battle. Whether it be simply walking away moderately damaged or a loss of the power he started with, a good number of things could have potentially been on the line here since this would be Rimuru's first battle where there might be stakes. Yet, just as quickly as the fight begins, the results are already decided. Tanks to him being immune to fire from the very beginning, Rimuru simply walks away from this ordeal wholly unharmed. Any damage his village might have suffered in the attack is mended the very next day. Nothing is lost in this battle except Shizu herself as she is quickly consumed, subsequently adding to Rimuru's power, as an act of kindness. Yet, touching as this one loss might have been, it quickly turns hollow as this supposedly important character's death is immediately turned into a crude joke about what sex Rimuru's new human form will be.
I'll be totally honest and just say that I found this entire gag disgusting. I understand where
it's coming from but it utterly destroyed what little respect I had for Rimuru.
Following this fight, nearly every arc follows the exact same pattern. First, tension is built for the battle that is to come. Second, the threat draws nearer as Rimuru toys with the powers he gained from the last arc. Then Rimuru's attention is finally drawn to the coming threat by a new, would-be companion(s) for his growing nation. After incorporating these new allies into his ranks, Rimuru is finally given no choice but to deal with the coming threat. Once the threat actually arrives, he gives his subordinates the chance to show off how much they've grown since the last arc. During this phase, Rimuru is often shocked since he has no real gauge of what is own power actually is and it is generally assumed that he is orders of magnitude stronger than his allies. Then, finally, it's time for Rimuru to take the field, end the fight without any real resistance, and then adopt yet more people into his budding nation. While the Orc Lord arc is the perfect example of this, the same can also be seen in the Charybdis arc with a minor adjustment being made in the case of Millim. Even the arc with Shizu's students follows much the same pattern as he just kinda effortlessly resolves the conflict of that arc through his and The Great Sage's brute strength.
Of course, that use of strength basically voids his earlier promise to Shizu to build his world peacefully.
While the world building and politics Rimuru engages in are still entertaining to watch on some level, I ultimately found it harder and harder to care the longer the show went on. In spite of the threats to his ambitions growing with each arc, there has yet to be any kind of consequence for his actions that hasn't been immediate justified. As I mentioned in the case of Dwargon, his solitary failure to establish any kind of alliance are wholly forgotten after the Orc Lord arc now that he possesses a nation that can't be reasonably opposed. No matter whether he faces a Demon Lord or some ancient horror placed on a pedestal on par with his long-forgotten friend Veldora, there's never any doubt that Rimuru and company will turn out perfectly fine when all is said and done. The problem with that pattern, though, if I'm being perfectly blunt, is that it's just plain boring. No stakes means no intrigue or drama to get invested in. Arcs that go up and down and dedicate entire episodes to nothing actually happening thanks to the show's terrible pacing only exacerbate that issue further. Pair that with the million other nits I could pick with this show--i.e. the fact that Rimuru's uplifting the various monster races is basically an unabashedly sexist kind of whitewashing--and you just end up with a disappointing mess dotted with only a few actually good episodes. Don't get me wrong, I love the look of this show and do enjoy its world and what the show plans to do with it a fair deal. But the truth of the matter is that I simply don't care about the driving character of this plot any longer. Rather, I'll be watching the show's second season just so I can get some good laughs out of the rest of the show's cast.