The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist In Another World

Haruyoshi is the strongest onmyōji (diviner) in his world. He's betrayed by his friends and, on the verge of death, he wishes to be happy in his next life. He then attempts a secret reincarnation spell. The spell is a success and he is reincarnated, but somehow it's in another world. He is reborn into a distinguished family of wizards, but is judged to have no magical ability. He soon realizes however that the magic in this world is nothing compared to his old onmyō arts, and he declares that he doesn't need magic. He thus begins his easy life in another world with his onmyō arts and a multitude of yōkai creatures who follow him.

The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist In Another World is based on Kiichi Kosuzu's light novel series and streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Does anyone a show called The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest? Because if you do, elements of this one will seem very familiar. They have essentially the same premise – that someone super powerful in their dying breath manages to finagle a reincarnation wherein they will have the same or more powers. Where The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest was in a completely fantasy-based world, The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist in Another World takes someone from Japan's past and plops him down in a fantasy land, which we can tell because it has two moons. Despite what it at first more or less looks like, our protagonist is not Abe no Seimei, but he might as well be – in this case exorcist seems to be a translation of onmyouji, and his spiritual talents definitely lie in that direction. And like in many a similar tale before it, his spiritual powers negate any potential magic powers he might have in his new incarnation, leading people to grossly underestimate what he is capable of.

Unfortunately, this is one of those first episodes that makes you feel like you must be missing an awful lot from the source material. Over the course of twenty-three minutes, Seika goes from being killed in his first incarnation to being a three-year-old to being twelve, hitting a few ages in between along the way. Presumably this is in the interest of getting us to the point where he's old enough to enroll in whatever magic academy his father is eventually convinced to send him to despite his lack of apparent magical talent; the song that closes out the episode certainly indicates as much. But we can't just jump in at that point because we need to understand just what makes Seika so different and special from everybody else, and how else could that possibly happen without us getting up close and personal with his terrible brother and neglectful parents? Oh, and he has to meet the busty young maid Yifa as well. Can't forget that.

The pitfall with this style of Information packing is that it doesn't really give us a chance to get to know Seika as a character or to have anything more than a superficial understanding of what it is that makes him so purportedly awesome. It simply ends up feeling like isekai #27B, with nods to other similar isekai stories just sort of tossed in in the hopes that if enough of them are combined together, we'll have something worth watching. So there's paper-making like in Ascendance of a Bookworm, Yifa looks awfully like Latifah without the fox ears from Seirei Gensouki, and plenty of other bits and bobs are strewn about the plot. The result is that it feels less original and more cobbled together, and while that won't necessarily be the case going forward, when you pair it with uninspired art and animation, you have an episode that's just sort of there. Having an onmyouji be reborn in a fantasy world isn't a terrible idea – it just doesn't look like it's one that this show is going to be able to do justice.