The Spring 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure: Serving Gods Who Go Too Far

After dying in the act of stopping a crime in modern Japan, our hero is reincarnated as Cain von Silford, the third son of a noble family in a world of swords and sorcery. In his new life, all children receive a blessing from the gods...but Cain is unexpectedly blessed with an absolutely enormous, over-the-top cornucopia of magical powers. If his dream of traveling the world as a free spirit is to come true, he can't reveal too much of his potential to the wrong people. A light-hearted, escapist adventure in another world begins!

The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure: Serving Gods Who Go Too Far is based on Yashu's light novels and streams on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

When watching anime in a super well-trod genre like being transported to/reincarnated in a fantasy world, I always ask myself the same question: What's the twist? What sets this anime apart from all those surrounding it? Good or bad, I can usually find something new that I haven't seen a thousand times before—something that gives the series some kind of novelty. Sadly, with The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventures, I found nothing.

I mean, this series is pretty much a generic isekai checklist. Is the main character from our world? Check. Was he killed accidentally? Check. Is the world he's reborn into a western-style fantasy world with knights and magic? Check. Does he retain his memories from our world? Check. Is he reborn as a noble? Check. Is he genre-savvy enough to understand what's happened to him and keep it secret? Check. Does he have a new, loving family? Check. Do the gods dote on him? Check. Was he granted numerous “cheat” skills that make him overpowered? Check. Do all the girls, including his sister, want him? Check.

Maybe all that would be okay if he had some kind of personality beyond “I saved those girls that one time.” Everything else we see from him is something that could apply to anyone in his situation. Who wouldn't feel weird about suddenly being in a kid's body or being treated like a baby to the point where they check to see if you wet yourself and burp you after meals? A majority of what happens to him is played for laughs but none of it is particularly funny. The whole episode didn't get a single laugh from me.

Frankly, I was bored from the start and stayed that way throughout. Unless the character design of one of the many upcoming harem members we see in the opening/ending really gets you going, I can't see any reason anyone would want to keep watching this one. I know I won't be.

You know the drill: Young man dies in modern Japan doing something noble, wakes up in a new toddler body in a fantasy world. Is ludicrously gifted, decides to become an adventurer. Girls throw themselves at him, starting with his older sister. There are stat windows and RPG-style levels. Sigh.

The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure might be a better premiere if it tried at all to be, if not different than other similar stories, then at least a little bit better. Instead, this is half an hour of exactly what you've seen before. Kazuya even died “protecting” girls from a nonexistent danger, à la KONOSUBA—the girls he “saved” were in no danger and he not only lost his own life, he also turned their would-be assailant into a real assailant. That may not be so bad in the scheme of things, since anyone who would threaten someone with a knife needs help, but still, it doesn't make Kazuya, now Cain, look particularly good. Despite that, his intentions were good, so it's off to OP-land with him, with the blessing of all the gods.

Probably the best thing about this episode is that it has a light touch. It isn't interested in being serious, and once the pesky setup is out of the way, that could make this a frothy show in a good way. The whole “social debut at age five” thing is a bit odd and perhaps indicative of core problems with the story's world-building, but it's not quite a deal breaker if other things about the episode work for you. Other unexplained gaps are more of an issue, although it could just be me who spent most of the time wondering if Cain's dad is married to two women at the same time who live in separate households or if his first wife died. For me, that indicates that there's just not enough to dig into and that the story is moving both too quickly and not convincingly enough to excuse such issues. In any event, unless you're deeply invested in this iteration of the isekai genre, there's really not much here.

Watching this premiere was a bit like getting hit in the face with a stream of lukewarm water. It's annoying, unpleasant, yet somehow too tepid to actually shock you the way that cold or scalding hot water would. This episode is a perfect mix of tedious and annoying that manages to sprint through multiple episodes of exposition while still feeling like nothing of note has happened. It would almost be impressive if it weren't so pitiful.

Take any idea from the last 1,000 isekai series to be halfheartedly tossed onto television, and it's probably here, delivered with all the grace of a living Funko Pop figure screaming into your ear. Our charisma-devoid hero dies a generically heroic death, gets reincarnated as a super powerful magic baby in a generic fantasy world, and proceeds to have exposition hurled at him for 20 minutes. There's even a scene where the entire pantheon of Gods in this world show up to tell this bobbleheaded melvin that he's so super special and amazing that they're giving him all their blessing. It's rote, exhausting trash that might as well have been spewed out by random word generator for all the creativity it portrays.

That would be enough to throw this thing in the garbage, but it gets that extra bit more irritating when the show refuses to shut up for five seconds, filling every moment with loud, shrill voice acting and cheap, generic music at full blast. Pair that with some truly horrendous editing and direction, which constantly recycles the already lousy animation, and you have a recipe for something truly insufferable. Every scene feels like somebody running full pelt up a descending escalator, exerting a ton of effort and energy to accomplish basically nothing.

It's god damn miserable, is my point. It's so awful I couldn't even be bothered turning this review into an Aristocrats joke. I am sincerely hoping this is the nadir for this season's isekai offerings, because I don't want to imagine it can get actively worse than this.

It is getting really hard to come up with new ways to make the exact same criticisms about all of these trash copycat isekai anime that aren't even pretending to differentiate themselves from one another anymore. The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure quite literally has absolutely nothing to offer even the most terminally addicted genre fan; it is so devoid of even one iota of genuine creativity, in fact, that it spends this entire premiere speedrunning through all off the stalest tropes and story beats, just so it can cover even more stale tropes and story beats.

Our main guy, Shiina, gets stabbed to death when he foils the world's most pointless attempted murder, and then he wakes up as a rich little toddler named Cain who has all of his old memories, a sister with a brother complex, access to a bunch of magical powers, and yada, yada, yada. There's a lot of shrill line delivery and an incessantly corny soundtrack running throughout the whole premiere, because apparently this series fashions itself to be a comedy, which is horrible news for anyone watching this show that still believes in the possibility of laughter as a general concept.

I wasn't being snide when I said that Shiina/Cain died in the world's most pointless crime, earlier, since the closest that this episode gets to a halfway funny joke is when our protagonist meets those titular “Gods Who Go Too Far” and learns that his painful demise was truly a waste of time, since the criminal would have tripped over himself and avoided a for-realsies murder charge if Cain had just stayed out of things. So if you ever needed more proof that a series doesn't have a good reason to exist, The Aristocrat's Otherworldly Adventure spends a good amount of time reminding us that its whole premise is based on God taking pity on some idiot for dying the most embarrassing death imaginable, and then making him some other universe's problem because He truly cannot be bothered. Nor can I, as it turns out, and I recommend that you all heed my advice and steer clear of this stinker.