Reincarnated as a Sword is a fantasy isekai lacking any real sense of adventure, any real story, or any developed characters whatsoever. The action is never resolved in an interesting manner and relies purely on decent visuals to get by. The rules of this RPG-like system make little sense. The tone is baffling, going from scenes of a character graphically describing acts of torture and murder to scenes dedicated to making Fran look cute within the space of minutes.

To expand on the characters, there practically aren't any. They are all very simple and any opportunity to develop them is squandered for no reason. Shishou is a very basic self-aware, vaguely comedic OP isekai protagonist commentating on things that happen. He is reminiscent of Arc from Skeleton Knight in Another World, but lacks the charisma of that character. Fran is a cute catgirl slave, part of a race that is discriminated against and can't evolve, that gains a chance at strength and freedom via Shishou. Her desire to evolve is her primary motivation throughout the series, but ultimately none of it matters. Whilst she is a slave in the first episode, she's soon freed and from that point on the only discrimination, or difficulty based on her race, that she faces is token hatred from mediocre, flat antagonists who are easily dealt with. Everyone else accepts and loves her practically instantly, even though her rapid growth and monumental power should be the source of tons of suspicion given the RPG systems in this setting. But any suspicion of her is light and soon dismissed. Her being part of a 'weak' race and facing discrimination feels token if anything, a cheap plot device to evoke pity. She is not an underdog whatsoever with the power gained in the first episode.

It's pretty important for a fantasy show to give a sense of adventure. This is something fantasy worlds are primed to do. But this show gives us nothing of the sort. We get literal seconds of some interesting environments in the first episode but after that, the show exclusively takes place in a simple cliché city, a couple of brief simple outdoor environments and some incredibly bland & simple dungeons. There's no mystery to the monsters or characters that are all soon identified by Shishou, there is nothing unknown about any of the locales, Fran just goes places and kills everything.

The show devotes a lot of time to making Fran look cute and if you are the sort of anime watcher that can genuinely get more enjoyment out of something because a character is cute then perhaps this will be a big plus for you. But when you combine all these cute scenes with the scenes featuring dismemberment, vivid description of bodily harm and so on, I'm left very confused by the intended tone or message of this show. I'm ultimately left feeling like it has none. These cute scenes and the general friendly vibe of the side characters makes it feel like this should be a comedic, comfy show but there are no jokes to speak of and the tone frequently switches to faux-intense for the action, with rock-ish music and token attempts at pretending Fran is ever in any danger.

Fuck this show, to me it's so lacking that I've just lost all my motivation to talk in any more detail about it. Positives are decent visuals.