In Another World With My Smartphone

One day, a boy died unexpectedly, and since his death was unplanned, he wound up in front of a deity who offered him a chance at another life in a new world. He was granted one favor, and he used it to bring a presumably useful item with him, only for it to fall far short of it’s potential as he became an adventure, built up a harem of useless girls, and tried to survive in a fantasy world of unfamiliar magic.

If it sounds like I just rattled off the plot of Konosuba with all the interesting and funny parts taken out, well, yeah. That’s what this is. Not literally, but pretty much.

In Another World with my Smartphone, which I’m just going to be calling Smartphone from now on, was produced by Production Reed, a studio so obscure that I’m honestly surprised that I’ve mentioned them before. They were fairly prolific in previous decades, mostly sticking to obscure genre fare, but it seems like they’ve made efforts to produce more modern-style work for several years now. Smartphone is one of only six anime I can find credited to them since 2003, sporting a far more polished aesthetic than anything from their roots. Honestly, some of these titles look pretty good.

I mentioned in my Vampire Hunter D review that it looked passable despite having a low budget, and the same applies to Smartphone. There are cost-cutting tricks spread all over the series, but they’re only really noticeable when you’re looking for them, and they’re fairly unobtrusive. I’ve said before that I prefer cheap productions that managed their budget well over big, lavish productions throwing around Pixar level money, and while Smartphone’s animation isn’t anything revolutionary, it does what it has to do to stay smooth and consistent.

The character designs, as well, are more than serviceable. They’re easy on the eyes, although they’re also painfully generic. You’ve got the dark haired samurai girl, the outgoing loli, the rich blonde girl who brings up marriage way too fast, the twin sisters where(and stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the older sibling has longer hair and a more outgoing and dominant personality while the younger sibling has short hair and a more reserved and submissive personality. And, of course, you have the harem lead who looks pretty much the same as every other harem lead. Like I said, none of the characters are bad looking... I’m willing to bet they do just fine at pushing merchandise... But you’ve seen them all before.

The English dub is pretty solid, and it’s probably the best thing about the series. The actors blend into their characters so well that I find myself taking the presence of actors for granted, and that kind of speaks for itself. The only detail of note is that Josh Grelle spends most of his time just spouting generic harem-lead dialogue, asking questions, spouting exposition and just being blandly nice, but he suddenly goes way over the top any time his character has to show actual emotion. There are random moments of dialogue where he’ll basically take any excuse to over-act and give a melodramatic delivery. It’s like he spends most of his performance as a bent hose, just occasionally unwinding for bursts of personality at unpredictable intervals, and I kind of love that.

So, many years ago, I had a group of friends that liked going to movies together. It was our thing. When the first trailer for The Purge came out in 2013, of course they all wanted to go. I did too, kind of, but there was something about the premise that nagged at me. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize just how huge the concept it was presenting really was. One night where all crime was legal... The implications were horrifying. There are so many awful things people could do if given that kind of an opportunity, and this movie was using it as a cheap excuse for why the cops aren’t called during a home invasion story. In a wide release American movie.

Don’t get me wrong, they portrayed some stuff. Looting, murder, property damage. But the true extent of that concept was too gruesome, soo dark, and way too consequential for a major studio to ever stake it’s reputation on. What about arson? Entire neighborhoods burning to the ground, all because of some random dude with a rag and a lighter? Or not even a random dude, but the KKK burning down minority neighborhoods? What about animal abuse, or all the unspeakable things parents and like-minded adults could do to children? There would be long term planning involved with a lot of this. I dunno, maybe the sequels addressed some of this shit, but at the time I had no faith that an American movie with that kind of backing could ever go as far as it needed to go to do such a terrifying idea justice.

Why am I bringing up The Purge, you ask? Because there were multiple points during Smartphone where I found myself saying, “You know, at least The Purge had an excuse.”

The concept of an isekai protagonist bringing a working smartphone into a magical world with him is an inherently creative idea. Much like The Purge, it also happens to carry a ton of implications and possibilities. Off the top of my head, maybe he looks up the news about his death? Maybe he looks up his family and friends on social media to see what they’re saying about him, and how they’re dealing with his loss? Hell, he’s fifteen, I’m sure his parents would have a lot to say. Imagine him alone in some scene, reading his mother’s heartfelt facebook post about him while he tears up silently in the night.

Or how about people see the mysterious artifact and accuse him of using arcane or demonic magic? Maybe people see how much he’s able to do with it, and they instantly distrust him? Or maybe somebody steals it, and becomes corrupted in some way by the knowledge they find on it? Maybe he can download movies to show his new friends? Or they become addicted to some weird games on it?

They don’t do anything I just mentioned. Literally none of it. Throughout the series, he only has two uses for his smartphone that stand out to me; He looks up how to make some things, an he takes some pictures. That’s it. He also uses it to enhance his magic in some scenes, but the magic itself is far more memorable in every instance. Hell, the fact that he has unprecedented access to all forms of magic FAR outweighs his actual smartphone usage by a substantial margin. That is not how you should use a gimmick that you based the title of your series on. Probably worst of all is the fact that pretty much everything he does with it SHOULD still be revolutionary and world-changing, but the biggest reaction he ever gets from anybody is along the lines of “That’s so cool!” or “Would you look at that...”

And the lack of imagination goes a lot deeper than just the premise. I made a brief comparison to Konosuba at the start of this review, which might have made some of you cringe, but the two shows are somewhat similar. In Smartphone, we open with the protag already in front of God, being told that he died. He’s surprisingly cool with it. God lets him go to a new world, and he gives him a ton of convenient advantages to help him survive there. This scene technically works, as it does set up the premise, at least in a bare-bones sense, but all we learn outside of that is that Touya has no real personality, and God apparently has rules he has to follow. Somehow.

Compare that to Konosuba. We see Kazuma’s previous life, his pathetic death, and an entirely unique scene where he’s mocked by the deity he meets in the afterlife, so he gets back at her by dragging her into a new world with him. This opening is brimming with personality and humor. Rather than just set up the plot and introduce a couple characters, like Smartphone, it lets you know right off the bat what kind of people the two leads are, just how mean-spirited and diabolical the show’s sense of humor is going to be, and even the fact that you’ll probably never feel guilty for laughing at it. The dynamic between Kazuma and Aqua is so unique and hysterical that you immediately crave more of it.

I’m not going to go into all of the characters... I implied how generic they were when I discussed their designs, and they’re pretty much the exact characters you’d expect them to be, at least down to the lowest common denominator. You never learn literally anything about Touya throughout the series, and the girls are all madly in love with him and(aside from the twins) have no unique dynamic with each other outside of being each other’s competition. I could talk about the world they inhabit, but honestly, there’s nothing special about that, either. It’s just your typical fantasy RPG world.

There are attempts at world building, but little of it matters in the long run. Not long after Touya arrives, for example, a passing noble obsessively offers to buy his strange, otherworldly clothes. This is a good building block for future development, as well as a convenient way to get some currency in the protag’s pockets, but it never really comes back, and it’s undermined several episodes later by a beach episode where everyone just conveniently has normal, modern-day bikinis. Similarly, the fact that Touya had to invent ice cream was also an inspired idea, but it feels weird that they already had cake, and all the ingredients for ice cream just happened to conveniently exist. This also doesn’t really go anywhere. Hey, remember the massive impact flavored burgers had on the world of Log Horizon? Good times. The invention of bikes also fails to really make an impact.

Look, an isekai anime doesn’t necessarily need a strong cast, and it doesn’t necessarily need a strong world, but it should at least have one of those things. Konosuba’s fantasy world was honestly kind of generic, pretty much on par with Smartphone’s, but it didn’t matter because of how strong the characters were. You put Aqua and Kazuma in any environment, it’s gonna be entertaining. On the other side of the coin, the main cast of 12 Kingdoms wasn’t much to write home about, but it didn’t matter because the world it sent them to was unique, complex and full of breathtaking details. Smartphone doesn’t have a strong cast of characters OR a strong world, so the only chance it has left is if it takes a page out of Escaflowne’s book and bets all of its chips on the power of its writing. So, how IS Smartphone’s plot and story?

Well, let me put it like this. I was not surprised to find out this show was based on a light novel. Most isekai are. Most shows with annoyingly long titles, as well. I’m not a huge fan of light novels in general, as even the best one I’ve read made abridged novels look complex in comparison, and while most adaptations of the like are able to elevate the material above it’s source through careful execution, Smartphone wasn’t even your typical light novel. It was self-published online, and didn’t get picked up professionally until it got popular, implying that a good chunk of the early material operated under less revision, feedback and professional criticism than most other light novels.

The writing in a typical light novel is bare bones at best... You get conversations, things happening, more conversations, brief exposition and more conversations as the story quickly moves from moment to moment, never really attempting to build up any sense of mood or emotion for any given scene. In a typical novel, if a character faces their greatest fear, the narrative would place you in their shoes and force you to feel the tension and terror they’re experiencing. In a light novel, you’re told what the situation is, you’re told it’s their greatest fear, and you see the actions they take to get through it. Like I said, not terribly complex. I’m sure there’ are people out there who love light novels, that’s fine, they’re just not for me.

Unfortunately, this is how Smartphone feels most of the time. Much like a light novel, it’s all text and no technique. Character goes here. Character says this. Character wins fight. There are no quiet moments. There’s no time for character development. Major events go by at such a break neck speed that you’re given no real reason to care about them. The perfect example of this is in episode two, where Touya meets a duke, and uses his magic to heal the duke’s blind wife. Now that should be pretty impactful, right? A woman who hasn’t seen in five years, finally opens her eyes to embrace her husband and child as they cry in joy. This could easily take up half an episode, introducing the issue, getting us invested, setting up tension, establishing some kind of doubt and then inflicting massive feels with the payoff, right? Wrong.

This entire sequence takes two minutes. I counted. The Duke mentions his blind wife. Touya’s friends realize he can heal her. We see her for literally the first time. He heals her, and I swear to God, they try to make a tear-jerking moment out of this. They try to make you cry over a woman you just met, whose illness you immediately knew was going to be cured, taking no time whatsoever to actually earn the emotional reaction they wanted. The entire series is like this. There’s no plot, Touya’s not trying to accomplish anything, you’re never given any reason to feel anything, and every single threat or obstacle the main cast faces is overcome in the time it takes you to say “Well that was fucking easy.” A conflict arises, Touya has a solution for it, they move onto the next thing.

There is no danger. There is no threat. There are no stakes. Nothing is ever allowed to have any weight or gravity. There was honestly only one moment in the entire show where I was able to feel anything other than bewilderment; Touya is decisively the most powerful person in the world, having more magical aptitude than anyone else alive(and a smartphone too I guess) and he faces no real opposition, so what does he do? He uses his magic, and instructions from the internet, to make guns. Because he really needs extra firepower. And then he turns around and gives two guns to two of his waifus, both of whom are still children, neither of whom have had any firearms safety training, neither of whom have any idea what guns even are. The fact that they didn’t wind up accidentally killing anybody is a true miracle. Yeah, he uses rubber bullets, but he's also shown using real bullets on a tree, and there's no indication which one he gave his friends.

The only thing I could see even resembling a plot thread was the question of who Touya would wind up with, but even that means nothing. He has no preference whatsoever out of his harem, he never shows any explicit signs of attraction to anybody, and he only kisses a few of them because they ask him to. He approaches his harem with all the enthusiasm of Sousuke Sagura, to the point that he might as well be choosing a soft drink instead of a romantic partner. This plot thread is resolved... Kind of... In what has to be the single dumbest way for a harem storyline to possibly be resolved. I’m not going to say what happens, but it didn’t work in Cat Planet Cuties, and it doesn’t work here.

So at the end of the day we have an isekai anime with a promising gimmick that it refuses to explore, no sense of identity or personality, no sense of stakes or suspense, a clear sense of humor but with absolutely terrible comedic timing, no real surprises, no imagination, no creativity, and nothing interesting to set it apart from the absolute glut of anime about high schoolers being abruptly transported to another world. Yes, I said transported, not ‘reincarnated,’ because very few of these titles involve actual reincarnation, and this is not one of them. I don’t even think the uncensored version of To Love Ru was as disappointing as this crap.

I‘ll give it credit that it’s a fairly inoffensive show, and it’s not unpleasant to watch, so I guess I could see it being someone’s comfy show, and if that’s what it is to you, who am I to argue? My favorite part of the Kingdom Hearts franchise was the opening two hours of Kingdom Hearts 2, and that’s a terrible opinion to have. But I get it. Boring stuff can be a source of uncomplicated comfort. If this series is your chicken soup when you’re sick in bed, I understand. (Then again, I caught covid when I tried to rewatch it for this review back in March, and it sure as hell didn’t do anything for me when I was delirious with fever, so what do I know.) For anyone else, though, this show has just as much substance to it as 12 episodes of uninterrupted static.

In Another World with my Smartphone is available from Funimation, and can be streamed on Crunchyroll. A second season has recently been announced, and while the exact release date is unknown, apparently Touya’s gonna get a bunch of new robot waifus, or something? Whatever. The Light Novel is available stateside from J-Novel Club, and a manga adaptation is available by Yen Press.

So after years away from the anime reviewing scene, why come out of retirement for this? Well, simply put, I sometimes watch an anime and have so many thoughts about it that I can’t get it out of my head without writing it all down and making a thing out of it. That’s why I wrote my review of Serial Experiments Lane last year, and now, here we are. I’m not sure why this was the title that lit a fire under me. It’s by no means the worst anime I’ve ever seen. It didn’t piss me off or offend me. It wasn’t painfully cringey or tasteless. Honestly, on my first viewing, it wasn’t boring either. I actually found myself engaged not in the plot, setting or characters, but in seeing all of the fascinating ways that it failed at basic storytelling. It’s probably the worst isekai anime I’ve ever seen, and it’s definitely the most nothing anime I’ve ever seen, which is why I’m going to give In Another World With My Smartphone a 2/10.