Literature Too Serious
I'm ambivalent towards the isekai genre. I appreciate products like Magic Knight Rayearth, Konosuba, or Bakarina, but I find stuff like Shield Hero, MAR, and Re Zero more tedious than anything else. I don't really like the whole "generic audience surrogate experiences a ridiculous power fantasy, harem included" when it's played straight. On the flipside, sometimes it's fun to watch an average earthling get wrapped up in all sorts of otherworldly shenanigans without having to do all the extra work of organically introducing an ordinary modern human to a fantastical setting vastly different from our own.
In Re Zero's case, it tries to have its cake and eat it too. It's framed as a deconstruction. Subaru is a tracksuit-clad otaku transported to a magical realm with one special power: he returns to a specific point in time every time he dies. With this power, he can avoid and overcome a slew of otherwise fatal encounters with enough preparation and cunning.
But Subaru is still just a shut-in otaku, and he suffers immensely for it. The show goes out of its way to let us know just how horrific each and every death must be for him. He is whiny and selfish, and struggles to understand...anything at all about relationships. He is absurdly prideful and possessive, convinced that his power makes him the only person capable of protecting his one true love, Emilia, regardless of anyone else's thoughts on the matter. If Subaru is a self-insert (he is), he exists in part for Re Zero to challenge those who would project themselves onto him.
And yet, Subaru still starts to acquire all of the usual isekai boons. He wins the undying devotion of a cute, magical demon-maid and accomplishes some truly incredible feats. He is elevated to a position of significant political power by virtue of having a hard-on for the white-haired elf girl. He begins to overcome some of his worst flaws, but he doesn't develop any new, interesting characteristics to compensate.
As far as S1 goes (I don't care to keep watching), Subaru has already begun to morph into a more conventional isekai protag, nascent harem included. To get there, you have to watch an unlikeable dork suffer one bad end after another, whining, screaming, and crying the whole way. It's more exhausting than rewarding.
Ultimately, Re Zero lacks the charm and levity of Konosuba (which, improbably for a leering ecchi show, manages to have more interesting/complex female leads) or the wholesome heroism of Rayearth. It doesn't even have the guts to commit to a real harem like the effortlessly bisexual Bakarina. It relies instead on gratuitous violence and half-hearted subversion to carve out its niche. If you want to watch a sometimes-skeevy nerd get (literally) eviscerated before he wins the girl of his dreams, this might be more your speed.
Literature Has A Rough Start Despite Potential
ReZero is an above average anime to me. That being said, I dislike its pseudo Anyone Can Die nature and repetitive gore as the shock value gets old quickly. It worsens down the line because I can't take these aspects seriously when I know they won't significantly impact the story.
Despite Subaru's status as a Classical Antihero, I don't relate to him. His backstory wasn't sad enough to warrant sympathy from me. In fact, he lost all sympathy from me because of it. The anime's manner of reconstructing the typical isekai hero felt lazy: Subaru gets cheered up and almost instantly overcomes all his self-doubt and other flaws. I hoped he'd become a Pragmatic Hero out of desperation and to make up for his lack of ability, but it becomes clear he'll simply develop into an Ideal Hero at some point. Which I wouldn't mind if the progression didn't happen so quickly and it weren't so obvious.
Emilia gets no focus until S2, and her personality is unremarkable. Making Subaru's devotion to her confusing rather than endearing. While it can be explained as stemming from Subaru's insecurity, that doesn't answer why he does so after overcoming that. It doesn't help that she's basically pushed aside to focus on a couple of side characters despite being the heroine.
As for the rest of the cast, S1 spends much of its time detailing Rem only for her to be Put on a Bus. Which makes me feel like I wasted my time. Next is Wilhelm, who's well written, but other than the one arc, he plays such a minor role that his impact is hardly felt.
Everyone they introduced at the royal meeting was forgettable or too flat to gravitate towards. But this illustrates how ReZero introduces more characters before it even has a grasp on its main ones. As a result, everyone besides Subaru is Out of Focus. Many exist only to help him and then be pushed aside.
It's disappointing they never play any of Subaru's deaths for Black Comedy. It would've varied the tone nicely and provide great comic relief.
The dialogue consists mainly of exposition, which is to be expected although it can get too long at times. When it isn't that, it tends to be where the cast just states how they feel to each other. It's not really a problem until S2 where Subaru and Emilia's interactions became inorganic and corny. Also, tons of angst to the point where it gets tough to take seriously.
Although the visuals are good, specific designs like the over-saturation and the faces threw me off. The OST was decent, nothing memorable though. Subaru's Japanese VA's screaming was annoying the shit out of me, so I switched to the English dub, which was good, but the poor dialogue was even more apparent then.
ReZero would likely be a lot better if they limited the entire story to a single season or if Subaru's development wasn't overly simple. If it was better organized, I'd love the series, but there's too many writing choices that frustrate me.
Literature Hypocritical is too nice of a word to describe it.
I don't hate Re Zero and on some level respected what it was trying to do up until episode 18. However for everything it cirticised its target audience for, episode 19 and on went about doing exactly what it criticized as awful wishfullfillment. At the end of the Day Subaru gets the girl of his dreams, has a side chick who he can always rebound on. None of his mistakes has lasting consequences and are forgotten about, he makes friends will many powerful figures, and is respected by many others. Evangelion this is not.
Literature If You Want To Watch An Isekai...
This is better than most. That being said last anime season had Death March, which reduced its world to an old school rpg with high schooler leveling his character to god tier within the first episode and then spending the remaining episodes collecting preteen girls that want to jump his bones. Needless to say better than most of a toxic genre is a very low bar to pass and occasionally I feel Re Zero trips over it, anyway.
It's somewhat of a relief to learn that Suburu does not immediately dominate the setting like most isekai protagonists. His power, resurrective immortality, allows the audience to see how dangerous the world is without ending the story, anticlimactically. Getting gutted by a group of muggers is a fairly realistic way to die, but a terrible way to close a narrative. In contrast to other isekai protagonists that evolve a power in order to survive, Suburu evolves his mind becoming more clever as he continues to die in a fairly hostile fantasy environment. He has to make alliances, bargain deals, and often think outside the box to defeat potential dangers.
Which brings me to the other quality Re: Zero does better than most isekai and that is developing its side characters. Suburu has to rely on other characters to survive and in order to do that he has to learn about them so they can commit to his cause which is a fluid way of introducing these character's motivations and backstories. These characters eventually take on a life of their own. For example, Wilhelm's conflicted relationship with the woman that would become his wife is not tied to Suburu at all, but a compelling story in its own right.
Where the story trips is when it gets dragged down by more common isekai conventions like the harem genre. I dislike harems because it reduces female characters to notches in the MC's bedpost of masculinity. Contrary to popular opinion I loathed Rem because when she fell for Suburu all other traits were crushed under an obsession to please him. The story also features a thief dressed as a hooker that wonders why she isn't more feared or respected as well as a number of other unreasonably dressed female characters. Occasional breaks in the fourth wall made by the MC also disrupt an otherwise interesting fantasy world. The story can also introduce elements just for the sake of being melodramatic. Rem disappearing in a timeline results in Suburu screaming incomprehensibly until he dies and she appears perfectly normal after the time reset, the entire subplot affecting nothing whatsoever.
I want to like Re Zero but I grow weary whenever it shows its skeevy side. More than anything I find it a sanctuary to wait out the storm of crappy isekai manga and anime that flood the fantasy genre nowadays, which throw blank slates into cookie cutter worlds and hope they stay afloat.
Literature Re:Zero Season 1: A merciless rollercoaster
Warning: Everything between parentheses is a spoiler.
It's not that this is a bad series. It's not that I don't like it. But Re:Zero, or at least its first season, is very much like a rollercoaster, and not in a good way.
It goes like this:
- Things are OK at first (for example, Subaru as a servant in the mansion) - Things get bad very suddenly (oh noes, Subaru died in his sleep!) - Subaru tries to fix things, things get unspeakably horrible (our lovely Rem kills Subaru! But if Subaru doesn't die, then Rem will die!!) - Subaru gets a hold of himself and fixes things so hard that some of them get great (Subaru and Rem survive, and not only does Rem stop wanting to kill Subaru, she also starts to love him more than life itself!) - Rinse and repeat.
On and on and on. Downhill and uphill, downhill and uphill. There is hardly any time to breathe. Victories get increasingly bigger, but that hardly seems to matter when there is always an assassin, or a mabeast, or an archbishop, or any combination thereof around the corner to screw things up again and ensure that Subaru gets killed and traumatised over and over, again and again (Oh crap, people forgot Rem's existence! Again!)
I think the problem is that Re:Zero seems to want to be both the Neon Genesis Evangelion of the isekai genre and a comparatively conventional Earn Your Happy Ending Epic at the same time, which, as another troper has pointed out, is pretty much having your cake and eating it too. In some ways I respect its ambition, but the truth is that I find it hard to invest in a story like this. It's kind of exhausting. I'm getting off this ride.