Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! is a 12 episode anime based upon the light novels. This is an isekai anime, and there isn’t really too much of a twist here. At least the protagonist this time around is a girl, who died doing something heroic, and since she stood out in her past life due to her abnormally high intellect, requests god to be reborn into a very average person. It mostly succeeds… but she’s still a magical prodigy.
Going by the alias Mile, she attends a hunter school, which upon graduation she will be able to join the hunters. Mile looks unassuming, just your typical noble dainty lady, but both her physical and magical prowess are exceptional. Upon her first day in the city she foils a children kidnapping plot. Joining the school, she is clearly the best student. Of course, being an otaku in her previous life, she’s a bit socially awkward but is determined to change that, and joining the school, she manages to meet and get along with three others.
Despite the first two episodes setting up Mile arriving and attending the school, it has never been the focus. After a quite scene setup where Mile trains the others given she is just so clearly out of their league, there is a time skip to the graduation. Perhaps, it’s just an easier way to explain and justify the overpoweredness of the four member party now. It also avoids all the early awkwardness as instantly they are like lifelong friends. It can be a bit of lazy way to go about it though.
The rest of the season kind of like a slice of life, but just the girls going about their early days as hunters, and enjoying life in general. They are clearly overpowered, so they have the potential to just take on any quest and succeed, get rich, and live out their lives. However, they’re all young and inexperienced, and so must go through the regular rites of passage. There are many episodes where it fleshes out their backstories, diving deeper into their family, however, the plot is very episodic, as everything basically will be resolved within one episode.
Mile still retains a lot of her knowledge from Japan, and she often uses the science from this previous world to help now. It has potential for her to become even more overpowered and utilize her magician clever ways, but it’s only lightly touched up and more often than not, it is used for laughs. This is because Mile is a huge otaku, and she gets excited over typical anime things, and even goes so far as to general and reference those anime herself.
To be fair, there’s no overarching objective to the anime, so there isn’t any urgency in anything the characters do. There’s also little incentive for any sort of multi-episode spanning plot arc, thus, it can be too laid back and chilled, leading it to being bland at times. That said, the season finale had some interesting tidbits about this world, which sheds a little bit of light into why magic is created by nanomachines. It’s also at this point that the anime gives up any pretense that Mile is not the most powerful character in the whole world.
Overall, Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! is an average anime. It had an interesting idea, reincarnating a character that doesn’t want the overpowered abilities. However, it ended up being more of the same from what you’d expect of the isekai genre. Mile is slightly different in that she prefers to have a fun normal life, but can’t help but still be dragged into all sorts of situations.
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