Long-time followers of Beneath the Tangles or my own blog Curiously Dead Cat may know that I have a thing for isekai. I will watch all but the trashiest and most offensive new releases if they include a poor(?) Japanese sap who gets whisked off to a fantasy setting and—oh, the horror!—finds himself or herself at the top of the socioeconomic food chain. Don’t get me wrong: I will readily acknowledge the flaws in half-baked visual narratives like Master of Ragnarok and Blesser of Einherjar; I’ll just enjoy it anyway. Like my daughter who likes to eat lemons, it’s kind of inexplicable.
So when I tell you that I found the first episode of Drug Store in Another World: The Slow Life of a Cheat Pharmacist to be rather, well, banal, you can guess that something is seriously awry. I will, most likely, continue watching it; but I can’t in good faith say I particularly enjoyed it more than the bare minimum required to do so. First of all, as the title indicates, the show is slow. But it’s not slow like a slice-of-life, so much as a slice-of-wrist: As the minutes tick by, you can feel your life dripping away. I don’t remember any explanation given as to how our protagonist ended up in Generic Fantasy World surrounded by Generic Harem, nor do I feel inclined to go back to confirm whether Truck-kun was there and I just forgot. Here is the entire extent of Generic Protagonist’s introduction:
That’s it. Look closely at this picture. You already know everything that the show deems important. Kirito—I mean, Kirio—used to be a Japanese businessman. Now he’s a—get this—pharmacist. No explanation of how he got here. Since he’s not living like a hero, I’m guessing he wasn’t summoned to save the world; so I’m assuming serial murderer Truck-kun added another victim to its ever-growing list.
Now, don’t look too closely at the picture, or it will become painfully obvious how flat the art appears. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of the animated arts; but when you have a slower, SOL show like this one, the scenery and visuals will have to do the heavy lifting. And this episode looks like it was cut from layers of cardboard. The lines are inconsistent, and the colors kind of sad.
Having said that, it is harmless. If you’ve got time to kill, and like it better dead, there are worse things than Kirio and his live-in moe ghost and werewolf assistants selling blue coffee to the countryside.
You can squander precious minutes every week as you legally stream Drug Store in Another World: The Slow Life of a Cheat Pharmacist on Crunchyroll.
I swear there’s some secret competition among anime creators to create the most unnecessarily long titles ever.
Really good write-up! I haven’t seen this show, but I have seen the title here and there. It gave me pause because that is, quite frankly, one of the worst titles I’ve ever seen. It does generate interest just in how baffling it is, but if you’re going to put ‘drug store’ and ‘pharmacist’ in your title and even go all in with saying ‘slow life’ you better be secretly really clever and entertaining otherwise it’s just a ‘I don’t know what I expected’ situation. Slow shows, even drugged-up snail speed shows can work really well if you’ve got the writing chops, but it looks like this one isn’t even trying.
Right? I feel like there was so much potential here, and was really let down. I do hear from manga readers that the manga is better and the show doesn’t do it justice.
Hilarious post XD
Thank you!
Well, you certainly live up to your username. Primely negative fits your overly-biased, negative as f*ck review. Not every anime has be action packed with oppai eye candy and filled with low key yaoi. But given you’re a Naruto weeb, I guess we can’t expect much from you.
This anime does exactly what I expected. I didn’t want a deep anime. I wanted happy, fun, kawaii, no ridiculous love trapezoids with an OTT, overpowered MC. It’s tropey in all the right ways, and pokes fun at itself.
You’re right though. You’re not a connoisseur of visual arts. But you also have piss-poor taste in general, so that doesn’t say much. Go watch Bleach or One Piece, like the basic trash you are.
One of the wondrous things about anime is that it’s such a vast medium that there’s room for all sorts of genres, types, tropes, etc., and just as much room for different opinions about these series and movies. We respect that you like this show, and there are others in our staff that like it, too (in fact, it’s quite usual for our writers to have varying and sometimes widely diverging opinions about different series). A negative review of an episode is no slight at those that enjoy it. It’s just an opinion—and in this case, I think a pretty informative and humorous one.
We see this site as a community, and hope you’ll return and be a part of it, giving opinions from your own expertise and taste, but with a better measure of decorum and kindness. Take care and God bless.