Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody is based on the light novel series and is comprised of 12 episodes. The protagonist is shown to be working at a software company as a debugger. He is competent and has to juggle between multiple games. We're shown that he is a hard worker but is worked to death (hence the "death march" in the title). Along with his coworkers, he frequently works through days and nights, sleeping at the company. One night when this happens, he is transported to a fantasy world where he thinks it is a dream. He also gets the bonus of dropping from 29 to 15 years old.
Taking on the name Satou in this world, he finds that a game UI is available for him, and him only. This gives him a massive advantage given he can view the stats of everyone and check out the properties of all objects, as well as a handy map of the area. He gets severely overpowered really quickly and at that point, you feel that the anime is treading into generic territory. The pacing is extremely slow with the first few episodes having him meet up with all the heroines before exploring the town. He learns various skills and how this world works such as the new languages, monetary system and social status system.
As expected, heroines flock to him like ants to honey which can be annoying at first since Satou has a fake sounding high pitched voice. Girls just pop up and immediately take a liking to him, seize the initiative to talk to him and take him around. Due to most of the heroines' statues in the world, they're a lower social ranking to Satou and a lot of their scenes come down to them eating and enjoying food. Compounding this is that while Satou is overpowered, he hasn't done anything worthy yet for so much attention to be placed upon him.
Naturally, a lot of the enjoyment of the anime will come to whether you like each heroine's personality and how they interact with Satou. Unfortunately, most of them tend to be kids though... Satou is pretty much a wish fulfillment character, with his new party just flocking to please him. Although Satou himself doesn't panic or get flustered when the girls try to push themselves onto him which is an interesting take, he doesn't accept it either. Despite being so powerful, Satou wants to keep his strength low key and thus even when high level enemies appear, he ends up disguising himself. What saves the anime is that he is as interested as the viewer in trying to understand what he can do in this world given his access to menus, infinite storage and ability to learn all skills.
Every time Satou does something or is attacked, he gains new skills, which he then powers up by putting his excess skill points into it. When he completes something he gains a title (like defeating a demon will give him the title of "Demon Killer"). It feels like he is cheating sometimes when he maxes a newly gained skill to mastery immediately during combat and becomes a proficient user of it. This lacks the effort put into mastering it and feels cheap as a result.
For most of the season, Satou rapidly gains new party members, at the rate of around one per episode. Later on, we finally get to see more of Satou's abilities as he fights solo (and thus doesn't have to hide his identity) against enemies of varying levels. Satou prefers to use a gun that shoots magical projectiles during combat which lacks excitement in its execution.
If you're hoping that Satou will be able to use his awesome powers to one up some evil characters, then you're in for a long wait. The ending kind of covered it but still lacked a certain feeling of justice. While Satou was triumphant in the end (and it was expected being the final episode and all), we don't get to see those antagonists suffer. Unfortunately, there is a lack of an overall objective for Satou. He is basically just living in this world and learning about it. He puts his nose ito everything to help them out secretly, gathering allies in the process, yet he is not the fabled hero to defeat a demon king or whatnot. There's a bit of slice-of-life angle to the anime series since a lot of episodes just show him living with the heroines and later on, travelling the world.
Overall, Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody falls flat in many areas. The pacing is really slow for a first season and as such, feels similar and generic to a lot of other isekai anime. It has potential as there were funny scenes and exciting scenes, so it is still worth hoping that there will be a second season.
-------------------------------------------
For other anime reviews, have a look at this page.
