When it comes to Slime, we know the story promises to be good. But when you look at the isekai anime that we have been receiving, most are average at best with many, many being subpar to downright bad. They have generic characters or you burn through the series so fast; and speaking of fast, it flies at you, throwing character after character at you expecting you to understand and remember all of them. Plus, let’s be brutally honest, having your harem call you “father”–and no, it wasn’t daddy like y’all wanted. They used the formal Japanese to address him–is just bizarre and a total mood-killer.

Rather than being simply summoned to another world, we get a heads up at what happened to Rimuru before he ended up in this new world. So with that in mind, we meet him in this pitiful form where he cannot do anything, but he can analyze things and learn their abilities. Through that, we get to see the world through his eyes and learn just how this world works.

ORETUEEE is what Japanese otaku use to refer to isekai series where main characters are OP out of the starting gate and wield power like it is nothing. And it’s true, the OP MC setup has been beaten to death to the point that some fans just give up and turn off the TV/close the tab when things become too repeated. If you don’t see someone struggle even a little, does it even matter? You already know the outcome.

With Rimuru, his ability is overpowered because it does allow him to digest anything as well as copy anything and replicate it. However, we watch him learn and there is nothing boring about it. This series feels a lot like Subaru’s growth from Re:Zero where Rimuru has to play by the rules of a system that is foreign to him. This ties into the worldbuilding thing, but seeing your main character grow, rather than him start out at over 9000 in the beginning, is so much more refreshing.

To continue too, with the world. Nothing is just “as is” which is where many anime fall afoul. Too many anime just explain things in a “matter of fact” manner and gloss over plot that could have made a good story, but because of time or budget, the committee charged forward. In Slime however, even the minor characters keep coming back and best of all, they keep growing. Seeing the same character do the same thing constantly is boring, but the growth within the story is so fascinating to the viewer that we want to come back, even as new characters are introduced, in order to see them grow more. It makes for an all the more compelling story.