High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World is an anime based upon the light novel series. The season is 12 episodes long. It follows seven high school prodigies who are transported into another world due to a plane accident. They were already big shots in the real world, to the point of ridiculousness. They’re either moguls or expert doctors or a high ranking politician. Basically, they’re anything but a normal high school student and stretches the believability quite a bit.
In the new world, they are found by a small village. The seven easily adapts to this new world and uses their smarts to help the village. They were already overpowered in the real world, and so are even more overpowered in this new world despite not gaining any additional abilities. If you don’t like your characters to be overpowered without putting in the effort, then you won’t like this anime, as it hits all the cliches of the genre. In the beginning, there isn’t as heavy a focus on the fan service as the anime restrains itself. It’s still there, just not in every opportunity. A few more episodes in and then it starts throwing fan service at many opportunities, ticking off yet another box in the generic isekai genre checklist.
With seven characters, we were initially treated with a quick overview of each one. However, with so many characters, naturally it can’t focus on all of them all the time, so we cycle through each one as they work together to overcome the various obstacles. It tries to portray them as geniuses able to easily overcome others by their abilities, but given that we were introduced to them by being told how clever they were, it can feel superficial.
Due to the characters being overpowered, you cannot take any of the villains seriously. For one thing, no matter what, you know that they will be easily taken down. The second thing is that these villains have all the stereotypes and tropes of the genre, but deliberately dialled up to eleven, so it’s just not much fun watching them when there’s no real challenge. The villains exists only to be curbstomped by the characters. That is to say, there is no originality and everything becomes predictable and cringey to watch.
Whenever each character shows up and does their thing, they are very good at their own specialities. Although being so overpowered means that is crosses into ridiculous and cringey territory. They supposedly didn’t get any powers or enhancements entering this world, so they were already like this in the real world, capable of superhuman feats. With no build up or seeing them “earn” their abilities, it ends up reverting back to a generic wish-fulfilment anime. Also for a team of seven that is supposed to work together, we are just told about their teamwork and see the results, without seeing them work together much since it’s mostly each character going on their own way to do their thing.
The anime goes for the direction where the characters are going to change the world. They introduce technologies from their own world which is much more advanced (several hundred years in fact) to this medieval-ish era. It’s portrayed as them liberating the people, allowing them to have the collective responsibility, freedom and advantages of a democracy, although it can swing too far on being overly idealistic and positive. It doesn’t help that events, character personalities, dialogues and everyone’s body language are melodramatic and highly exaggerated.
The problem with the characters’ plans on bringing their advanced technology into this world is that it’s done on such a fast pace. What would normally take hundreds of people and a lot of planning, is done in a few days, from the gathering of the materials to the construction of the technology (which is super advanced even in comparison to the real world). That’s not to mention the moral aspect. The anime doesn’t touch on this but still gives off the vibe, when these advanced and overpowered technologies are given to people, they are prone to corruption and temptation. Do they really want to introduce so much advanced technology in such a short period of time and destabilize the whole world?
While there is an objective that the characters are working towards, the way it gets there feels unfocused. It jumps around between characters all the time, and it’s really jarring when in one scene they mercilessly take over another area, while in the next, a character is stressing over a mundane event such as a date. It’s not paced very well in this aspect. It’s trying to tick all the boxes of what a lot of successful anime has already done, but doesn’t do anything unique to make itself stand out.
Overall, High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World is a mediocre anime. The isekai genre, which has gotten quite saturated at this point, can still be good. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them. The characters are too overpowered and the story doesn’t do a great job at evenly covering each of them to make them interesting. We’re just told about their special abilities, and then they go about using it to change this new world that they have entered, forcibly changing it on a fundamental level. Flip the viewpoint and they’re very much like invaders or terrorists pushing their ideals and methods on others.
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