New isekai anime Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! (also known by the abbreviated Japanese title Noukin) held the world premiere of its first episode at Crunchyroll Expo in San Jose on Saturday. The event was hosted by producer Hirotsugu Ogo, whose previous credits include Assassination Classroom and Restaurant to Another World. Ogo framed the premiere with a new trailer presentation, a discussion of the production process, and finally a showing of the first episode months before the show makes its appearance on Japanese TV in October.
The Noukin anime is an adaptation of a popular light novel, but not one I’m familiar with and only a few hands went up when Ogo asked the audience who had read the series. So I went into the episode totally fresh, and mostly liked what I saw. Noukin is an aggressive parody of the isekai genre, with constant fourth wall breaking and direct attacks on isekai and more broadly anime tropes.
The title Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! Is in reference to our protagonist, Mile, who as a high school girl named Misato Kurihara in Japan suffered from crippling loneliness that she blamed on her superior intelligence and academic overachievement. After being killed by the classic isekai runaway truck (and breaking the fourth wall to directly call it out as such), she begs the god of isekais to make her average in her reincarnated form.
The twist is, of course, that god takes a loose interpretation of average and makes her a tremendously powerful isekai protagonist. The central conflict of the show then becomes Mile trying to hide her incredible abilities, make friends, and lead an average life in her new fantasy world.
The first episode skips the whole business of Misato being a Japanese teenager and mercifully starts in medias res with Mile about to start classes at a new school in a new fantasy town. The isekai process is explained with some of that rampant fourth wall smashing and trope skewering, which is a refreshing way to handle that bit of exposition, even if it wanted for conflict.
When asked what is particularly unique about Noukin, producer Hirotsugu Ogo pointed to it being a girls’ isekai story. The main cast is entirely female, which is indeed a deviation from the “typical Japanese high school boy” protagonists of formulaic isekai. Although this isn’t to say that Noukin is directed at a female audience. While not especially sexy, the girls are very much designed to be moe archetypes that the male target audience will want to protect (or do other things with).
The core of the show is clearly meant to be comedy, and I had plenty of laughs through the half hour runtime. There are a few fights, but not much action. There is plenty of conflict, but not much peril. The ultimate question is how much you’re looking to laugh at a dissection of the isekai genre through the lens of a clumsy smart girl who talks directly to you, the viewer, about the tropes that are happening.
Also, she has a friend that’s some kind of nanomachine cat, which is how magic happens in this universe? That part was confusing and seemed unnecessarily complicated. I guess I’ll tune in come October to find out if it was worth it.
