Loner Life in Another World

TLDR and recommendations - You can do so much better. If you like a loner having to deal with his class in a real way, watch Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru. If you want a whole class that's involved, try Naruto or My Hero Academia. If you like simple skills being taken to the limit, try Kekkaishi or Charlotte. I hope you enjoy at least one of them. You and I both probably saw the summary and thought "Oh, sending an entire class to another world sounds like a fun and interesting dynamic! I wonder what they can do here that other isekaiscan't? And the main character gets leftover skills! What kind of interesting stuff he'll have to figure out?" Both of these questions end badly I assure you. Let's start with the more egregious of the two. The class. I'll keep the second one short. The main character occasionally looks like a timid guy with occasional social skills, but only because he's like a metronome swinging between being a wildly successful and sociable guy who helps out other people out of the kindness of his heart... and being an utter psychopath who vehemently refuses to remember a single name of any character and instead places every single character into a horribly generic bucket, such as jocks or nerds, and refers to them exclusively in these groups for the entire show. He also talks to himself incessantly, which drags out even halfway decent scenes and makes ones with bad pacing worse. The other characters aren't much better, doing almost nothing when the main character isn't involved (after the first few episodes maybe) and with one or two exceptions nestle themselves so tightly into the generic character type buckets that the main character creates that it's pointless for the viewer to think of them separately either. Essentially, the entire premise of bringing the whole class was their way to remove character development while putting as many female characters on the key art as possible. The final nail in the coffin is that aside from the clear villains, every character clings incessantly to the main character after a certain point in his interactions with their bucket. It undermines their development, it undermines the freedom of the premise, and it ties everyone together so tight it impossible to have the class be anything but a mob of random people. As I said, I'll keep the second main issue short: crap skills. The main character gets a bunch of crap skills, as is mentioned in the summary. It turns out, to the surprise of nobody, that most of these skills are better than they look by some technicality and therefore make the main character broken. After the high of seeing him discover new details and skills/subskills goes away, there's not much left. While admittedly the MC does make some actually designed combos and does some research or quick thinking to expand his library, in practice most of his power comes from either gaining access to every magic type and combining them all, or combining every physical strengthening concept he can think of into a vague and meaningless amount of strength. They just run out of stuff to do with it despite shows like Kekkaishi going to the moon with only one ability (barriers, in this case) (also if you like Kekkaishi read the manga, it goes farther and ends better) FINAL SUMMARY The start is kind of cathartic, but the show quickly devolves into a bland and meaningless slog, regardless of how much you liked the beginning. The main character goes from boring to an unlikeable, annoying, stereotyping chatterbox - (if you want a real character like this watch Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru, where the main character actually has to deal with any real problems at all, including himself. He's a loner who hates everyone and himself and I cherish him dearly). The final arc brings it back a bit, but not much; like the rest of the show, there's a lot of potential lost and what's left is the most bland version of itself.

“Loner Life in Another World” is what happens when a good idea meets incompetent writing. From the very first episode You know this will be a master class in lazy, subpar writing. It’s actually amazing how fast we see the world bending over backwards for the MC. Even the garbage “Re: Monster” waited 2 episodes for that. Before we start I would like to explain something. I will be talking about “plot” and “story”. Many people use those terms interchangeably. I’m not one of those people, so to make sure everyone is on the same page… I use the definitions for “plot” and “story” asLisa Cron describes them: “What happens in the story is the PLOT, the surface events.” “STORY is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result”. I’ll start with this. The story has a lot of potential. A loner that wants to be alone is forced to be part of a pretty large group and every time he wants to leave he is stopped in one way or the other. It could work both as a comedy and as an action adventure. But “Loner Life in Another World” fails on all fronts from episode two. The first episode is absolute garbage. I really didn’t think that any show could beat “Ishura” when it comes to bad first episodes but here we are. Not only we don’t see anything that would make us root for him, we don’t even see what kind of person he is. The only thing we do see is that he avoids people or rather he declares that he wants to avoid people. That’s all. Because he is already proficient with his skills we don’t really see him struggle much. He even gets new skills the first day. It all feels unearned. I don’t mind if he starts with some OP skills (and despite what the show is trying to tell You, they are OP) but having more or even levelling them should be earned, not given for almost nothing. We don’t see his long term goal, any sort of plan or even any kind of moral stand. In short, we see jack shit. Listen, I know that there are a metric shit ton of OP AF MC shows out there but most of them (at least the good ones) give us something. At least show me the idiot has a goal (no, being alone is not it) and an early stage of a plan. Morality can wait but I really don’t give a damn about a protagonist that just waits around and grinds low level monsters. Granted we do get to his morality in the second episode but for fucks sake, that’s one of the most important things about protagonists and we have to wait a whole, boring, useless episode for that. On top of that, worldbuilding is atrocious. We do get the general idea about skills and leveling up but that’s just game logic. Something I truly despise. Seriously, is it that hard to make an isekai without this shit? Anyway, Apart from the skills we don’t really get much about the world. There are monsters, there are levels and killing monsters and using skills allows You to level up. How original. To be totally fair we don’t see in the first episode even what kind of world this is. Yes, the MC - Haruka, ends up in a forest with clothes that do look a bit medieval-ish but for all we know outside of the forest there might be some sort of steampunk civilization. For fucks sake, give me at least a skeleton with appropriate armor or weapon to help make assumptions of what state of technology this world has. I don’t think I’m asking for much. Of course it ends up being a pseudo european medieval world because of course it is. At this point I’m not expecting originality in any way, shape or form from this show. The skill system itself is also an issue. About half way through the season we get our first true BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy). The fight itself is horrible, it’s just pulling skills and tricks out of the combatant's asses. If You are generous You could say there is a little bit of a setup for that but… it’s so incompetent that I wouldn’t. First of all, The BBEG has a skill to copy other skills. Why? How? When He was summoned he chose a skill that is an interference skill and he doesn’t seem to have any magic items granting him this skill so… why? Did he get it while leveling up? That makes no sense since it’s stated he had his big, bad plan from the beginning, including stealing skills. How was he supposed to do that without the copying skill? It’s a pretty big plot hole and it destroyed the whole fight for me. Of course, this being a badly written isekai, there are no stakes. The whole shtick is that Haruka is stuck with “bad” leftover skills but anyone who ever played any kind of RPG would tell You that they are fucking usefull as hell. But that’s not what bothered me the most in this set up. Everyone can pick a skill but there doesn't seem to be any kind of description prior to picking them so how the hell the first BBEG knew that one of the skills is OP AF and had a murder boner to get it? Haruka could only guess what the skills do by their names. Only after leveling he learned what all his skills do so WTF? Of course they end up useful and OP because having stakes in an isekai would be horrible. I think that’s what killed it for me. I really don’t mind power fantasies but they have to have stakes. This one had none. There are only two moments when the show tricked me into thinking there would be any stakes. The final fate of the second BBEG (not exactly BBEG but I’m gonna call her that to avoid spoilers) and the potential drama of the relationship between Haruka and his childhood friend / class rep. The first one could have been an amazing moral dilemma. I’m not even saying that the result we’ve got should change but the set up to it should. The second example is just wasted. Class rep has some obvious feelings about Haruka leaving to live in the woods alone with a girl but does nothing about it and even lies to herself that it’s for the best. That’s just bad writing. Have her confront him. I’m not saying they should change the outcome but for fucks sake don’t make the class rep such a pathetic character at the very eng of the season. After all the crap she went through those 12 episodes with Haruka and others she deserved better. When it comes to the plot… yeah… oh boy. It’s even worse than the story aspects if You can believe this. A lot of things happen because the plot demands it and not because of any kind of logic. Delinquents are the bad guys because… I have no idea. The Jocks leave the girls alone because… I guess Haruka needs to be surrounded by only women. Haruka has “bad luck” with leaving everyone in secret to return to his lone life in the forest because… the show needs him to be in the city and make a running joke of his wanting to be alone. It’s really idiotic. It is especially painful in the last arc when he falls to the bottom of the dungeon. Everything from his motivation for going to the dungeon, to the outcome of the fight with the dungeon emperor is just lazy writing. It’s like some had some ideas using the rule of cool but had no idea how to connect those ideas and it shows. This show is one of the worst examples of wasted potential I have ever seen. Apart from Haruka himself, everyone else from his class is either incompetent, does really dumb things or gets late to the party. It’s visible in the case of the first BBEG. Haruka fights him alone. Why? At this point his classmates have a solid grip on their powers and skills and could help him. Even if we factor in the fact that he cares about class rep and want’s to make sure she’s safe it makes no sense. The only reason I see why we get a dumb one-on-one between them is that the writers didn’t have the skill to write a proper, logical fight with stakes in any other way or just wanted to use the rule of cool thinking that it will make Haruka more cool. It didn’t. I can’t recommend this show. It’s just lazy, banal and has horrible worldbuilding.

This anime starts as "average good", but goes downhill pretty quickly. So why am I recommending it? Because towards the end we get a new character that saves it. "Loner Life in Another World" is a deceiving name for this anime, since the only time he's alone is in the first episodes. It's fun to see him getting around the new world, but the plot has too many inconsistencies and holes that quickly kill our enjoyment. Not only that, but the female characters are insufferable, specially the 'Class Rep' which is somehow supposed to be his "romance". If you manage to get through the mid of this anime,at least I can promise you that the ending is rewarding. Without giving spoilers, I can tell you that he actually finds a character that we can come to like, and that matches his good vibe.