Sweet Reincarnation - Reviews

This show has an identity crisis. It's trying to be a slice of life, isekai, political, war, action, rom-com, and cooking show all in one. But it doesn't really go all in with any of them and ends up being pretty bad at them all instead. 

Focuses a significant amount of air time on the political and war aspects, but yet the show is not produced like one because every action scene is full of still frames and non-animated motions.

The main premise of the show and the title introduced in the first minute make this seem like it should be mostly about the main character's cooking knowledge, but that element is somehow touched on the least of anything else which is super weird to me.

I only kept watching cause I wanted to know how they would take the shows direction to the end, but it never got better at any point...

To start off, it is your typical reincarnation anime. Guy dies on Earth & is magically reborn into a world with magic. He is crushed to death by a giant sugar sculpture which is a pretty lame way to die, but the same could be said of dying from a ton of books falling on you. No spoiler as it’s literally the first episode.

To start, the animation is weird, they often leave out the faces of people in the background & sometimes even on main characters. Not sure how they couldn't budget some faces from their animators, but it is pretty bad. Not to mention a bit creepy to see lots of faceless people.

So a pastry chef is reborn to a small time lord & just like "Ascendant of a Bookworm” he is hell bent on getting the things he needs to produce his love (ie sweets). It is mostly a slice of life anime, with a few battles in between. Kind of like “By the Grace of the Gods”, except he is obsessed with making candy & other sweets from his previous life.

As of episode 11, it is pretty slow, with some episodes seeming like a complete waste & more like filler. If you want a super chill anime with a bit of excitement this might be for you. But for me it’s been pretty lame. Hope this helps.

“Okashi na” has multiple meanings. Impression I had from this would be summed up in “okashi na”, but meaning “strange, bizarre” instead of intended meaning “sweets” implying the series will revolve about making sweets. This series starts in stereotypical manner of isekai reincarnation of master in craft, but then instead of exploring the craft as anyone would expect it goes into somewhat long intro arc with no cooking until the end of the episode three. Even more strange is the fact that this more typical mini arc was the best part of the series [1]. Story, where baking cakes and making candies is supposed to be highlight, but it sucks instead is fail. MC makes mere four items during the entire season and two of them are basically same.

Visually meh series. Soundtrack ok. OP and ED skip, already forget that.

Overall. If one could ditch the “sweets” part, which wasn’t there much to begin with, it could be potentially developed into more typical and enjoyable isekai adventure. As it is now it won’t be satisfactory neither as cooking anime nor as adventure/action story.

Spoilers

[1] Even if the strategy of fighting bandits was bit silly, I liked the end when the leader outsmarted kids and escaped.

This anime seemed to wander too much to me.  The MC is a dislikeable character that is self absorbed and only cares about what makes his goals come true.  If there are any benefits to anyone else it is only because it is a secondary occurrence to what he wants and was not intended.  He treats anyone associated to himself as pawns to get what he wants.  This includes family and so called loved ones which he uses to only enrich his goals.  There are funny comments here and there, the names like Pastry and other food products/dishes is common and is overdone so it takes away from the possible humor that was intended.  The storyline is farfetched which is ok to some degree, but because they try to take an unimportant topic of sweets and make it superseed border conflicts, raiders, political infighting, arranged marriages, etc... etc... it makes the story go all over the place.  The voice acting for the MC was agitating to me, it was a lot of whining which from and professional reincarnated adult male made me dislike the MC even more.  The storyline needed to be streamlined and more focused in my opinion.  I like the idea of the anime being focused on sweets, I just believe the way they went about doing this did not work.  The animation work was so so at best in that they had background characters have no faces to having silhouettes all in black to having main characters with no faces while talking when they would pan out any distance.  I would say this is a filler anime if you have nothing better to watch, just do not expect much out of this anime.

I had high hopes for this anime.

Sadly, the arrupt ending and lacking season finale sealed the deal on my frustration. I imagined this to be more of a cooking/iesaki anime and found so much more. However, in tackling so much, there is also a lot lacking within this anime. 

For one, only about 2-3 characters have a true backstory outside the plot, leaving anyone beyond the main character to be greatly lacking for connecting to the audience. You receive a minor glimpse into characters' mind as it is needed for the plot to progress.

The story, while filled with some wonderful ideas could have been played better in various ways. The ideas vary greatly and pull from varying elements, clouding the overall point for this anime (which is, more frustratingly, clearly laid out at the beginning of each episode...)

Overall, while the anime is not horrible and scores high in the cute-sy factor, it lacks what would be needed to make a truly great iesaki.