Intro

Isekai cheat magician. If you've gotten far enough to read this review after seeing that title, I'm going to assume you probably are willing to put up with isekai cliches to at least some degree. As a person of that type myself, having read and watched absolutely metric tons of isekai content, I have extremely high tolerances. Thus, I was able to make it through this anime. However, if you get fed up with tropes and cliches, or get easily annoyed by isekais not being original just close this review now and never watch this anime.

The Concept

This anime is a perfect recreation of the default setting and plot structure for an isekai anime. The key difference between this anime and other isekai anime out there is that they is no difference. With the saturation of the isekai genre being what it is, pretty much all other popular isekai anime in recent years have all had some unique twist to the normal formula to make themselves unique. This anime doesn't do that. Shield hero give the protagonist, well, just a shield and makes it a revenge story with the royalty being evil, slime has the main character be, well, a slime, and goes in more interesting directions with a focus on the developing city and such. Even the extremely awful "high school prodigies..." anime had the twist of each character being overpowered in a variety of different and theoretically interesting ways. This anime feels like a writer made a template story for them to experiment with changing things of to try to make an interesting isekai, but then they just published the default version instead.

The Plot

To say that the plot of this anime is anything other than generic would be a lie, as would describing basically anything about this show as anything other than generic would be. The two main characters get summoned to another world of fantasy and magic, they join the adventurers' guild, they are found to be exceedingly strong, and they train their strength to fight monsters. They uncover some nefarious people trying to do evil things and they battle them, saving the day in the end, but never actually killing the enemies because that clearly would be wrong. Seriously, I lost track of how many times they just let the villains walk away after they beat them, and it's not like those villains don't come back to cause more trouble later or anything. The royalty totally feel bad about yanking them out of their world into this dangerous world, but they also tell them that after they've finished doing all of the things that the royalty summoned them to get them to do (fight in a civil war of differing policies of Isolation or diplomacy) then they'll start trying to find a way to send them home. Of course, they don't act like the main characters have any options to not participate, and the main characters just kinda go along with it.

The Characters

I feel like a broken record here, but the characters are all exceedingly textbook examples of the roles. The main protagonist wants to protect people and help them, the female lead is similar but less headstrong, the royalty is unremarkable, the villains feel like they are always either ineffectual morons who the main characters can swat away for them to return another day, or brooding masterminds who are still somehow so dumb that they don't realize that the overpowered main characters will just stop all of their plans.