Making good lightweight entertainment is actually a pretty tough balancing act. On the one hand, you can’t go ham on suspense and drama and give your audience an aneurysm with constant tension all the time by incessantly keeping them on the edge of their seats like a Kuroko no Basket match. No, the conflict has to be simple, laid back, and not all-too-dramatic, just warm and pleasant, not unlike a summer breeze.
That said, conflict does have to exist. You need drama to tell a story. If you make that conflict too easy to resolve and forego tension entirely, then the story loses all meaning. It’s ... difficult to invest in something when there are no stakes. An example of how to do this wrong is the Smartphone isekai. That one never came across to me as a story about an overpowered protagonist, but rather a story about a regularly-powered protagonist in a world set on babyshit easy mode. Everything just sort of works out for him in that world, even with little to no intervention on his part. In a way, he feels a lot like Indiana Jones in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, except, you know, minus the part where he is a cool character in a good movie.
What is needed is a sweet spot between teeth-gnashing tension and meaningless child’s play. In other words, what I’m saying is that you need to create the illusion of a high-stakes conflict, and then slowly but surely resolve it in a relaxed, fun, and pleasant way. And that’s what’s difficult about it. It’s difficult to sell an illusion as believable. If you don’t sell the illusion hard enough, and if you’re not subtle enough with the resolution, then the curtain falls away and you see the Wizard of Oz for what he really is. It’s a sleight of hand, but it can be very effective if done right! HameFura offers just that.
We open on a day in the life of a spoiled young lady, the daughter of a duke in a magical, pre-industrial revolution medieval land. Her name? Catarina Claes. Then, upon unexpectedly suffering a head injury, the trauma makes her remember her past life as a Japanese otaku girl who died in a car crash at the age of 17. What’s more, she particularly remembers a dating sim she used to play, Fortune Lover, whose world and characters bear a striking resemblance bordering on the identical to the world and characters of the world she currently lives in. What’s more, Fortune Lover has a main villain character who, one way or another, suffers an unpleasant fate in all of the game’s routes, be it death, exile, or worse. Her name? Catarina Claes! Upon realizing that she was reincarnated as the detestable villain destined for doom, she endeavors to change the course of history and spare herself a sticky end. Will she succeed? Watch to find out!
Aside from being an instantly magnetic premise which makes use of a gimmick I haven’t seen before, it’s the perfect balance of a conflict that is meaningful and important and also simultaneously rather simple to resolve. You might already intuit what she needs to do. I mean, it’s really not that hard to figure out, right? All in all, it’s a genuinely pleasant and fun show, and seeing Catarina encounter characters from the game one after the other, and changing the way she interacts with them, thus fundamentally changing the way they develop as people was nothing short of a delight.
If it has any weaknesses, other than being light novel shlock, it’s the fact that it doesn’t have much to offer beyond its original premise. Point and fact, whenever the characters deviate towards a side-quest that doesn’t directly have to do with altering Catarina’s fate for the better, I found myself losing interest. I also felt that the ending was the weakest part of the anime, seen as it introduces a completely new antagonist character out of nowhere, rather than paying off a threat it was admittedly building throughout its run, but never really went anywhere. Unfortunately, I can’t go into any more detail without spoiling. There’s also some dark magic mechanic that tries to sell itself as ominous, but I found wholly uninteresting and superfluous.
If the basic premise does not attract you, then you can safely skip this, but if it does, then by all means, enjoy it because it really is a lot of fun. Personally, I would strongly recommend it, but I want to be sensitive to isekai exhaustion. It’s one of studio Silver Link.’s weaker shows in terms of visual presentation, but it never looks anything less than perfectly presentable.
Alternative Titles Synonyms: Hamefura, I Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess With Only Destruction Flags…, Destruction Flag Otome Japanese: 乙女ゲームの破滅フラグしかない悪役令嬢に転生してしまった… Information Type: TV Episodes: 12 Status: Finished Airing Aired: Apr 5, 2020 to Jun 21, 2020 Premiered: Spring 2020 Broadcast: Sundays at 01:30 (JST) Licensors: Crunchyroll Studios: SILVER LINK. Source: Light novel Demographic: Shoujo Duration: 24 min. per ep. Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older Statistics Score: 7.461 (scored by 243,784 users) 1 indicates a . Ranked: #20332 2 based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded. Popularity: #501 Members: 450,726 Favorites: 2,983 Available AtResources |
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