Instead he basically decides slavery is totally fine because hey, everyone else is doing it, why shouldn't he also participate in a dehumanizing system that turns sentient beings into property? Going by its premiere, Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World is one of those perfect storms of garbage that I almost have to suspect was a prank created specifically to make me suffer, personally. How was the first episode? The first two-thirds of the premiere is the most paint-by-numbers "Reborn in a Video-Game" isekai imaginable. You could easily do that here and it'd save both the show and audience a lot of time. Potatoman wakes up with a magic sword and the ability to read game menus, proceeds to kill some nameless bandits and shrug his way through a tutorial village, and then gets talked into buying a slave so the actual point of this show can presumably happen next episode. He doesn't just decide to make the best of a bad situation, or to do as the Romans do. Just add its name to the baffling long list of "Anime That Desperately Wants to Be Porn But Are Too Cowardly to Commit". Multiply that by 60, 000 and it's well over a million dollars. Unfortunately, trying to do both in a single episode leaves the former feeling a bit too rushed—especially given all the heavy lifting it has to do in explaining why Michio is able to throw out his earthy morals and get right into buying slaves.
What really kills this story dead is just how badly it tries to justify and rationalize why it's totally cool for our protagonist – who the show insists is a perfectly nice guy – should buy a woman exclusively to have sex with. I'm not sure if that's original to the source material, but it is fairly annoying; sure we can guess what words are being used, but it makes about as much sense as how words are edited out of songs on the radio – if we all know, why bother? Discuss this in the forum (216 posts) |. All in all, I'm not sure how I feel about Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World. While there's nothing quite as bizarre as the digital artifacting that turned WEH into a dada-ist masterpiece, we instead get a show entirely built around our hero buying women to have sex with, where they have to bleep out the words "sex slave. " But if you're watching this for the mature rating and sexy bits, you may find yourself disappointed, because you really can't see anything besides some highly questionable boob "jiggling" (they move more like clappers) and, as an added bit of censorship, several of the spoken words are beeped out.
Moreover, each step is important because it forms how he comes to view the world he is stuck in and his own place in it. There's just not enough here to make up for its deficiencies even if all of those deficiencies don't bother you, so if you're looking for sexy fanservice, I'd recommend Bastard!! Doesn't make it good, and I won't be bothering with another second of this mess, but at least it made this delve into the labyrinth tolerable. Michio's vibes, by the way, are absolutely rancid. I feel that this first episode of Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World was stuck in a bit of a no-win situation. Seriously, what is the point of airing a show like this during broadcast hours when all of the sex and nudity is going to be censored to hell and back? Basically, Michio is able to deal with everything that happens by couching it in game terms. That is a lot for a character to go through in a single episode—much less the first episode. No conflicted ethics, no struggling with the idea that he has no choice but to buy a slave to survive in this world. Well, actually his first questions are whether the slave can kill him or run away, which demonstrates an understanding that hey, enslavement is actually pretty awful and what he's doing to another person is indefensible. His real-world morals can be completely ignored, just as one would do when playing Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. It's a little too blasé to be palatable or even to work as a plot point, and while it may be intended to indicate that he's a hardened consumer of isekai media, it just comes off as lazy writing.
He doesn't feel disgust over how common slavery is in this world for a single instant, but accepts it with a shrug and, later, an erection. Yet here we are just three months later and we've got a contender that could be even funnier than its spiritual predecessor. How else could you explain this show, which somehow combines the two absolute worst recurring trends in modern anime? On the other, it had to set up the first driving goal of the anime: making enough money in five days to buy Roxanne. Except there's the "Harem" portion of the title, which we get a glimpse of when our hapless "hero" gets lured into the sex-slave trade. This, it is clear, is not just about hapless, horny seventeen-year-old isekai victim Michio assembling a harem in a labyrinth in another world – it's about him buying a harem in a labyrinth in another world.
As long as he follows these rules, he is in the clear. That this is a real world, not a game world. On one hand, it needed to do an awful lot of character building for our hero and introduce us to the world. That he really wants to buy a sex slave. Rating: Holy crap, a slave costs 60, 000 Nars products? High school student Michio Kaga was wandering aimlessly through life and the Internet, when he finds himself transported from a shady website to a fantasy world — reborn as a strong man who can use "cheat" powers. It is startlingly ugly, with its hand-drawn characters poorly composited onto computer-modeled backgrounds worthy of a Windows 2000 screensaver and baffling directorial flourishes.
Michio, like another isekai protagonist this season, failed to read the pop-up on his computer, and that catapulted him into what he thought was the VR game of his dreams…but then he can't log out. It is sure to anger anyone trying to watch this show for its sexual content, but for my money there's no better way to watch this show. So we get every tired isekai trope in the book thrown at us with pure apathy. Even if I were a person with no scruples about what I consumed, who did not feel intensely creeped out by how Michio had no compunction about purchasing a woman to have sex with, who was totally comfortable with slavery fetishists, I would think it was a bad show. This article has been modified since it was originally posted; see change history. It turns the scene of the friendly neighborhood slave trader selling our hero on his finest dog-girl maid into a joke right out of Yu-Gi-Oh! It is 20 minutes of reading Playboy for the articles, but all the articles are 4chan posts recycling old JRPG memes. The censorship is an interesting combination of the massive amount of coverage we saw in World End Harem but done with road signs and computer error messages rather than a five- year-old with a sharpie, and I'm hard-pressed to say if it's better or worse; at least it's not as ugly, I guess? Don't worry, though, he's pretty chill with that, even though it means that he's become a murderer by wiping out an entire bandit gang and got a guy sold into slavery, because…that's just how this world works? Man, they got that second season of World's End Harem out fast!
There is not one second of this part that attempts to tell a real story. The Summer 2022 Preview Guide. But that's not the main concern of this show's audience, is it? That's because otherwise, this premiere would be a total dirge to get through. That's the kind of amazing, unintentional art that can make for a hilarious time. Seriously, I figured it would be a good long while before we saw another show so desperate to be porn, held back by the strictures of TV broadcasting until it morphed into a surreal, hilarious car crash. But really, that's the stuff that's true of a lot of these shows. That's an expensive makeup brand!
To all of this it must be added that there's not a whole lot going on with the plot, either. It's just watching this anthropomorphic department store mannequin check his stats and read info screens on his video-game menu while characters dole out meaningless exposition. It's boring as all hell, and barely animated since all of the production values were funneled into the jiggling, cranium-sized bazongas that are now locked behind those censor bars. The episode seems to loosely imply that this is a coping mechanism—something to help keep him sane when faced with the true gravity and implications of his situation and his actions in it. Despite being billed as a super horny fuckfest, this premiere is entirely about going through the dull stuff you have to do when you're pretending your porn series has a narrative. However, setting it in stone by spreading his character arc over several episodes would have likely been a better choice. That dissonance made this premiere one of the funniest things I've watched in a while. The point is slavery fetish porn, and the version on Crunchyroll is censored to hell and back, including, hilariously, bleeping out the words "sex slave. So with that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, let's talk about the other unfortunate thing about this episode: it's censored. Basically, in this episode we see Michio grapple with the following facts: - That he is trapped with no way home. Over this in a heartbeat.