The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

I Shall Survive Using Potions!

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Nagase Kaoru, a 22-year-old office lady, suddenly finds herself reincarnated in another world. To help her survive in this new world, a being that amounts to its god gives Kaoru a younger body and... the ability to make insanely overpowered potions?! The reincarnated Kaoru must use her knowledge and cheat to survive!

I Shall Survive Using Potions! is based on a light novel series of the same name by FUNA. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

There are some things I liked about this episode. Being reincarnated in a low-fantasy world (where magic is barely existent) instead of a high-fantasy world is a good start. I also like that we see the logical consequences of Kaoru's actions—i.e., her almost immediately getting captured and brought before the greedy local lord. But the sad fact of the matter is her powers are far too overwhelming to lend the story even a hint of tension.

Her ability to make potions—of any type or size and at any number without limit—means she can do just about anything. In this episode alone we see potions that revitalize energy (meaning she'll never get tired), those that heal both minor and major wounds (meaning she can't get hurt), and a potion that changes the color of her eyes and hair—and also a bottle of chloroform. Add to this her infinite item storage box and ability to speak all languages—including animal languages—and it's hard to imagine a problem she couldn't handle: “Oh, a dragon is attacking? Let me just drop this freezing potion the size of a building on its head.”

Now, having overpowered characters isn't necessarily a bad thing but the anime has to have something else to keep things interesting. Usually, this is some unique part of the setting that limits the hero or a supporting cast that is often in danger even if the main character isn't. At this point, I Shall Survive Using Potions! has neither of these things—nor anything that does a similar job.

Because of this, I found this first episode rather boring. Sure, it's nice to have a main character who is smart enough to trick the gods into giving her all she needs to thrive in a fantasy world but that can't be the end all be all of the series. Maybe this show will pick up a bit or maybe it'll just turn into a series of cute, if largely pointless adventures. But either way, I feel no need to find out which.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

You always know what you're getting in an adaptation of a FUNA light novel: a woman who looks like a little girl trying to survive in an isekai setting, typically one that's pseudo-Medieval in setting but inexplicably has people dressed like the 19th century. Frequently, there will also be a noble of some sort who wants to take said young woman under his wing. In I Shall Survive Using Potions!, that nobleman probably wants to use Kaoru's godly potion skills for his benefit, if the guards outside her door are any indication. At least that's different from the last FUNA anime, where the nobleman wanted to full-on adopt the heroine and marry her off to one of his sons.

That doesn't stop this from feeling very rote and making me wonder if the original author is something of a one-trick pony. This feels very similar to Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement. Kaoru even has a brother who's very well-versed in isekai fiction, to the point where he gives her some advice in the dream she's allowed to send her family to tell them what happened. She is, of course, actually dead because that's what happens when a god (or "administrator") accidentally slices you in half, so there'll be no back and forthing for her. Kaoru does, however, seem relatively okay with her situation, largely because of her brother's advice to request an overpowered skill as a condition of her reincarnation.

The title gives away what that one is. However, along with the ability to create any potion she can think of, Kaoru gets the always-popular item box and the more practical ability to read, write, and speak any language she encounters. One of the best scenes is when she realizes that administratrix Celestine has included animal languages in the package. However, if she were to stop and think about it, the info the birds pass on is probably precious and will come in handy later on. Of course, it would have been nice to know that her skill puts her lightyears ahead of virtually everyone else in the world of Verny, but you can't win them all.

Apart from the blandness and familiarity, the biggest issues here are the art, which makes all short characters look like chibis, and the fact that Kaoru is annoying. She might not be under other circumstances, but we spend this episode almost entirely in her head, which quickly gets old. This may be worth a look if you've enjoyed other FUNA adaptations. Still, if you haven't, it's easy to advise against it because wherever it's headed later, this first episode feels like nothing more than a remix of the series that preceded it.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

If you watch enough isekai premieres, you eventually start feeling like you're trapped in a Groundhog's Day scenario, where a nefarious magic rodent has forced you to watch the same basic story beats play out in the exact same way with minor variations for all eternity. That's certainly what the first half of this premiere felt like, as I witnessed our bobble-headed protagonist calmly learn about her sudden, supernatural death before calmly negotiating her Isekai Severance Package with not one but two different gods. She, of course, made sure she had an overpowered skill – her words, not mine – and we got multiple mentions of how this was just like those light novels we've all presumably read. That's the problem with having so many of these goddamn things airing all the time – they keep hitting the same notions, going through the same motions, and cooking up the same potions. It's to the point where you wish Crunchyroll had a 2x speed option so you could skip past the Mandatory Isekai Tutorial section.

Not that everything after that is much better, but it's at least slightly different from things I've seen before. Like yeah, it's novel that Kaoru ended up with a power that's unheard of in this world and has to disguise herself to avoid a bunch of hassle by the local nobility when her super potions attract too much attention. That doesn't make it very interesting or worth sitting through, especially with how dry the delivery is. Maybe it would be more engaging if her power weren't limitless, and this could turn into some escape room thought experiment where she has to use her wits to sneak out with limited magical assistance. Instead, she has to chloroform a maid, swig a potion, and waltz out with nobody the wiser.

What drags it all down is the character visuals. The cast either looks like bobbleheads or background characters from other isekai shows, and the direction here is as bare bones as possible. There are jokes about Kaoru having “scary” eyes that the animation cannot portray because it looks like her eyebrows are slanted down a little. There's a bit about the God of Earth being super hot, but to the audience, he looks like the most 5/10 slice of white bread ever put to the screen. Occasionally, a background or environment looks halfway decent, but everything else feels as empty as the story. More and more, it feels like isekai shows are built out of spare parts, and this one exemplifies that.

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James Beckett
Rating:

Okay, before we go any further, I need to get on my soapbox for a second because we've reached a critical mass of narrative paradox I can no longer ignore. To all of the people out there who are writing these derivative isekai light novels, I am begging you: If you refuse to stop the dark work that you've sworn yourselves to, can you please, at the very least, stop doing that thing where you fully acknowledge that every single aspect of your story is a predictable cliché, only to spend half of your entire premiere explaining those clichés in excruciatingly dull detail, anyways? Don't get me wrong, I still don't like it when shows barely bother to waste even a second on pretending that setting up their story matters in the first place, but the way that I Shall Survive Using Potions! has chosen is equally bad. It's all bad! Stop being bad!

Okay. That's my speech. I suppose I should finish the rest of this I Shall Survive Using Potions! preview, huh? Well, that will be easy! I can just do what so many authors of these isekai stories do and mindlessly recycle my material. Let's see, if I dig back through a couple of these old isekai anime reviews, I'm sure I'll find…ah ha! Here we go, from last year's preview of Sweet Reincarnation:

“So, yeah, outside of a completely flat protagonist and a story that follows the formula of the modern reincarnation isekai down to the letter, what else does Sweet Reincarnation [I Shall Survive Using Potions!] have going for it? Um…the animation is kind of nice looking, I guess? I'm honestly at a loss…[it's] yet another title to throw onto the pile of Nothing Isekai that come and go with distressing regularity each and every season. Like the others, it will fade from memory just as quickly as it entered, and the only evidence anyone will be able to find of its existence will be the empty calories they stock up on from the snack run that this episode might possibly inspire [Okay, so this last bit doesn't work because it originally included a snack-based pun, which doesn't really make sense here. Just, I dunno, pretend I made a mildly amusing joke about potions, or something].”

There! Mission accomplished. If you're wondering why I gave this one a full half-star less than Sweet Reincarnation, it's because I don't like the character designs. Kaoru looks like a Funk Pop that's come to life, and everyone else looks like a randomly designed sprite from an RPG Maker-esque character generator. That's a hearty “No thank you!” from me, and now it's time to move on to the next show of the fall.