Am I Actually the Strongest? Anime Series Review – Review

It’s not unfair to say there’s some critical bias against the omnipresent isekai genre in anime. If you’re a casual viewer who only watches the stronger examples every now and then, the constant bemoaning of the trend by professional writers might feel played out. Yet, as someone who necessarily keeps up with these series, I am one of those writers who must regularly bemoan them. And here we have an example of that kind of weaponized mediocrity in Am I Actually the Strongest?: An anime barely content to exist, seemingly green-lit at the behest of analysts insistent that some quota of on-air isekai series had to be met. It’s an adaptation apparently selected with no more consideration than a producer picking up a volume from amongst the sea of nigh-identical genre chaff, shrugging, and going, “Eh, this one’ll do.”

The thing is, for all its shovelware signifiers, one can’t actually immediately disregard Am I Actually the Strongest?‘s source material as some amateur indulgence. Sai Sumimori isn’t some starry-eyed first-time Narou author getting their feet wet by posting their own baseline isekai derivative. They’ve been writing light novels and having them published over the past decade, many of them being adapted into manga, and at least one other having even been animated before (not that you can actually watch the mystifying Mahō Tsukai Nara Miso o Kue! ONA anywhere). Being aware of this, the existence of Am I Actually the Strongest? comes off not as incompetent or even malicious but simply cynical. It absolutely feels like it was created just to capitalize on a trend, designed only to take up space and not much else.

I can’t overstate how distinctly the unifying tone of Am I Actually the Strongest? is that no one involved in this show actually wants to be here. The main character, Haruto, has a primary motivator of having to do as little as possible. That almost feels like an aware allegory for the show’s own existence. Haruto already fulfills all the overpowered requirements for being an isekai lead; after all, why should he have to do anything? Similarly, the story itself commits to containing all manner of marketable material, including monster-girl maids, a cute little sister character, and a magic school, so what could any actual story utilizing these things be other than an aggrieving pain in the ass?

Technically there is a story happening throughout Am I Actually the Strongest?. However, the anime balks with active contempt at the idea of actually telling it. Issues like Haruto’s desire not to attend the magic school are dragged out for weeks. Complaining to the audience about how much of a pain in the ass a plot point will be is not the most effective way to hype them up for it. Imagine if, for three weeks leading up to arriving at a new island of adventures in One Piece, Luffy kept turning to the camera, grimacing, and going “Ugh, do we have to?”. Other swerves, like the villainous nature of Haruto’s biological mother, haphazardly raise their head with no regard for being properly paced out or resolved through a season-long arc. It’s like the writers behind the script were listlessly copying the story of the books to fill twelve episodes, just trailing off once they hit that finale with no hint of how this void of a product might continue if anyone ever cared to allow it to.

And why should they? Nothing about the storytelling of Am I Actually the Strongest? shows any interest in even the few theoretically compelling concepts it contains. Whether he’s chiding his dipshit wolf-maid or enslaving his murderous mother, Haruto displays all the enthusiasm of someone sleepily doing dailies in their third-favorite mobile game. He creates a robot duplicate of himself, which he and the show then forget about half the time. The writing teases out Haruto befriending the potential reincarnation of the Demon King themselves, only to shunt that aside in favor of laboriously detailing the story’s magic system as the main focus of most of its final two episodes. Why not? It fills the time slot, doesn’t it? What more could you ask for from a show that feels like it was produced as some sort of tax evasion scheme most of the time?

Occasionally, there will be an element that those behind the anime seem to glom onto. The one person within the story who has any enthusiasm for it is Char, Haruto’s little sister. Her insistence that Haruto fulfills the “Hero of Justice” role she’s imagined his powers foist him into makes for a moderately consistent way of keeping what passes for plot advancements moving. This also comes with the expected little-sister-admiration-coded-as-potential-romance factor, with even Haruto himself indulging the fantasy as he gleefully enjoys a date with Char in the eighth episode. But by that point, I was honestly welcoming it. Screw it, Am I Actually the Strongest?, just go for the incest angle. It’s the equivalent of macabrely poking at a dead bird on the sidewalk, hoping it will do something. But, of course, it never does.

Another thing that must be stressed is that Am I Actually the Strongest?‘s detached disinterest in its existence isn’t at the behest of satire or humor, regardless of how it might halfheartedly try to convince you of that at times. There is an attempt at “hilarious” irreverence way back at the beginning, in the now-infamous scene wherein a wolf-woman attempts intercourse with our infant hero in an absurd plan to produce breast milk for him. But everything after that seems to conflate low-effort anticlimax with actual jokes. Most glaring is Haruto’s adoption of an alter-ego blatantly riffing on Zero from Code Geass. It entirely misses the mark of parody and lands instead in the realm of pure acknowledgment. So much of what passes for “humor” this way feels like it was the first thing the author thought of, drawn out entirely to take up time while we continue not doing anything with what scant story is here.

But that’s the height of this anime’s ambition and the closest thing to praise I can give it: That it exists. It looks cheap most of the time, relying on blurry cel zoom-ins and a weirdly noticeable abundance of isometric-view aerial angles. But it’s never utterly falling apart, and the final episode, with its contractually obligated battle against a hulked-out tertiary antagonist, actually has some pretty nice cuts of animation therein. To the voice cast’s credit, they bring enough effort to these canned character roles that they don’t feel as ambivalent about being here as every other aspect of this production. Misaki Kuno, in particular, stands out as Tearietta if you’re the type who appreciates tiny, endearingly irritating little gremlins of characters. Crunchyroll also produced an English dub for this thing, seemingly on account of the ongoing belief that any isekai, no matter how otherwise conceptually barren, would move audience numbers. And while that dub seems as functional as everything else about the series, I beg of you not to prove their hypothesis right.

This series might technically exist. It might ostensibly hold together. But it does so in service of a story that nobody, including those who created it, clearly actually wanted to be involved with. It only reinforces the isekai genre’s status as a nadir, the unswept concrete floor of braindead otaku entertainment. It is naught but a screen-saver. Still, that ultimate breaking point of Am I Actually the Strongest? is somehow also its greatest value. Suppose you do, for some ungodly reason, force yourself to sit through this show. What you then need to do is go ahead and imagine watching this same thing, five to ten times over, every three months. That’s the landscape of modern isekai anime that fundamentally, blatantly does not care about itself as a piece of art or you in the audience consuming it, and that should make clear why so many who have seen this same anime a million times over do not care for it.