Gotta admit, I didn’t expect Re:Monster to get an anime adaptation. I mean, sure, I did re:ad a few volumes of the manga adaptation of the original light novel series, but not only did I find it to be just your run-of-the-mill isekai with a re:cycled plot, I also felt that the story structure wouldn’t re:ally translate to anime that well. Given the isekai boom going on, however, I should have re:alized that it would eventually get an anime adaptation. I figured that I might as well give it a watch, and now that it’s over, I might as well write a re:view for it. Hopefully, it will help re:aders decide whether or not it’s re:ally worth their time.
Ah, my vocabulary isn’t expansive enough for this! Let’s just get to the review of Re:Monster.
Re:Monster begins when a human named Tomokui Kanata meets an untimely death at the hands of a yandere. He is then reincarnated in another world as a goblin while retaining his memories from his past life. Most isekai anime of this caliber would give its hero an ability that would make him overwhelmingly powerful, and for Tomokui - now named Gobrou - it is an ability he already had in his past life to inherit the abilities of whatever he eats. Using this ability causes Gobrou to rapidly become stronger, eventually evolving into different creatures and even becoming the leader of his goblin tribe. Basically, nothing isekai fans haven’t seen before.
One thing that stands out about Re:Monster, in particular, is its “diary” format. Whenever a day or more would go by within the series, there would be a title card that says “Day (insert number here)” with a short, slightly dramatic jingle accompanying it; there would also be narration of the day’s events provided by the main character. It’s certainly a unique format, as far as I’ve seen, but I don’t think the narration part works very well; I feel like Gobrou’s constant narration causes the “show, don’t tell” rule to be broken too much. I can see it kind of working in the light novel series that it’s based on, and it even somewhat worked for the manga due to the lack of motion with the drawings; however, when you’re watching an anime, you kind of want to see the action more than you want to hear the narrator describe the action, you know? Another problem with Re:Monster’s story structure - which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with its format - is its pacing. Multiple days pass in every episode, and within those days, so many things happen at once that it gets hard to keep track of it. It’s hard to keep track of all of the abilities that Gobrou gets throughout the series as-is!
Speaking of Gobrou….I wouldn’t say I hate or even dislike him, but I don’t care about him too much. He’s a pretty strong leader, which I liked to see, but his values can be a little dubious. He’ll forbid the other goblins from forcibly impregnating the human women that his tribe captures, but he’ll also bang pretty much any woman who shows interest in him. What? I don’t really care too much for any of the other characters, either, albeit for different reasons; some of their appearances change throughout the series, but most of the characters don’t get any development. They just exist to play off of Gobrou….or in some cases, play with him, if you know what I mean.
The animation, provided by Studio Deen, is….serviceable. Sure, there are a few moments where the characters go off-model, but the action scenes are fine, for the most part. The voice acting was also serviceable; no one in the voice cast gave a particularly outstanding performance, but no one gave a bad performance, either. As for the music….well, the opening theme - “Into The Fire” by CHANSUNG(2PM) and AK-69 featuring CHANGMIN(2AM) - is a song I have mixed feelings about; the rap part of the song wasn’t all that good, but the singing part is catchier than one might think. Finally, the ending theme - “Sadame” by EverdreaM - is a nice song, even if not all that memorable.
Overall, Re:Monster is a bit on the lower side of average. I wouldn’t personally re:commend it, but massive isekai fans might get a kick out of it. As for me, though, maybe I’d get more enjoyment out of That Time I Got Re:incarnated As A Slime, which seems to have a similar concept. Wait, no, I wasn’t supposed to put a colon there-!
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