A boy wakes up in a very tidy cabin with two books and a knife on the table. He steps outside and summons water, which morphs elaborately in the air above him before dripping away to the ground. Ryo has reincarnated into a world with magic, and he’s one of the twenty percent of humans who can cast magic. Woohoo! But rather than go wild, he requests a slow life from the Fake Michael angel in charge of his reincarnation. Said Almost Angel obliges, providing a cabin in the woods stocked with food and protected from monsters. But Ryo is not one to slack, even when living the slow life, so he immediately gets to work imagining his magic into useful expressions. That’s how magic works here: Imagination. That’s it. That’s the whole system. Ryo thinks he can and thinks he can until he can indeed, and he starts taking on various monsters in the surrounding environs. Fortunately, one of the books is about monsters, though it seems to have been written by a hopeless coward and tends to advise simply avoiding everything at all costs. Ryo is brave, though, or foolhardy, and he works his way through the beasts, even picking up a mortal enemy along the way, whom he trains to overcome should it one day return. Ryo is aided in his training by a dullahan knight in a skirt that may in fact be the Fairy King, and who gifts Ryo an ice sword for reasons unknown, since his head is nowhere to be found, so he can’t express himself very clearly. Anyhow, the sword comes in handy, Ryo defeats his nemesis, the one-eyed More Than A Hawk Monster, and then a dragon arrives and has a nice little chat with him telepathically. All in a day’s work!
The most exciting thing about this episode is the OP, which makes this out to be a pleasant, “just hanging out with friends” kinda dealio. Relaxing! Friendly! Easy peasy entertainment. But the episode is more like, “just narrating while I do really unimaginative stuff with H2O until my clothes are suddenly gone and I become very, very wise.” Sigh. I really wish that a bit more thought could be put into adapting this kind of magic-system dependent isekai. I mean, we really don’t need to see every tiny millimeter of progress the MC makes in learning the world’s magic rules. Especially when there aren’t even any rules to speak of. We’re clever viewers; we can fill in blanks. There’s also these devices called “flashbacks“ and “montages” that can spice up your visual story-telling, rather than plodding the plot along by the hand, one baby step at a time. Oh well. It was only 16 minutes of ”learning” magic and 6 more of getting sentimental with monsters, I guess. Honestly, though, I’d rather have seen the friendships starting to build—so much more interesting than solo-boy-with-water. I’m sure this one will pick up eventually, but the fact that the premiere episode was wasted with so much filler does not inspire me with confidence. I have a feeling this is just going to be isekai by the numbers, and since I’m not a ride or die fan of the genre (needing instead a little something of intrigue or ingenuity to get me hooked), I’ll be leaving Ryo alone to his cabin in the woods and his alarming sudden loss of wardrobe. But if isekai is your jam, then at least the OP is promising! Maybe you’ll be rewarded for sticking around…
The OP teases a meet-cute in the library!
Lookit how much fun they have in the OP!
The Water Magician is streaming on Crunchyroll.
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