There are a few pieces of media that seem… unreal. Concept or pitches that seem too stupid to be real, the fiction equivalent of satire where the very thought that this is being pitched is, in some ways, an indictment of the genre, studio, culture, or what have you that supposedly spawned it. If I told you that there was a fighting video game called “Attack of the Busty Vixens!”, you’d probably laugh. Sure, there are a lot of fighting games that get mileage out of their well-endowed females, but nothing would be that bald-faced. Similarly if I said there was a sci-fi novel called “Philosophy 101 in SPACE” you’d know I was just making fun of the tendency – legitimate storytelling technique or no – to have alien species or even human groups in science fiction be defined by one all-consuming ideology each.
This was how I felt when I heard there was an isekai harem anime called “In Another World With My Smartphone” – like it couldn’t possibly be real. This had to be satire about how isekai shows would use any lame thing they could grab as a “Cheat Power”. However, I have to report that this one is, in fact, real.
The show cold opens with main character Touya meeting with God. God apologizes for the inconvenience, but it seems he dropped a lightning bolt on Touya’s head, and now he’s dead. Touya takes it freakishly well (even God is a bit confused at that), though really I suppose there’s not much he can do. God says he’ll be reincarnated at once, but in another world since just putting him back would be against the rules. To make up for the blunder, he also asks if Touya would like anything. At that point, Touya requests it to be possible for him to use his smartphone in the new world, which God arranges (including the rules for what he can access, some new stuff like Gods’ number and a new world map app, and magic-based battery charging). Thus, our isekai character is dropped off in the clean, pretty, period-esque world of unspecified magic with his crazy request and all the basic protagonist boosts. He finds his feet extremely quickly, of course, getting some starting funds and a pair of cute twins to party up with, Elze (the outgoing loud one) and Linze (the shy quiet one) fairly shortly.
Even before the Smartphone comes into play, it seems he’s got even more game breakers with powerful combat abilities and unprecedented magic variety – every element at high power and fast travel teleport, just to start his adventure of having the power to have all powers. He even tries out a spell like Kazuma’s Steal, with the same effect discussed but not seen. The show really goes all in on making our main character a nice common dude with every advantage in the world.
We very quickly pick up our third girl, Yae, the very hungry samurai girl and with her meet/save a little girl named Sushie, daughter of a duke and niece of the king, earning an obscene bankroll, special permissions, and top-ranked patronage in the process. You know, all the amenities to make up for our lead’s lack of personality.
The plot tries to step up a little with an attempted assassination of the king (Via poison, easily cured with Touya’s magic) and, as the culprit is fingered with another spell, this sees Touya betrothed to the young princess much to his… kind of surprising horror. I get it, he’s sixteen and she’s twelve, which is not an acceptable gap (for modern Japan. For Faux Medieval Europe, it’s of course a-ok), until much later than the two year pause to arrangements proposed, but you’d think being welcomed into literal royalty with a starstruck young lady begging for the match would not get a “this feels like a bad dream”. It’s slightly problematic at worst. If this is your bad dream, the good ones must be something else. God even phones to both congratulate him and reassure our lead that polygyny is normal in fantasy land so he needn’t miss out just because the princess is head over heels.
Far be it from me to suggest that social structures other than the familiar modern westernized societal mores shouldn’t be explored, but it’s clear why this one is being explored here and now. Audience, please pretend you’re this guy while the silver platters loaded with everything you could want are brought around faster than dinner courses at Beast’s castle. Try the harem, it’s delicious, don’t believe me? Ask the dishes! But don’t ask this guy, he’s denser than a neutron star.
In any case, the princess actually up and joins the party because while she has the mystic eyes of character quality perception, Touya needs to get used to her. Around now, he also manages to summon the White Tiger (as in, of the four guardian beasts motif, basically a demigod) and make it his pet, just sort of offhand so we get a new character in cute cat form except when tiger rear-kicking is needed. Yeah. After an episode getting vignettes with each of the girls, we get another something resembling a larger story continues as the party is asked to travel ahead to a neighboring nation in order to be able to teleport the king and other dignitaries in without a harrowing journey. In the distant land we meet another girl, Leen, who visually fits in with the rest of the harem but is a 600-year-old fairy archmage who wants our lead as an apprentice. At this point I’m not even surprised, we’re doing all the tropes. He also makes himself a handgun that morphs into a sword using dragon fang (complete with rubber bullets for a nonlethal option), starts to arm up more of the party and… is there really any point to listing off all the “All the shiny things” this guy gets? And most of it isn’t even highlighted, there’s just too much wish fulfillment to make big moments of all of it so the show just has this parade of drive-by gains that, in any other narrative, would probably have been big deals. I haven’t even recorded all of them. There’s even a point where our lead obliterates an army of immortal zombies with one spell and the other characters comment it’s not even surprising any more. Because it’s not.
Because, generally, they are things that should be big deals. A decent show could take any one of the boons our lead here earns and spin an entire character arc out of it. The service of a divine mythical beast, the hand of a princess, the power to use other peoples’ normally unique magic powers, the ability to craft modern inventions like bicycles and revolvers in a fantasy setting, some of the individual spells… all could make for compelling hooks that would give the character with them an interesting layout of opportunities and possibly even challenges. Even the smartphone (which is frankly under-utilized as stupid as it sounded) with adapted apps and read-only access to the Earthly internet, a camera, a flashlight, and so on could have been an interesting tool for a character to have if the character were a legitimate guile hero and not a complete tool himself. If that were a character’s only advantage in a hostile world, it could be interesting in a MacGyver-esque sort of way to see how they leverage the knowledge in order to overcome difficult trials.
You might ask why it’s a problem, strictly speaking. Can’t something just be a fun bit of pandering? Strictly speaking, it’s fine to have shows that exist primarily as fanservice, but even then one should expect some small degree of intelligence from them, and they work better when they’re lighter and not as wasteful as this is. Helpful Fox Senko-san works because it’s a little story about little people. Senko is close to flawless but even then she can only do so much for her poor ward’s stress and exhaustion. In Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, there’s more energy and more power on the table, what with Tohru being able to do just about anything she wants, but the show works because the characters, even Kobayashi, are all insane in their own rights and the power that Tohru wields isn’t really adapted to her setting, so there’s comedy in the mismatch of what she’s capable of and what she’s trying to do. So what about the action side? There are other fanservice-heavy, wish-fulfillment-heavy shows there, right? In Trinity Seven Arata has a similar capability to Touya here in that Arata is able to learn the magic of others, but it takes him significant effort to do it and he’s constantly thrown into do-or-die trials that are beyond the capabilities he knows for certain he has going in. In Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs you’ve got a more similar structure and feel to this show, but Yuuna, while not a good show, knew to keep its focus tight and its theme clear. Our lead there can punch spirits into the next world in the first episode, and while we see him as strong rather than weak by the last episode that’s still basically his power. And along the way the show, for all its stupidity and ecchi harem antics, knew that there was an inherent pathos in ghosts and the invisible and would occasionally, rarely, milk that. Hell, even Omamori Himari, a wish fulfillment Harem show that I absolutely hated in the end, tried more and achieved more than In Another World with my Smartphone.
It’s kind of amazing, in a way, how this show gets everything so very wrong. There’s no one moment that insults you, no horrifying turn like Koi Koi Seven, just a steady snowball of wasted moments and wasted ideas providing an ever growing rotten stench beneath the saccharine fantasy. Any one of the advantages handed out like candy on Halloween in this show could carry another show. Any one episode or even vignette in this show could probably be a major plot arc in another show. But because these bits aren’t given the time and respect to have weight, they lose all the awesome potential or even staggeringly adequate potential that they might have had.
Once upon a time, I heard an idea floated that the torments of Hell wouldn’t simply be pain. Rather, Hell would take what you might have enjoyed and twist and corrupt it so that only sorrow and not happiness could be squeezed out of any former pleasure, insidiously undermining whatever the tormented would hold dear. In a sense, this show is that kind of hell for wish fulfillment Isekai. It talks the talk, suckering people in with the idea that they’re going to have a good time, but it doesn’t walk the walk and deliver anything resembling a good time itself, because none of the elements are presented in such a way that you could enjoy them. I’ve gone on and on about the story elements and the rewards and powers but even the fanservice is off. You’d think with the number of cute girls in this show they could at least slip us some ecchi, and while there are contexts in which I could find that worse (see Omamori Himari), it’s… basically absent for most of the show and extremely tame when it does appear. The show is far too tame and harmless to a fault to offer up anything actually steamy.
And, alright, comparing this show to the idea of Hell is far too melodramatic for what it is. In a strict sense, it can’t really be called that bad. The animation is competent if underwhelming. The opening has a fun tune and some basic character and action shots to cover what an opening needs. The voice acting is on note. Each episode has a chain of events that follows logically and the characters do stuff that makes sense. This isn’t bad the way Ex-Arm is bad or Koi Koi Seven is bad. It’s junk food. But, unlike some shows I’ve reviewed and called junk food, I’ve got the creeping feeling that In Another World With My Smartphone isn’t the kind of junk food you can have once in a while and feel fine, it’s the kind of junk food that sends you to the hospital needing a quadruple bypass.
And, really, no greater plot emerges. There are hints of an enemy known as the Fraze (including one being fought early in the show) but nothing of their threat actually manifests, it’s pretty much an excuse to go to set pieces as lame as the ones we left and have a conversation with a pre-recorded message left by a hyper-accurate seer. (If you’re wondering, the internet comedy show did that one better). It’s all just window dressing for the harem BS which, because “You can have them all” is aggressively pushed, doesn’t really have any conflict outside Touya being kind of a wimp all things considered.
We do at least pay God another visit to find him watching the series as a soap opera, which sees the god(dess) of love and harem cliches called in to provide advice and pretty much just tell him to go for it. I’m not sure this scenario needed the divine assistance of the harem trope god to resolve. Nothing in this show ever reaches the level of the dramatic.
And, if you can believe it, after a last episode 100% dedicated to getting an “I’ll marry all of you eventually” resolve, they have the gall to throw in a post-credits scene with the sinister white-haired boy who was in the opening looking like a villain but never showed, as if to give us some kind of cliff hanger. Sorry, not interested. Nothing you did was worth interest. I know it’s going to start nowhere, go nowhere, have no drama, have no tension, and ultimately resolve trivially.
This show was… differently bad, as I’ve already explained. No one scene properly conveys how much of a waste of air it is. Hell, for a couple episodes, I was even fooled into thinking something like “Okay, this is bad, but I don’t see why people got so terribly angry at it.”
And then, slowly, I saw. In Another World With My Smartphone isn’t bad in one stroke, it’s not remarkable in its horror. It doesn’t look or sound or even necessarily feel at first like a completely awful show. But its staggering lack of intelligence or meaningful storytelling weighs on you, grinds you down. It’s soporific poison and I feel dumber for watching it. If you want comfort with a side of mayhem, watch Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. If you want a show with a powerful male lead who’ll get to keep a full harem, watch Trinity Seven. If you want to see the common isekai tropes played to their fullest potential, watch Rising of the Shield Hero. If you want to see a light, fun isekai that’s aware of its tropes, watch KonoSuba. But for Haruhi’s sake don’t watch this show. Whatever itch you’ve got, there’s a better way to scratch it.
While In Another World With My Smartphone may not be as flagrantly broken as other shows I’ve given a Fail to, it would be a straight-up insult to everything else that I’ve rated in the D’s to give it any higher, and frankly when looked at as a whole package an insult to some of the Fails too. Say all the mean things in the world about Omamori Himari or Familiar of Zero: Knight of the Twin Moons (please), but they at least tried before falling flat on their faces. I’m not going to invent some new F- grade (I would have done that for Koi Koi Seven or Ex-Arm if I was going to), but I’m certainly going to award In Another World With My Smartphone a big, fat Fail.