Just saw In Another World With My Smartphone...

[Kitten Champion]

I actually like the first little bit of Smartphone, because it had this lack of pretension to it and reminded me of Hayate no Gotoku in its art style and certain choices in its production are similar -- though I don't believe it's the same studio. That maybe it would just be a gormless, breezy comedy where dramatic tension wasn't necessary.

Then it just sort of phased out even rudimentary cohesive story-telling or developing much potential humour and became about the harem fantasy aspect of it. Even if you're into that kind of fanservice-heavy anime - and there's certainly a market for it - it doesn't really work with the limitations of the art style and cheap looking animation.

I think the most disappointing part is that the smartphone is pretty superfluous. Like, even if you go into it with the expectation that the protagonist isn't going to be meaningfully challenged and will become essentially omnipotent at a certain point anyways, you can make getting there kind of interesting with a new tact on how they become powerful. Like, they have a seemingly weak power that can be creatively exploited to break the system or something. With this, developing a magic system based around smartphone apps could have been fun even if it's in an overall dull narrative. In stead, he's just given whatever superpower he could want or needs with no drawbacks or even effort on his part, and the phone is just an occasional convenience to make his life even easier.

Anyways, I'm curious if the contemporary Isekai bubble will burst in the near future at least in anime, The only ones which seem to persist are Overlord, Konosuba, and SAO. Granted there are still many out there to adapt, so that's whatever.