Score: A-

This was fun. I think the isekai genre has room to entertain. But it does need to find interesting setups or ways of telling that kind of story. I think this one found a way that could work out just fine. It will depend on how the story is told going forward. But the setup here is solid with a main cast that I found myself really enjoying as the episode went along. In terms of the main character, I think Yukito was easy to sympathize with. The poor guy grew up with this cult of crazy bodybuilders and just never found happiness in the life he was living. It reached the point where being put through a ritual (being murdered) barely got an outburst out of him. Getting out of that life was almost worth what had to be an uncomfortable death drowning by himself in the ocean.

This girl is out of control in the best of ways

Talk about a first impression though! Alural…cheering up the unconscious Yukito in her own way! Definitely an unique way to meet a HanaKana character. The girl is fun though and sweet. I guess living in a village so despised like that made her eager to meet new people from the outside. For her Yukito was this breath of fresh air that gave their little village a boost of energy. It was no big deal letting him stay at their eatery. Even more so when he basically…gave them access to booze! That’s a big win for a village that probably couldn’t get access to it normally with how hated they are by the nation.

It really says a lot about her that she spent what she thought was her last night with Yukito. Even if she did it in an over-the-top way, it was from a good place. He meant so much to her that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about what she knew was going to happen. I’m sure the last thing she wanted on what was going to be her last night on Earth was seeing the person she liked grieving her loss. Thankfully she gets to live another day. Although she may be somewhat…extremely unhappy with the amount of attention this deity Mitama spends on Yukito.

This guy lived quite the life even before the isekai

The pace of the episode felt pretty good. It got to the other world fast but spent enough time to establish Yukito’s background. And once he got to that world it really let him get settled in. He met new people, enjoyed the company, and made a place for himself in that village. It wasn’t the fancy isekai life he would have immediately wanted, but I do think he was happier this way. The biggest loss for him in his regular life was normal happiness. But here he managed to make friends, met a nice girl, and found a strange sense of normalcy there. If he just dropped into a fantasy world with crazy powers, I think the immediate thrill would have died on him fast.

Of course, that normalcy is right out the window now. He’s brought a deity into a world that didn’t have any. I don’t see Mitama as being the kind of God that will forgive what has been done to Yukito in this world. Although I guess we’ll have to see. If she claims to have been with him his whole life…is there a reason she never intervened to this point? It had to be obvious that he was miserable in that cult. But she didn’t have any issue with him being tossed in the ocean to drown? Well, she did grant his wish to go to a place without gods so maybe she’s limited to what he actively wishes for.

Don’t mess with this Goddess!

Mitama is hardcore and so is this world. I don’t know exactly what happened to those soldiers, but I don’t think they are having a great time. I think she absorbed them or something like that. Not exactly sure, but they paid a high price for messing with Yukito. In that sense things are going to change quite a bit in that world. She seems to have enough power to do whatever she wants. So, if creating a religion in that world is part of the plan it shouldn’t be all that difficult.

The setting itself is brutal and this episode didn’t shy away from things. It had…Alural’s greeting for Yukito, a lot of drinking, and quite a bit of death. The demanded suicides weren’t pretty, and neither was the stabbing Yukito suffered. This feels like a show that won’t censor a whole lot and will lean into the messier stuff when it is appropriate.

Hopefully the focus stays on this cast and village

This episode was better than I expected. There was a lot of fun to it and that mixed well with the darker stuff at work here. At one moment it was possible to laugh at Roy and Alural freaking out over classical depictions of pornography and then we saw Siluril having been hanged. This show will probably cover a lot of extremes. So long as the story remains good and the characters likeable that should be just fine, I think. It might not be a show I talk about much this season, but I didn’t want to miss out on talking about the first episode here.