Mushoku Tensei was a landmark in the isekai genre, with its rich world building and great character development, in addition to getting an anime adaptation with the highest production values you'll see in any modern anime not made by Production IG/Kyoto Animation or named Made in Abyss, all which serve as a testament of why I consider it the best isekai ever made. This review isn't about that show.
Tensei Kizoku no Isekai Boukenroku is a generic, insipid, ugly animated isekai in a flood of other equally completely uninspired isekai that just happened to have gone the full mile and decided to be a complete rip-off of Mushoku Tensei, and while I'm not like others who think copying the plot a pre-existing work automatically makes it bad (as basically any anime made after the 90s would be bad by this logic), this show is a prime example of the reason copycats got a reputation to begin with: it missed the point of what made the original interesting or good.
The series follows the all too familiar premise of a Japanese teen dying saving someone, so gods reward him by reincarnating him in a world of swords and magic, where they proceed to give him the most powerful blessings that effectively make him invincible, so he has to hide his strength from the world. This is automatically a bad start, as it gets rid of any sense of stakes, as the main character is so overpowered he can literally just swing his sword and even the most feared monsters fall without a fight, meaning that the series has no weight to its action which in turn just makes it a waste of time.
The series then proceeds to have every girl who MC-kun meets fall in love with him, even those much older and in a much higher social class than him, as the setting being a fantasy version of medieval Europe is purely aesthetic and has no bearing on anything, as the one and only reason it even is like that is to NOT explore said setting by making it something everyone is familiar with from other series. This deals heavy blows to two important aspects of storytelling, namely world building and characterization, as not only it makes the world empty by effectively having it be a coat of paint you can replace with any other and it changes nothing, but means all the characters are cardboard cutouts who only exist to shill to high heavens our already bland MC, who's clearly intended for self insert in a sort of power fantasy, as he really has not a single character trait beyond "was a regular Japanese boy" who are clearly supposed to see themselves in his place.
The animation is ugly, its plot is basically non-existent, its world building is empty, its characters are all plot devices - there's literally nothing here that makes this anime stand beyond its similarities to Mushoku Tensei, except that this does everything it shares with that show infinitely worse, as the author of this clearly only intended to ride the wave of million other isekai with no value beyond the kind of mindless entertainment that has overtaken the anime industry in the last 8 years, and I'm honestly already tired of these so called stories that don't actually want to tell a story, they just want to make a cheap cash, and I'd guarantee you that no matter how bad this show is, it'll sell, because this is the kind of safe trash that does nowadays.
Thank you for reading.
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