The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1

Ryota Sato gets the surprise of his life when he's suddenly transported into another world and nearly clobbered at the hands of the young, pretty adventurer Emily Brown. This new world revolves around defeating monsters and profiting from whatever they drop -- food, money, items, etc. Unfortunately for Ryota, he has no skills to speak of... until he learns he has the ability to get rare drops! Suddenly his luck turns around... or does it?

My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 is based on Nazuna Miki and Subachi's My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 (Level 1 dakedo Unique Skill de Saikyō desu) light novel series. It streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

There's something telling about the fact that overworking to the point of death has become an often-used trope in isekai stories. I mean, what greater condemnation of Japanese company life can there be than the idea that doing constant hard, manual labor in a fantasy world—often with your life on the line—is not only the better option but a literal escapist fantasy. And for once, this trope is more than just a back story.

Ryouta is clearly still suffering from his past life as an overworked wage slave. Having a hot meal with another person is such a novelty, it causes him to break down in tears. Then, to repay her for her kindness, he decides to find her a house and pay the rent indefinitely. This is how much having someone listen to his woes means to him. Unfortunately, while his heart is in the right place, he is so conditioned by his past life that he falls into old patterns, overworking himself massively for Emily's sake—despite her not asking for nor expecting any kind of reward. It's legitimately tragic.

But while the character work for Ryouta is above average, the same can not be said for the rest of the cast. We know next to nothing about anyone else who shows up in the story—including Emily who Ryouta is literally living with. Instead, the remaining focus of the episode is spent introducing us to the world, its level up system, and how Ryouta's cheat skill works.

There is a lot of wasted potential here. The story of a guy who can get rare drops but never level up could make for a creative story. As he would be unable to kill monsters alone, it could be centered around his social interactions and how he works to find a group of people who will work with him and not exploit him. Of course, in this story, he just finds a magic seed that lets him upgrade his stats directly instead of through leveling—which means he does level up for all rights and purposes but just in a different way from most. Thus, most of the inherent dilemmas and drama are stripped away instantly.

The setting is likewise a mess of wasted potential. The idea of a world where literally everything comes from dungeons is insane. People with high drop rates for plants replace farmers. Those with high drop rates for weapons replace weapon smiths. Basically, all jobs outside the dungeon would be the infrastructure for those going into it.

Fully exploring this thought experiment would honestly make for an interesting fantasy story. What kind of government would arise in such a world—what kind of art, music, and religion. And since everything comes from the dungeon, how would technology advance—or would it at all? Then, on the isekai front, you could look at what would happen if someone from our world taught people how to farm—breaking the dungeon-industrial complex's strangle hold on the agricultural economy in the process. It's a playground for stories. It's just unfortunate its used in this anime as little more than a one-off line to explain why slimes drop bean-sprouts.

I think it says something important that I've spent as much time writing about what this anime could be as I have about what it actually is. While the main character is a slight step above many isekai protagonists, the rest of the anime is not—to the point I couldn't help dreaming about how cool some of the ideas in the episode were if they would have been explored correctly. So, in the end, this one is one I won't be picking up this season.

If it were possible, I would make my entry for My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 a 24-minute video of just my increasingly befuddled expression as the episode wore on. I mean, I wouldn't actually, because I didn't sleep last night and thus don't look pretty right now—but I just have a feeling the look on my face would sum up my response to this episode with far more eloquence than I can express with words.

I've watched some lazily-written, poorly animated isekai premieres in my day, but this one might actually beat them all in terms of amateurishness. It made me regret using the sentence, “Things just seem to happen with little narrative thread to connect them,” to describe anything in the past, because this one beats them all in terms of incoherence. A few days ago I watched a five-minute isekai play written by a ten-year-old—and this was on about the same level of narrative development.

The script reaches dizzying new heights of vapidity as protagonist Ryota (guaranteed 100% personality-free, or your money back!) skates through the world, bolstered by his S-class item drop skill. Within minutes, he can afford a humble house that he gives to the adventurer Emily Brown—who has been effectively homeless and saving up for years to be able to afford. This was really an awakening experience for me; if you take your average crappy isekai and take out the elements I've complained about—like overreliance on the protagonist's internal monologue or dull establishing scenes but don't replace them with more skilled storytelling—you get disjointed, incoherent mush like this. Never again will I… oh, who am I kidding. I'll keep complaining because I refuse to lower the bar any more than I already have.

There's something particularly icky about how the female characters have been written that goes hand-in-hand with the frictionless writing. Once Ryota gets his house, he has Emily move in and she immediately starts waiting on him—like they're in one of those skeevy “free room for pretty girls” Craigslist ads. The way the receptionist at the guild hall tries to ask him out makes me think of how mediocre men assume service workers are flirting with them when they're just trying to do their jobs. Then there's the girl in a Playboy-style bunny suit who bops him (in a cheaply-animated, zero impact way) for being low-level but then shows up at his door and professes her love. True, they're not slaves or falsely accusing him of rape, but they feel like more insidious versions of how men see women as prizes to be won rather than human beings trying to navigate the world in their own ways.

If you asked me what I prefer, My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 or The Underwater Land by Sima, age 10, I'll go with the latter every single time. It's just as well-plotted but with more efficient storytelling and no weird crypto-sexism. Good job, Sima. You've created something better than a professionally-produced anime. I'm proud of you.

I'll save you the spiel. This is another identical, bland, poorly produced batch of isekai filler. It looks like crap. The characters are boring and have no personality outside of explaining things to our protagonist. The world is boring video game bullshit, complete with stat screens. We've all seen this before, and I'm tired of harping on the same thing all Preview Guide.

So instead, I want to use this space to talk about how goddamn mortifying the apparent thematic message of this series is. Characters dying from overwork, only to be reincarnated into video game worlds where they can make it through life on Easy Mode, is a standard of the subgenre and often part of the explicit appeal. The line is that these are escapist stories for the many disillusioned working adults who want something simple and indulgent for their entertainment, where they can imagine themselves going on adventures, meeting cute anime girls, and briefly forget about the dehumanizing drudgery of an exploitative, thankless workplace. I can sympathize with that, even if this particular escapism feels hollow and patronizing.

However, there comes a point where these stories become so blatant about that message that it becomes morbid, and this episode crosses that line. It's all well and good that Ryota is happy to have a life where his effort pays off finally, and he has people to share it with, but watching him sob into a young girl's chest while she comforted him by saying that this new afterlife was his reward for working so hard – it just made me feel sick. Perhaps by accident, it was the only moment of this boring dreck that felt sincere and intensely depressing rather than uplifting. Is the message here really that if you struggle at a soul-destroying job without hope or change for long enough, divine chance will reward you in the otaku afterlife? Jesus, that's grim. I hope that's just an accident of poor writing because if it's intentional, it makes this whole series distressing to sit through.

This isn't the first isekai to cross that line and make the morbid subtext into text, but it's the first this season to make me feel genuinely uncomfortable. After finishing this episode, I had to walk outside and take in warm sunlight to recover. For that, it gets no points, not even a joke score. At best, it's an empty husk. At worst, it's something far more uncomfortable.

Here's the deal: There's a guy named Ryota, he's from Japan, gets overworked to death, reincarnates into a generic RPG fantasy world with stat boards and crap, and then he meets a chipper girl named Emily who's got low stats. Ryota's vital stats are low, too, and his level is capped at 1, but he's got S-ranked drop stats, which means monsters give him a lot of stuff. Some of that stuff helps him get stronger vital stats. This means that Ryota, in essence, is overpowered even though he's only Level 1.

There, I just explained in three sentences what My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 takes an entire episode to cover, and I saved you a precious twenty-three minutes of your finite existence on this Earth, to boot. Go, now, and use that liberated time to explore nature, spend time with your loved ones, enjoy a new hobby, or even just watch a better show than this one. Almost any show will do, provided you avoid keywords like “Skill,” “Level,” “Reborn,” “Overpowered,” and so on. You're welcome in advance.

If you're still here and want to know whether My Unique Skill is worth a watch, then I've already told you everything you need to know. Despite some relatively bright visuals and a dynamic between the main characters that one might be inclined to describe as “cute enough,” there is absolutely nothing about this show that you cannot glean from the summary I provided above. Hell, you don't even need that much; just read the show's title, and I guarantee you that you already know every beat of the episode in advance. Depending on how many of these isekai anime you've digested over the years, you might be able to predict each line of dialogue moments before they are uttered. There is not an ounce of imagination or compelling storytelling to be found here; it's just people standing around and explaining how stat drop rates and level-up mechanics work, over and over, while they harvest bean sprouts or whatever from slime monsters.

I am still baffled at how an entire industry somehow managed to turn “Literally Just the Tutorial Levels of The Most Creatively Bankrupt Bargain Bin JRPGs, Repeated Over and Over Until The Heat Death of the Universe” into this hellish, perpetual money-printing machine, but I resent whichever mogul first sold his soul to Mephistopheles to make it happen. I'm giving this show an extra half-star because it at least had to decency to keep the energy up with the lighthearted relationship that Ryota and Emily share, but that's as generous as I can be at this point. Nothing else here makes My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 worth recommending at all.

Earlier this morning, I finished reading Dear, Brother. Then I watched this episode. To say that it was a harsh letdown would be to understate it because My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1 is about as far as you can get from innovative literature. The story, if we can generously call it that, feels like it isn't really trying, including its use of hoary old isekai standbys. It gives the overall impression of simply not caring, and that's a greater sin than simply being a bit dull.

I will credit it for a new way for the hero to pop up in his new world. After dying of overwork, which previously got Ryota hospitalized before he went right back to doing the exact same thing, Ryota wakes up to discover that he's somehow a drop from a monster in a dungeon. Since all the other drops in the dungeon are vegetables, Emily, the little (?) girl who killed the slime, is flabbergasted. That doesn't stop her from becoming the episode's walking dictionary, though, as she runs through all the basics of this not-so-brave new world Ryota's found himself in. It's the antithesis of “show don't tell,” minute upon minute of video game-style exposition that is only different in that status screens are actual screens set up in various places where anyone can check their stats.

Ryota's harem is already building up, with Emily (I seriously wish we knew how old she is), the most annoying bunny girl I've met in a while, and the busty lady at the trading post. If the opening theme is to be believed, the girls will keep being introduced. Ryota and Emily have a nice enough relationship, as the first thing he does is go out of his way to help her find a house so that she can stop camping in the dungeon. That he does this as a repayment for making him soup is a little over the top, but that seems in line with what little we know about his personality. Regretfully, none of this is nearly interesting enough to make this easy to pay attention to, and the visuals are sterile and lackluster, particularly the dungeons. Even if you're into this brand of isekai, this should only be your last resort. Its jokes about no one being able to pronounce Ryota's name and a dungeon that only Japanese people can benefit from (seriously, it's the “Nihonium” dungeon) aren't enough to prop this up.