What’s this?
The office worker Leon is reincarnated in a particularly hardcore dating sim video game, where women are the supreme queens and only beautiful men have a seat at the table. But Leon has a secret weapon: he remembers everything from his past life, which includes an entire set of the very game he’s now trapped in. Watch Leon unleash a revolution to change this new world in order to fulfill his dying wish of living a quiet and easy life in the country.
Stuck in a dating sim: Otome game world is rough for mafias is based on Yomu Mishima‘s light novel series and airs on Crunchyroll Sundays.
How was the first episode?
Nicholas Dupree
Classification:
We haven’t seen it reflected in the anime yet, but in the LN and manga scenes, the isekai subgenre is absolutely riddled with stories of Otome Game Villainess. You can throw a rock in any direction and you’re just as likely to hit a book about reincarnation as the mean girl character in a video game as anything else. So it makes sense with the proliferation of that particular gimmick that you start to see stories that intentionally twist it to be novel. So we have this show, which tries to move the perspective away from noble and upper-class stereotypes and instead focus on what it’s like to be an anonymous background character in one of these stories. Or, well, he tries that, then immediately gets bored with that premise and more or less turns into a typical male-led isekai in the span of half an episode. Wow!
The biggest weakness of this program is that its creators don’t seem to know much about otome games. stories like My next life as a villain or I’m in love with the villain they use their familiarity with the subgenre to gently (and sometimes harshly) mock their established conventions, but they come across as jokes from someone who deeply enjoys that kind of media and spends a lot of time thinking about it. This show, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know much about gender, plus there’s a female PC and plenty of hot guys for her to sweet talk to. Everything else is packed with other facets of gaming: RTS battles, power armor, sci-fi style airships, microtransactions, all the stuff that appears in other games that has to be crammed in here because that’s what the creators are trying to do. more familiar.
I say all this not to call the creators fakers, but because that confusion of their own premise kills the joke. This isn’t a parody of otome games or a critical look at the genre from a new point of view, so none of its observations or gags are toothy. What a show, you’re right, there sure are a lot of haughty handsome guys out there in games made for women. You really have them there. And yes, some games are not very well balanced, so you are forced to spend real money on them. I can’t remember ever playing an otome game where that was the case, but hey, a good slam dunk in… mobile gaming? What are we parodying here, again?
This even comes down to our protagonist, who spends three full days playing the core game 100%, not because he’s a boy who likes otome games, but because his pushy little sister blackmailed him into playing for her. Because she wants to see the final CGs but she doesn’t really want to play the game to get it, and apparently she can’t use Google just to find them? It’s a clumsy and contrived way of allowing a guy who hates otome games to still have all the knowledge he needs to cheat the system and get ahead in life, making him fundamentally identical to a normal isekai hero. So we’ve taken three lefts to turn right and arrive at a simple wayne isekai story, only now our male lead will have to build a harem of loving anime girls showing off those handsome gigachads that make up the typical love interests .
Then there are the frankly flaccid attempts at role reversal with the game world’s gender politics. Look, in this game, it’s the women who have all the power! So now MEN are the ones who are forced into loveless political marriages where they serve older, wealthier WOMEN who have disposable male lovers. Look, it’s clever, because they CTRL+F for the word “patriarchy” and then replaced the P with an M. My first impression seeing that part of the premise was that this would be a shame-inducing setup for a victim complex. to further fuel the main character’s resentful growl, but I’ve read enough of the manga adaptation to know that’s not the case. But that doesn’t stop it from feeling like a lazy way to build a paper-thin world, which isn’t much better.
Combined with sub-par, stiff animation and a pacing that jumps from moment to moment with unabashed desperation, this one ends up being a total disaster. It’s overloaded and totally lacking in ideas at the same time, and it has the nerve to have its own protagonist complain about how much their world and his story sucks as if it’s someone else’s fault. It’s just failure all around.