Life hasn’t been going well for Mitsuha Yamano. At the age of just eighteen, she’s been orphaned by the sudden, tragic car accident that killed her parents and brother, leaving her alone in the world with her family’s savings, but no clear goal on how to use it. To make things even worse, when she goes on a soul searching journey following the accident, she’s harassed at a viewing platform at the edge of a cliff by three scoundrels, and when she tries to fight them off, she falls over the edge, presumably to her doom on the jagged rocks in the waves below... Or so she expected. However, after cutting her hand on thin air and hearing a mysterious scream, she goes from plunging to her death to sitting in the middle of a vast, lonely open field. As it turns out, she’s been Isekaied, and as she soon discovers, she can travel back and forth between the two worlds. Armed with this new power, Mitsuha vows to use her circumstances to her advantage, and adopts a brand new goal in life... To save 80,000 gold in another world for her retirement!

I feel like I’ve been reviewing quite a few anime lately where I didn’t really have anything to say about the people who made them, and unfortunately, here we are again. Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for my Retirement, which I’m just going to call 80K Isekai from now on for the sake of brevity, was directed by Hiroshi Tamada, a man who only has one other primary directing credit to his name. In addition to this, he directed Banished from the Hero’s Party, which I have never actually seen. This particular series was produced by Felix Film, which does have a small resume of primary production credits to show for the brief period it’s been active, but I’ve never seen any of their other titles before, aside from maybe two or three episodes of Nekopara. There’s nothing really special about the pedigree of this anime, which is usually a bad omen for most titles I review, so how well do the visuals hold up?

Honestly, if I’m being blunt, this show looks more or less fine? The animation is a little hit or miss, but it has enough hit in it to be mostly acceptable. Director Tamada is very careful to work around the limitations of the project, juggling keyframes and animation cycles as well as he can to keep from betraying the limited nature of the project’s resources, but he does slip up here and there. You may run into an awkward walking cycle, a couple of stiff animation segments, and a few cringey mistakes, such as when a character is turning her head to yell at someone but the lines marking the amplification of her voice hit the screen a second too early. There were clearly some issues with budget allocation, but I still think the show looks mostly good overall, as its visual shortcomings only prove distracting once or twice overall if you’re not looking for them.

Part of this is due to the design work, which does an amazing job of straddling the line between generic and pretty. There’s really nothing in this show that you haven’t seen before, at least from a visual perspective. The population in both the fantasy world and our world look pretty much exactly how you’d expect them to, but they do also look very easy on the eyes, so it’s not much of an issue. What we see of the kingdom looks believable enough, even though the color palette is way more bright and soothing than the stereotypical grittiness and muted grays and browns you might be expecting. Actual animated movement is impressive most of the time, with only a few exceptions that I mentioned above, and a couple of significantly large CG objects looking like they don’t belong in this world, which is fitting, because they don’t. It’s not a perfect looking show, but there’s definitely more good than bad to it.

The English dub was produced directly by Crunchyroll, and I have no complaints with it. For starters, Trina Nishimura is outstanding in the lead role as Mitsuha. Her big selling point as an actor is her ability to imbue her characters with a charming hint of mischievous impiness, and since she’s playing a young woman who acts as a positive force in the world while also showing some distinct signs of sociopathy, this role falls smoothly into her wheelhouse. She brings a lot of depth and complexity to the role, flexing her voice control in all her various inner monologues. Another standout is Tyson Rhinehart in the role of a nameless mercenary captain, who is probably my second favorite character behind Mitsuha. He has the deep, gravely voice of a grizzled veteran, but he still comes off as laid back and open-minded. Alexis Tipton is also a lot of fun as a noblewoman Mitsuha meets early on, but the entire cast does a great job overall. This is, generally, a really fun English dub.

I’ve made it pretty clear in the past that I don’t follow seasonal releases. I’m probably repeating myself on that at this point, but it’s still true. If I’m watching an anime from the last two or three years, there’s usually a story behind it. Late last year, I was browsing the anime on offer for a holiday sale on the Xbox Marketplace, and I decided to just blindly buy a couple of unique or interesting sounding Isekai anime for about $5 each, and this one sounded interesting enough to pick up. The first one I watched, something about being a background character in a dating game, was kind of a train wreck, so I wasn’t expecting much from 80K isekai. What I got from it was an anime that hooked me from the start, and never let me go. Not only was I enjoying it, I wouldn’t shut up about how much I was enjoying it, despite the relatively mediocre reception it had from everyone else. Well, this is my second viewing, and while I don’t feel the same intense aura from it that I felt the first time, I was still fully on board, and I can explain why with a few facts about my tastes in media.

First off, this is something longtime readers of mine will already know, the fastest way to earn my love with a piece of media is to present me with a unique and intriguing idea, and then explore the everloving fuck out of it. This was probably my biggest complaint about Smartphone isekai, because the idea of bringing a working cell phone into a fantasy world has a ton of potential, and they used almost none of it. I don’t know, maybe this is just one of my own very unique strange quirks, but if I’m presented with that kind of idea in a story, and you’re being lazy with it, I’m going to be so distracted with thinking about all of the things you could do with it and all of the extended implications of it that I’m not going to be able to focus on your story. I’ve never watched a Purge movie before, because I just know that while the good guys and bad guys are killing each other, I’m going to be sitting there thinking “Okay, if all crime is legal, how many kids are being abused right now? That would be happening, right?”

It’s not my job, as a viewer, to flesh out your idea for you, and if there’s enough left on the table for me to become distracted, you’re gonna lose a few points. Well, with 80K isekai, we have a very surprisingly unique idea, and one that I can’t believe hasn’t appeared more often in the anime medium. I can think of exactly two other anime where the Isekai protagonists were able to swap between the real world and the alternate world at will... Inuyasha, which I'm a little rusty on, and Digimon Adventure 02, which felt like it had no stakes due to the fact the cast were never forced to be in danger. I feel pretty comfortable saying, though, that as far as exploring ideas goes, 80K blows both of them out of the water. The first episode spends a lot of time showing you who Mitsuha is as a person by having her just try to survive and interact with the first people she sees, and she proves to be a pretty clever, likeable protagonist.

She discovers her ability to jump between worlds while a girl she’d befriended was in danger, grabs a couple of her weird late brother’s weapons, and returns to save her. Okay, she’s shown bravery and compassion, love it, what about that power? That’s where things start to really take off. She meets the interdimensional being who she took her powers from, finds out she has a healing factor(which, to be fair, doesn’t come back for a while), and upon request, gains the ability to automatically learn new languages. She soon finds out that when world-hopping, she can teleport to any location she’s seen before, so she uses Google Earth to visit a foreign mercenary camp, appraises the other world’s gold and silver currency, and uses some of her inheritance to pay them to give her some guns and train her to use them. And this isn’t that “Shoot without really shooting“ bullshit like with Stella Women’s Academy, these are the kind of realistic, respectful gun lessons that you don’t see in anime, even as basic as they are, mostly because Japanese civilians aren’t legally allowed to own them, and are often pretty naive about them as a result.

Yeah, I know, just about every modern Isekai anime has some kind of gimmick to set them apart, but we could stop right there and 80K Isekai is already putting far more effort into its premise than most of the competition. But no, we keep going. Mitsuha manipulates her way into cozying up to nobility and obtains her own general store to start selling real world items to fantasy folk for a markup that’s profitable for her, but still not as shameless as most hospital equipment. That is another thing I enjoy, by the way, seeing common everyday items from the real world observed out of context by aliens, people from the future or the past, people from other realities, whatever, I just think it’s usually a really cool and creative idea. This series doesn’t just have fun with its cool premise, it fully deserves its cool premise, and there are far too many works of fiction that sadly prefer to rest on their laurels and take ideas with lots of potential for granted, so I’ll take inspiration and creativity where I can get it.

As for the other matter of personal taste, there’s a writing principle that I like to call “What would happen vs. What should happen.” I don’t know, maybe it has a more sophisticated name out there somewhere, but I’m just some dumb internet reviewer who hates doing research. When you’re writing a story, going through the narrative, you do sometimes have to choose between what would, or should, happen. What should happen is emotional storytelling. It’s what the audience wants, and it makes a story satisfying. What would happen is more logical storytelling, and it keeps a story grounded. Each has their strengths, but each also fails on their own. Too much Should, and a story feels empty and meaningless, with endings you didn’t earn. Too much would makes a story feel cynical and unpleasant, with nothing special to entice a viewer to watch all the way through. So you do have to find a good balance of these two forces while writing your story.

One of the best ways to do this is to give the audience what should happen, by traveling the path of what would happen. Have your character overcome a cold and harsh reality to achieve their dreams. This is, largely, how 80K isekai is written. There are plenty of examples, but the one I’m going to focus on is what happens after Mitsuha opens her store. What should happen is that she sells a lot and makes money, but what would happen is that people would be skeptical and not trust her. They would be too frugal with their money to spend it on some ‘magical’ product that sounds too good to be true, and that what happens on her second day in operation... So she goes all out to secure the sale! She offers to not only give them a free demonstration, where the writing goes a step farther in acknowledging that a head of hair that’s never been properly washed would take multiple washings for the shampoo to take effect, but to also make a meal for them! They wind up spending a bundle on her store, despite suspecting she might be a witch(an idea I definitely remember wanting Smartphone Isekai to try). This effort pays off over time, and I can relate to her satisfaction over this as someone with a struggling Ebay store. Successful sales feel special.

And that is really a good example of how the writing in this anime works. It is a mostly positive and light-hearted series, but there are hardships and challenges to overcome, they’re just not that dire until like episode 10. Until then, the stakes are just high enough to keep the story compelling, but if you’re looking for something more life and death, the final three episodes are worth sticking it out for. I won’t spoil anything, but a huge threat arises, and Mitsuha is forced to cross many of the lines she’d set for herself to deal with it. Things get pretty damn epic in the final quarter of the story, putting Mitsuha and some other characters through some dire circumstances that require both intelligence and courage to resolve, and it all leads to an emotionally satisfying ending that had me clapping and cheering both times I watched it.

I will admit though, it’s not a perfect series, no matter how much I thought it was the first time through. One huge area of contention I’ve noticed is Mitsuha herself, and personally, I think she’s awesome. She strikes a very nice morality balance where she’s motivated by both selfish means and the urge to do the right thing, and she’s courageous as a result. I like seeing her solutions to different problems, and I find moments where she’s completely full of shit but still passing those speech checks to be actually kind of charming. There are moments, though, where she busts out some knowledge that the people she’s talking to should already have, and HER excuse for knowing it is because of her brother’s wide array of interests. There are also some points where she comes off as TOO manipulative, almost heartless at times, with questionable motivations. She cries over her deceased parents because she actually calls two members of the nobility “Mom and Dad,” but this has nothing to do with the fact that she just sold off her mother’s pearl necklace? And yeah, there are others.

I’ve seen people call her ability too convenient, and they’re not wrong, but I think it’s justified by the hardship she faced leading up to it, and the creativity that spawned from it. I’ve seen people criticize her for bringing items into this world that will create plastic waste, and it is kind of sus that the narrative never brings up proper disposal options, but I highly doubt she could generate enough waste to actually cause any environmental problems. I’d honestly be more worried about how selling all those gold coins in our world would affect the economy, not to mention the value of gold, currently an extremely limited substance. There’s also always going to be people who call fanservice the bane of their existence, but this anime is honestly pretty conservative about that. There are occasional bath scenes that are tame enough for children’s anime, but there’s also one single bikini scene that kind of transcends all cliches. I won’t spoil what happens, but it reminds me of a moment from one of my favorite Teen Titans episodes, where Starfire is greeting a little Russian boy, and he blushes at her revealing attire, which in turn makes HER feel uncharacteristically self conscious. It’s like that, but less subtle, and it goes a few steps farther.

I also guess I can see why some viewers would find this series boring, because at least up until those last three episodes, the tone is extremely light-hearted, the main character doesn’t go through THAT much hardship(aside from losing her parents beforehand) and it might make people a little uncomfortable that she never really faces any serious consequences for all the lies she tells. If anything, her constant deception and manipulations are rewarded more often than not. Personally, I really don’t give a shit about any of that, because 80K isekai is just a fun fucking show. And hell, sometimes I want to see an anime character take advantage of the conventions of their world for their own personal gain. One of my favorite parts of School Days was seeing Makoto respond to the cliche of female harem members throwing themselves at a protagonist by just saying “Fuck it, why not?” to all of them. As randomly as I may have discovered this series, I enjoy the hell out of it, and I think you will too.

Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World is available from Crunchyroll, both on DVD/Bluray as well as for streaming. It can also be purchased digitally from Xbox Marketplace and streamed on their movies/TV app. The original light novels by Funa are available stateside from Vertical. A manga adaptation is available from Kodansha.

The first time I watched this series, I was so over the moon for it that I strongly considered giving it a perfect score. I wasn’t unaware of it’s flaws, just sort of indifferent to them, but I got myself under control enough to give it a more grounded score. Now that the honeymoon is over, I can say with some certainty that while those flaws are a lot more visible, I still thoroughly enjoyed this series. It’s smartly written, briskly paced, highly creative, and it shines with a spark of inspiration. The visuals may be a bit mediocre at times, some people might find it boring, and there are moments where the main character’s use of her silver tongue doesn’t land like it’s probably supposed to, but these aren’t huge deal breakers in my book. It’s a fun show to watch that makes me happy and helps me to forget how fucked the country is right now, and sometimes that’s all you need.

I give Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement an 8/10