The Great Anime Marathon of 2020! #61 – #65: Reverse Isekai are a thing?

This next five anime listed in this post are isekai, as you would expect, but not the kind that most people are use to. We can go to their world and they can come to ours too! Okay, maybe one of these is more a time travel story, but still… it’s a different world still!

The following is a spoiler-free list of anime I’ve seen this year in no particular order:

#61: The Devil Is a Part-Timer!

• Season 1: Complete series to date (dub)

This anime is actually really good and I would definitely score it higher if it wasn’t for the fact that it is one of those anime that ends just as it really starts to get good.

It’s a great story of a supposed bad guy who isn’t actually the bad guy as everyone claims and is actually a very hard working individual… who ends up working at McDonald’s… but not McDonald’s.

If there wasn’t a real world promotional thing between this anime and McDonald’s of Japan, I don’t know what to think any more.

It’s a good watch and does a lot of good fun things with introducing a character from another world to our strange world.

#62: Cop Craft

• Season 1: Complete series to date (dub)

As soon as I saw art from this anime, I could tell instantly… the character designer is Range Murata. How can you tell? It’s not that difficult, because his characters all have the same basic look to them to the point where you could put these characters into another one of the anime he worked on, like Last Exile, and they wouldn’t be out of place.

This one’s okay. It has a lot of that mid to late 20th century cop show flair to it, but with a cute loli anime girl (who at one point turns into a cat), but something about it didn’t click well together.

There’s something missing from this show that could elevate it above where it is and I think its the fact that it was far too conservative with its story. You have this great story setting and great concept overall that seems underutilised in pretty much every way.

It’s far too predictable for something that could have actually done some interesting things.

#63: Hinamatsuri

• Season 1: Complete series to date (dub)

Okay, so this one may be more time travel related, but considering how different the world that some of these characters came from, it fits in this list.

What is this anime? I don’t know… it’s complete nonsense in one way but there’s something about the individual character stories that I really like. The time travel and technological powers plot elements are set dressing for what is really a story about young people finding where they belong in a harsh world.

That’s why I rated this so high, but really, if it didn’t have that element to it and was purely about the time travel related stuff, then this would be a pretty big miss.

#64: Aesthetica of a Rogue Hero

• Season 1: Complete series to date (dub)

You watch this one for the tits and ass. Don’t get me wrong, it’s pretty fun in a lot of ways, but yeah… you watch this one for the tits and ass.

#65: Restaurant to Another World

• Season 1: Complete series to date (dub)

One of the funniest things about anime as a medium is how many of those cooking related anime there are where they spend absurd amounts of time making everything look as delicious as possible.

However, this isn’t just about food porn, it’s about people from another world coming to a restaurant from our world specifically to taste what our world has to offer.

On top of that, we’re treated to their life stories along the way which makes for a very entertaining watch. I mean, it’s such a simple concept but it’s executed so well.

This is definitely one of the more interesting concepts to have been created out of a very simple premise.