Name: Anime about being isekai'd twice ends up just being twice as bad.
Item: Summoned to Another World for a Second Time
Rating: 22
Author: Cavin856

Waifra

Anime about being isekai'd twice ends up just being twice as bad.

This anime is bad.
That's the long and the short of of it. It's just bad.
Spoiler free review with some spoilers marked in spoiler boxes

Summoned to Another World for a Second Time has a simple premise: that being that this is the second time the hero Setsu has been summoned to this world. In theory, this opens up the door for a lot of depth. Perhaps the hero knows too much, and the mystery becomes how does he? Or maybe he does things differently, and uses his prior knowledge for villainy. Or what if he just laid low and hid in the shadows waiting for the optimal time to make his triumphant return?

This anime does none of that. It doesn't even do bad time travel. Instead, there's just a 5-year time gap between the first and second times Setsu was summoned. Also, Setsu reveals himself basically immediately as the former hero and that's that. He just picks up where he left off 5 years ago. The entire premise is wasted and only exclusively as a cheap excuse to introduce characters with no depth or backstory that instantly trust Setsu because "he met them last time he was summoned'. It's just used as a lazy hand wave to promote disgustingly bad writing and horribly cliche tropes.

So lets talk about the story:

It's terrible. It's cliche. It has zero depth. Setsu just aimlessly wanders for a bunch of episodes and then the final battle happens. That's basically it. Sure, he was "gathering allies", but that's really just window dressing. There is so little content that actually happens that I'm surprised they managed to stretch it out to 12 episodes. I could summarize the entire anime in one paragraph and you wouldn't miss a thing. In fact, let's try it!

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

Setsu is summoned with his classmates and childhood friend to stop a war. He reveals himself to be the former hero from 5 years ago, and meets up with various allies from the last time he was summoned. He helps a young girl deliver a broach to another of his allies, Dezas the queen of the demon continent, and reunites with Levia (another ally) in the process, who follows him for the rest of the anime. While there, he saves her from the control of Toma's underling, and discovers that the war is a setup by Toma (actually he just assumes this and we roll with it). Then, leaving the continent, he runs into another ally, Alize, and her friend Amel who turns out to be one of Toma's underlings. They fight, Amel escapes, and Alize leaves. Then Amel captures Alize. Levia and Setsu then travel to the Beastman continent and, after foiling an assassination attempt by another of Toma's underlings, he makes new allies. Then, he goes to the king and his daughter (also allies), and has to fights a pointless duel with a guard that get's interrupted by Toma because he's evil and wants Setsu to be his friend. Lastly, we return to the demon continent where the war is held. There, Setsu's allies defeat all of Toma's underlings and rescue Alize, and Setsu defeats Toma and we get a stupid happy ending where Toma is rehabilitated and the classmates aside from Yuuhi go home. The end.

That was less than 250 words and that summarized every important plot point in the show. That's just sad.

Overall, It's like they tried to write the most generic box-standard isekai plot of all time. It's legitimately hard to be more generic than this.

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

Also, so many things were left unexplained or just flat out ignored. No development was given on the whole "reincarnated back in earth" plot point. Also, his three allies that specifically said he travelled with them last time don't travel with him again this time because... reasons? I guess they have to babysit his nameless classmates??? Among other issues.

So, what about the characters?

The first problem is, there are too many. Almost every episode for the first like, 9ish episodes, they introduce at least one new character that Setsu allegedly met the first time around. None of these characters have any depth and most disappear basically immediately afterwards only to reappear for the final battle. The one exception is Levia, who becomes the de-facto second main character by virtue of having the second-most screentime of any character, but even she has basically nothing going for her to make her any sort of dynamic character.

It's not surprising that a short 12 episode anime has no meaningful character development, but this is exasperated by the fact that there are too many characters, so none of them even get enough screentime to do anything interesting.

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

Even episode 5, which one comment described it as "It’s the “Don’t forget about the Childhood Friend” episode.", which theoretically develops Yuuhi, ends up being nothing more than pointless filler and padding and a waste because Yuuhi has zero relevance to the story and never ends up fighting side-by-side with Setsu anyway. And she's still just as flat and one-dimensionally at the end of this episode as she is at the start.

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

The motivation of Toma, the villain, is at least like... not the standard "I want to destroy the world because I'm evil", and the one episode we spend on getting his backstory is probably the best episode in the anime (not a high bar to clear). But still, if Setsu did literally anything other than inexplicably ignore him completely, then we could have just avoided everything anyway. The entire plot hinges on Toma just wanting to be loved by the one person that he thought would understand him. Which, is shockingly deep for this shallow of an anime, but still, this entire anime could have been avoided if someone just gave Toma a hug.

Animation?

Animation was average, I'd say, for a modern anime, however I want to specifically point out the fight scenes which are so bad that they look like they were choreographed by a 6 year old playing with action figures. None of the fights have any impact or weight to them, except maybe, MAYBE, the final fight.

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

Bonus points to Yuuhi for casting a single fireball and suddenly rivalling Elka in power somehow.

Can we at least like the music?

Eh, the op was a generic shounen, that reminded me of My Instant Death Ability is Overpowered but worse, and the ending was extremely out of place, hyper, and just so generic. None of the background tracks were that amazing, and in fact I don't recall any of them.

Basically, the music was dull and extremely unremarkable or memorable. But that's an opinion about music, so that's usually pretty subjective. Maybe you'll like the music.