Season 2 of In Another World With My Smartphone picks up where the previous one left off, logically enough. The generic OP isekai protagonist and his four fiancées (yes, you read that right) are fighting a couple of standard elite mooks (mithril golems). The rest of the party is helpless, helpless, I say! before the monsters, but the MC (I don’t remember his name, and please don’t make me go back and look it up, as I’ll have to think about this show a few seconds longer) dispatches them with ease. I am shocked. Shocked, I say. Anyway, then we get a reminder that the Babylons (ancient technological repositories) are still somewhere and need to be looted. Then the ladies all go and soak in a bath, while talking about their engagement rings. The MC is invited to visit the king and queen (one of his fiancées is the princess, of course), and then talks to some townspeople who worry that there won’t be enough tourism for their hotel. The MC takes literally two seconds to install a hot springs at their inn, and bam! Problem solved! Now we can spend the rest of the episode watching the fiancées (and the robot girl-in-all-but-name, who surprisingly is not a fiancée) undress ever… so… slowly… as they talk about how much they love MC (full disclosure: I skipped through this part in ten-second increments), and then sit around in the hot springs while they talk about how much they love the MC. That’s right, we got not one but two bath scenes in a single episode! …And the episode ends.
I enjoyed most of season one of Smartphone. The end of the season turned me off with its crass female robot character, and the (naively optimistic) polygamy portrayal could have been handled better, in my opinion. But I’m all in favor of brainless isekai fluff. The problem with Smartphone is that it might as well have been written by a smartphone. So far this season, we’ve spent all of five seconds setting up the microscopic stakes and tension, in favor of a male power trip—and I get that that’s like 90% of isekais anyway (including season one of this same show), but there needs to be something of substance to carry the story along. When you eat cotton candy, you expect to get some in your hair; but if it all gets in your hair and you can’t eat any of it, that’s annoying. The only thing worse than a male power fantasy is a boring male power fantasy. And that, sadly, is all that Smartphone seems to be bringing to the table.
In Another World With My Smartphone is streaming on Crunchyroll.
This whole premise sounds … quite like wish fulfillment run amok.
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I love this show. As a Biblical Christina I’m all for Polyamory.
Now that that Dub’s out I’ve watched this premier and I think it duffers form something a lot of season2 premiers suffer from, where a lot of time is devoted refreshing the audience’s memory just in case some viewers haven’t rewatched season 1 since it first aired.
Back when I’d given up on there ever being a season two I’d actually a bit of the Manga and yeah I think pretty much everything int his episode was Anime Original Filler.