The online game Kenichi Yamada had been playing religiously is shutting down its servers, leaving him with a void in his heart. He looks for a new game to fill it, but everything he finds is way too easy. Kenichi stumbles upon an untitled game, one promising incomparable challenge with unprecedented potential. Without hesitation, he selects the "Hell Mode" difficulty. Lo and behold, he finds himself reincarnated in another world as a serf. Now called Allen, he sets out to unlock the secrets of his mystery-laden Summoner class; without the convenience of walkthroughs, game guides, or online forums, he must grope his way to the top of his new world.

Hell Mode is based on writerHamuo and illustratorMo'sHell Mode - The Hardcore Gamer Dominates in Another World with Garbage Balancing (Hell Mode - Yarikomi Suki no Gamer wa Hai Settei no Isekai de Musō Suru) light novel series. The anime series is streaming onHIDIVE on Fridays.

The realHell Mode is having to suffer through all of these garbage isekai anime, am I right, folks? I suppose I should point out thatHell Mode has a premise that by definition exists to confront its protagonist with some degree of conflict and challenge. I can also acknowledge that a modicum of thought went into giving Allen a class that requires actual effort to be successful in, but come on now. I have not yet been so broken by this godforsaken subgenre that I'm giving out brownie points for a show managing to suck 10 percent less than its shameless competitors. My God, how I loathe the trope of watching a grown man get turned into an RPG toddler. Allen may not be the most insufferable twerp-baby that we've been forced to take seriously on account of the anime industry's obsession with churning out low-effort junk that is guaranteed toturn a profit, but he's still a twerp and a baby.

The job of a premiere is to get the prospective audience invested in a series enough to keep coming back for more each week. While I understand the primal appeal of a story that makes no effort to do anything other than recreate the same familiar experience that first activated the dopamine pathways in our brains when we were children, I reject the practice as a matter of principle. I don't care that the anime everyone loved fifteen years ago did the exact same thing; the problem is that it's been done a hundred thousand times since then. We don't need to see Allen farting around and monologuing about his random NPC parents who don't ultimately matter to the story. We don't need to see Allen learn how to summon little critters with the power of his stupid RPG class and stats menu. For the love of all that is good and holy, at least have the decency to relegate some of this stuff to a montage.

Here is what I will concede: Around twenty minutes into this episode, I finally began to feel…I don't know, something for this Allen kid and his poor family of serfs. I like the concept of a genuinely harsh world that demands sacrifice and suffering in order to succeed, and I can kind of see howHell Mode is trying to set itself apart from the pack. The problem is that the fundamentals we're working with—the writing, the tone, the worldbuilding, the genre conventions—are still trapped in the same essential framework, shaped more by corporate interests than by artistic instinct.

It's the anime equivalent of putting a decent hot sauce on a four-dollar frozen hamburger that just came out of the microwave. Is it technically a more sophisticated experience than what the plain burger would have provided? Yeah, I guess. It doesn't mean that you aren't still shoving junk down your gullet because it was the quickest and easiest option available to you. There's nothing wrong with settling for junk every now and again (trust me, I'm an American). Let's just all agree that nobody should be surprised when your body eventually starts to reject all of that processed slop in favor of something with actual nutritional value, instead.

I will giveHell Mode this much: I actually remember reading the source material and not disliking it. I kind of enjoyed it, as I recall, because the author,Hamuo, was familiar enough with the conventions to write them smoothly without overusing them. Within the confines of its genre, it was pretty good…But I could also skim over all of the pages of stat screens and rehashed text describing Allen's training. That is not an option here, or at least not an easy one.

The transition to anime form makes all of the story's flaws inescapable. Allen is yet another adult man reborn as an infant with an adult mind (cue requisite remark about “sucking on titties,” as if breastfeeding is something designed for the titillation of men reborn as self-aware babies). He can summon his stat screen, and he's got powers beyond what regular folks know about. He spends most of the episode figuring out how to use his skills as a summoner, acting like a cute toddler for his parents, and otherwise being as paper-thin a character as almost any other in a similar situation you care to name, with the plot following suit. It's all very cut and dry, right down to his friend with the pink hair, who is obviously going to have some sort of sword skill when she gets appraised at age five.

That's not to say that this is universally terrible. I love the cute designs for the creatures Allen summons, particularly the mole with his perpetual grin. They're more cartoonish than you might expect, given that the giant boar is pretty average-looking for a fantasy monster, and it does a good job of showing that Allen's monsters are different than those that occur naturally. This doesn't follow all of the other design choices, though, as the family's serf-wear looks like it came out ofThe Flintstones and character designs are pretty bland. At least there's some effort to show that Theresia's giving birth isn't a quick, easy thing.

If you're interested in this story, I'd suggest picking up the light novels. While this doesn't feel as rushed as the manga adaptation, it's also not nearly as entertaining as the original. It isn't terrible, but I don't think it'll be sticking in my memory the way the first novel did.

There was one single moment inHell Mode where I had hope for the story. Allen reaches out his hand, dramatically calls for the status window, and… nothing. Suddenly, I was excited. No status window? That would indeed be “hell mode” for a min-max gamer like Allen. He'd actually have to figure everything out himself or find a teacher. Then came another thought: what if “hell mode” means that everyone else has a status window except him? That would make for an interesting twist.

Of course, this was all for naught as my mind racing with the possibilities was brought crashing down to earth when Allen simply tried again a few seconds later, and it appeared.

Hell Mode is, simply put, boring and bog-standard isekai fluff. The most original aspect of the anime is that the status window is a floating book rather than a floating screen. While Allen talks about how unbalanced this world is, it means nothing. He's already a young child with the strength of a grown man and the intellect to match. The fact that he can only summon insects and rodents means little when he can fight almost on par with someone clearly destined to be the hero. The only actual “hell mode” aspect of his life is socioeconomic: his family is dirt-poor serfs working in a largely undeveloped frontier land. But when you have the ability to summon monsters (read: food) out of thin air, the fact that your family will never starve even if there's a famine is a major leg up.

So, in the end, this feels like a series where the main character laments how bad he has it, even though he's better off than 99% of people in the fantasy world. I don't care about him or his struggles, and I can honestly find not a single reason to come back for more next week.