#My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even At Level 1

[kodanshamanga]

NEW Kodansha Digital:

🥕My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1, Vol 13🥕 By Mawata, Nazuna Miki and Subachi

⚔️The Ryota Family joins the ranks of the “High-Income Families,” and each member of the family receives a magic cart with special functions.

[jaebird88]

Finished off My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1. I'm surprised I went through this faster than past titles I've seen from 2023, but it's not like it ever had some engaging story to begin with. It's about as fluffy as cotton candy and has as much substance, if not less.

Now on to Liar, Liar, which is among the six titles from last year's summer season left before I can finally move on to fall 2023.

ヽ(✿ﾟ▽ﾟ)ノ

[my-anime-goods]

Level 1 dakedo Unique Skill de Saikyou desu (My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1) - New goods by Granup with new illustrations (Lolita Style Maid) available at Shinjuku Marui Annex from 29 February to 31 March 2024

[elephanteadraws]

Emily Brown // My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even At Level 1 

#sketch #art #anime #MyUniqueSkillMakesMeOPEvenAtLevel1

[onemillionspiders]

This is the funniest shit

He's just blasting her

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Show Don't Tell

I think a lot of people get the essence of "show don't tell" as advice wrong.

There's plenty of stuff in fiction that should - indeed perhaps must - be told. There are great narrative reasons to include a narrator character, for instance, at which point what's being told and how it's being told can be critical to the story. Bastion wouldn't even be the same genre without its narrator.

But I feel like My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even At Level 1 is a prime example of where the advice comes from.

I'm not opposed to simple stories. Ponyo is a simple story, and it's a delight. The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Birthday is even simpler and it does everything it needs to. (And if anything its telling-to-showing ratio is higher yet!)

The core issues with "telling" are of finesse and trust.

Unique Skill at Level 1 has no faith in its ability to let the viewer comprehend what's going on without the protagonist narrating how cool he is in his own head - which sounds kind of pathetic as a behavior, now that I write it out. Because of that lack of trust, they include a hamfisted and extremely flat, straightforward delivery of "By carrying these monster bits out of the dungeon and reconstituting them and killing them again I get magic fire bullets and then if I shoot two fire bullets at once they turn into piercing fire bullets."

I'll grant that that isn't a direct quote; It's not like the hero ever says that entire near-paragraph of a sentence all at once. But there are whole scenes devoted to nothing but the hero getting new powers handed to him and then him describing what they do for our benefit. That's not "simplicity" as a problem. If anything it's outright bloat.

It's not a bad anime, not really. It's got some cute scenes and nice ideas floating around there. It's just got some poor execution in the storytelling and some pretty low-effort (or perhaps merely low-budget) animation. I don't regret watching it, and didn't ever dread watching another episode when it came up in my queue again (something that did happen when I was watching Hell Girl). It's very much C-tier viewing. Passable, but probably not worth your time if you've got stuff you know is good queued up.

[tetrix-anime]

Level 1 dakedo Unique Skill de Saikyou desu (My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1) - Episode 12 thumbnail from Muse Asia YouTube channel.

[kodanshamanga]

NEW Kodansha Digital:

🐰My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1, Volume 12🐰 By Nazuna Miki

🔨 Using a plan to gain experience points like a perpetual motion machine, the entire Ryota Family maxes their levels out?!

[jaebird88]

Over halfway through My Unique Skill Makes Me OP, and while I would throw this in the bin of "isekai that is mostly harmless fluff", it's worth noting how bizarre of a system it runs on.

Literally all goods drop from monsters that appear in remote dungeons. From tools (like the MC's six-shooters and bullets) to foods; not everything is produced in a normal way. But if any of them are left alone outside the perimeter of the dungeon, they change back into the monster that dropped them. These are referred to as strays, and won't drop any items upon defeat except for the MC and his S-rank skill (hence the title).

The only times items revert back to monsters is when they're left alone and away from others, because a majority of the time people are carrying them around to be traded and eaten. There has not been an instance of monsters popping up while in possession of adventurers, yet. So it amounts to a matter of time and isolation for strays to occur.

For how much forethought was placed on this bit of world-building, it's just so weird as a means to justify dungeon crawling as a profession of sorts. It makes me think of Handyman Saitou in Another World, but that treated it more like a mining operation where items and treasures are finite. (At least how it's presented in the anime, as the source material could have more info I'm unaware of.)

[handsome-robot]

Let's hear it for Bonsey, guys! Best anime character of all time! Bonsey! Very sad The Bonsey Show is almost over!

[c-k-mack]

I love Ryota and Emily’s platonic marriage dynamic. And that Emily’s insanity switch has nothing to do with jealousy.

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Bland and Sweet

The isekai My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 is very low-effort on the animation side of things, and also on the writing. By and large this is fine; It's aimed at kids...

Which makes it interesting that its largest ongoing theme is very much an adult theme: Work/Life Balance.

I don't know that I've ever seen an isekai where the protagonist so frequently narrated about his old life. Almost every intro/summary, which happens every episode, starts with "I worked at a toxic company..." And while the hero does his best to help people in general he's way more likely to stick his nose into other people's business if he sees people being overworked or convinced that problems caused by their employers' shitty behavior have somehow become their responsibility.

A few years back there was a wave of critique for a bunch of rebirth-style isekai that asked why the hell they were even isekai instead of just fantasy stories with OP protagonists, and you get the sense that this author encountered that critique and actively included an answer.

This series also features a sweet girl who is aggressively romantic, including flat-out kissing the protagonist when he doesn't get her dropped hints, and does not then change her status as good and sweet girl. It was not so long ago that this kind of initiative was a sure sign that she was secretly either a pervert or The Villain In Disguise.

The place where I call the writing "low-effort" is that there are bits of the worldbuilding that fall apart when examined closely. And I wouldn't consider that a flaw - as I said, I expect this is for a much younger audience - except the same story specifically asks those kinds of questions to provide the "protagonist is clever" moments. So even if I were 6, this story would be training me to poke holes in its cosmology. This is definitely one of the risks of using your worldbuilding to support the idea of your hero's intellect.

[tetrix-anime]

Level 1 dakedo Unique Skill de Saikyou desu (My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1) - Episode 12 [Final] (English Sub) is available on Muse Asia YouTube channel from 23 September 2023, 9.30pm (GMT+8).

[kodanshamanga]

NEW Kodansha Digital:

🌷My Unique Skill Makes Me OP even at Level 1, Volume 11🌷 By Nazuna Miki

🔥The drops in all of the dungeons of Cyclo have mysteriously disappeared! Clint, the Dungeon Chief, tasks Ryota with finding a solution.