Hello Isekai, my old friend
I’ve come to review you again
‘Cause tropes of genre softly creeping
Came and went and left me sleeping
And the genre that was seared into my brain
Still remains
In the Land of Leadale
In the Land of Leadale has the backbone of your typical modern reincarnation-Isekai, with video game mechanics and all. The twist, I guess, is that this time our protagonist is female – high elf player character Cayna, who wakes up in Leadale after a power outage cuts her life support IRL, sending her mind on a one-way trip into the world of her favorite VR MMO.
If you think that’s abrupt, the show gets it out about as quickly. She’s insanely rich and powerful (as an endgame player would be), but there is one rub: two hundred years seem to have passed in Leadale since the timeframe in which the game was set, meaning that the lore she’s familiar with is history and there’s a whole new world out there. This, of course, suits Cayna just fine.
She goes about checking up on things, and gets two missions, one shorter and one longer term. In the short term, she aims to meet up with her “children” (NPCs she paid to create, two elves and a dwarf thus still alive), who all pretty much do regard her as their honored mother and who have made names for themselves. In the longer term, she wants to check in on the Guardian Towers of other players, as requested by her own tower’s management being.
A quick trip to the local capital involves running into the children (The high priest, the head of them mage academy, and the master craftsman) and finding one of the other towers, where the manager lets her know more or less that Leadale hit EoS and she won’t be meeting any of her old crew or other Players from earth. Having to face up to reality gets Cayna down…
Briefly.
Thereafter, she embarks on a caravan journey to the north, where there was both trace of another tower, and someone her daughter sent her with a letter to. Along the way, bandits are mopped up, and Cayna fairly easily owns up to the fact that these are people who die when they are killed with little internal struggle and no real trauma.
Similarly, she discovers that the ringleader of the bandit plague is, in fact, another player… and doesn’t think much of destroying him and his literally childish sociopathy, having to be convinced by her granddaughter to spare the guy rather than squishing him on the spot. At least she gets the tower in the area? It was made by a jerk of a player who left her a mysterious nonverbal fairy.
This opens up the idea of other players having been hit with the Isekai treatment, and shortly thereafter (upon Cayna’s return to the capitol) we meet two more, former guildmates who have been in the present Leadale for different timeframes, only to now discover each other. They meet up with Cayna thanks to an “event monster” (penguin kaiju) manifesting from trash and attacking the city. Cayna then goes about her meandering tower quest, running into a couple other players, including a former guildmate of hers (stuck in a lower-leveled alt) and a female character with an originally male player who is really bad at fitting in with this as life. In the process, Cayna saves a mermaid, beats a zombie scenario, and activates another tower.
This does make one question… why are all these players being isekai’d to Leadale circa 200 years post game? Most of the ones other than Cayna know about her death and even Leadale’s End of Service, but they seem to have been in Leadale… longer than her but not the whole time. I think we hear figures ranging from ten years to pretty much fresh off the boat like Cayna. They weren’t all brought in at once, and it doesn’t seem to respect anything regarding their personal timelines. There’s no rhyme nor reason to who is pulled in either. It’s not the most powerful players as none of Cayna’s fellow “Skill Master” sorts seem to be kicking around, it’s not just long-lived races since we see a few humans as well as dragonfolk and Cayna’s elf pick, it’s not heroes since we had that kid leading the bandits, and if anyone other than Cayna had special circumstances to enter we don’t hear what those are. In fact, two of the other players even freak out a little at the idea she’s some kind of ghost, so we can guess that’s not their story too
When it was just Cayna, it was easy to roll with the setup. Sure, fine, she bit the dust plugged in so she gets a magical adventure. Introducing all these other players with no consistency, rhyme, or reason isn’t just weird, it feels sloppy. Like the creators looked at the social interaction in Bofuri that leveraged the joys of online gaming and said, “Let’s have that too”.
Anyway, once Cayna finishes the zombie arc (coming away from it with a random little girl as her new ward) the show’s almost over.
The last two episodes are pretty much just Cayna settling down with her new daughter by building a house in the starter town (not that I’d assume her to be permanently retired from her find-the-towers quest), ending with a recap to make it seem like more things happened than actually did.
And that’s In the Land of Leadale. Is it any good?
In a lot of ways, I see this as an opposite number to Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody. Both are much fluffier than these Isekai affairs tend to be. However, unlike Death March, Leadale is actually comfortable with that. It doesn’t try to have epic battles or high stakes plots. You know Cayna is going to steamroll any combat encounter in this game, and the show makes no secret of that. At the same time, it’s not concerned with combat encounters nearly as much as it could be, so while once in a while it’s fun to watch whatever over-the-top nonsense Cayna summons, that’s as far as it goes.
And instead of the slave awkwardness, pointless dates, and lame attempts at drama we get… a slightly less lame sitcom family. I’ll be honest, Cayna’s kids may need to cover a lot of screen time, but they’re pretty single noted. They play off of mom and each other decently well, so that’s not really a crime.
My biggest bother is probably how totally the “other players” aspect is gutterballed, but again this doesn’t really want to do a big adventure, it just wants to be the story of this girl who had no life because she was hospitalized from early childhood now having a life. I’d say don’t introduce it if you’re not going to use it, but I get that peers she can interact with as such are part of that. On the other side, I like that Cayna isn’t perfect. She gets mad, even unreasonably so, when people surprise her or bring up her edgelord phase. She can’t hold her liquor, and social pressure frequently leaves her with a hangover to regret. That doesn’t sound like much, and indeed she is mostly your milquetoast nice girl… but compared to some Isekai protagonists I’ve had to sit through, she’s at least a little bit more interesting to watch than paint drying.
So is it a good show? I’m going to go with no. It’s not quite slice of life, because it doesn’t have the depth into the lives of its characters you’d expect from that, but it’s still kind of… air. It’s invisible and you can move through it unhindered
I debated myself long and hard on this one, but I think I’m going to give In the Land of Leadale a D+. It’s better than Death March, even markedly, but its greatest virtue is in just being painless. It’s still a pretty boring show that achieves little, it just has a few kernels of nice moments to coast on. If you’re thinking of watching In the Land of Leadale, I think you can do better.