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Review

by Grant Jones,

Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement

Synopsis:
Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement

Saving 80,000 Gold In Another World for My Retirement is the story of a young girl named Mitsuha. After losing her entire family in an accident, she discovers that she can transport herself to another world. Mitsuha notices that she can also return to the real world at will, and hatches a plan to sell modern-day goods in this fantasy realm for the gold they use as currency. Mitsuha then takes the gold back to the real world and begins saving up for her retirement, with hijinks and adventure ensuing along the way.

Saving 80,000 Gold In Another World is produced by Felix Film Studios and based on the light novels by FUNA.

Review:

Saving 80,000 Gold In Another World is a fun enough show with a solid premise and meandering execution. It doesn't overstay its welcome, though it does make some odd choices that deflate an otherwise strong start.

The series is, yes, another isekai fantasy thing, but I wouldn't hold that against it. Despite the fact that these travel-to-another-world-wish-fulfillment tales are so common these days that the very word isekai sets many eyes rolling, I think this series manages to set itself apart by being slightly more relatable. I've often said that my own issue with most modern isekai stories is that they veer almost immediately into rather dull scenarios where the protagonist gets everything they could ever want with little to no pushback or consequence, and often without much thought given to the world they came from.

Mitsuha is a lead who sidesteps a lot of those issues. “I need money to survive, these people pay for everything in gold coins, I should just bring a bunch of common everyday items from my world and sell them here for easy money,” is an incredibly relatable hook. While obviously, not every isekai protagonist has the ability to go back and forth at will, the fact that her first thought was “How does this impact my actual life in the real world?” is such a breath of fresh air compared to many of the more ho-hum isekai I've experienced. It also cleverly lampoons the fantasy trope of all business being conducted in gold coins, which is one of those tropes so embedded in the genre milieu that most people don't even register its existence.

I also appreciate that Mitsuha draws on her family life as a source of strength and information. She knows a bunch of weird factoids and survival stuff from her older brother who was not only obsessed with such topics but prattled on about them constantly. Mitsuha meets a new family in this other world, and when their kindness makes her reflect on the family she's lost – her real family in the real world – she is moved to tears by the remembrance. These constant connections to the world she came from help us remember the importance of the real world and provide that layer of emotional reality often lacking in these works. Many isekai protagonists seem to run into these new worlds with reckless abandon and gleefully forget the world they came from; even if they hated their past lives, it would be nice to get some reflection on why they hated it, but the wish-fulfillment stuff often takes center stage.

There are also some fun ideas and interesting concerns that pop up as the story moves along. Mitsuha sets up a storefront to hawk her wares. Mitsuha needs protection so she gets trained with firearms and later hires private protection services using the gold she's earned. These are the kinds of practical considerations that add verisimilitude to the events on screen and help smooth over the fantastical element of jumping back and forth between worlds willy-nilly.

However, the series is not without its faults. Saving 80,000 Gold In Another World is visually rather bland. The character designs are fine though unremarkable. The fantasy land Mitsuha visits and the characters she meets are all the same off-the-rack generic medieval fantasy stuff you've seen a thousand times before. There are few animation moments to really get excited about, from the dull and uninteresting action scenes to the lack of any exciting expression work or fluid character acting. It's very boilerplate anime that never offends yet never wows either. Voice work is okay to good and the music is unremarkable too.

The plotting and pacing also suffer as the series moves along. There's a general sense around the mid-point of the cour that we've lost the thread somewhere and events are happening without regard for natural progression. Yes, there are some real-world concerns like learning to protect oneself…but then we're fighting dragons with armored trucks and machine guns? You'd think that at some point Mitsuha would have to deal with bandits or thieves in a more direct way, as a store owner has to think about things like burglary and attempted theft. But it never really comes up in a meaningful way, which seems like a missed opportunity. And while I think “we fight a dragon and the dark army” is a perfectly fine approach as these things go, it feels way out of proportion compared to the rather pragmatic setup the series initially started with.

When the premise is concerned with selling goods and saving money, I expected a bit more to do with business problems rather than fantasy problems. How do you go about running a storefront as a teenager on your own? How do you transport the goods to and from the other world? What happens if someone from one side tries to follow you back to the other? What happens when a rival storefront opens up selling imitation goods and trying to get in on your business? What happens when someone buys a product just to reverse engineer it and make knockoffs? These are the kinds of problems I assumed the show was going to deal with, and while it's not entirely fair to judge a work for what it isn't, I am surprised that the practical business-minded premise does not lead to various forms of practical business-minded conflicts. By the end of the season, Mitsuha is dealing with all the same isekai problems you would normally roll your eyes at, and that's a letdown compared to where we started.

Saving 80,000 Gold In Another World manages to get a lot of value out of its strong opening premise. It's just a shame that such a good principal investment can only generate simple interest when it could have been compounded.

Grade:
Overall : B-
Overall (dub) : A
Story : B+
Animation : C
Music : C

+ Good premise, fun characters, sensible connections to real world
A few head-scratching developments, meandering in the middle, not much excitement visually

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Production Info:
Director: Hiroshi Tamada
Series Composition: Akihiko Inari
Storyboard: Hiroshi Mita
Original creator: FUNA
Original Character Design: Tōzai
Character Design: Yūki Fukuchi
Licensed by: Crunchyroll

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Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement (TV)

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