OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)In a world where people’s magical power and social worth are determined by stars they get in their youth, a girl with zero stars is abandoned by her town, changes her name to Ivy, and befriends a weak slime she names Sora, but also reveals that she used to live another life before reincarnated here.OUR TAKEIt’s Isekai time once again! And once again it’s an Isekai that has the only thing that actually makes it an Isekai tacked on to the point it might as well not be there! If I had a nickel for every time I reviewed one of those kinds of shows, I’d have WAY MORE THAN TWO NICKELS. BECAUSE IT KEEPS HAPPENING, DAMMIT. And it’s another one where the world’s social structure is defined by a video game like level system, but also one where the main character apparently has the weakest possible version of that (part of me wants to blame Black Clover for making that popular but I saw that shit all over anime over a decade prior to that show). I wonder if the main character will actually turn out to be THE STRONGEST PERSON IN THEIR SPECIFIC FIELD OF ABILITY. And she has one of the hundred million of seemingly useless skills that people underestimate at first, but then turn out to be actually very useful down the line! Can’t wait for twelve whole weeks of going over the same old laundry list of Isekai tropes and cliches! It’s just the best and certainly not a mind numbing exercise in futility!But okay, surely I can come up with some genuine positives for this first episode, right? Well, it actually does stand out a bit in feeling oddly personal, not just as it says mostly inside the head of Ivy, the newly renamed protagonist, but also that it’s basically just about her thought process (and one-sided dialogue) with her new partner Sora the Slime. I’m hoping we can meet some new characters so it’s not just her talking to herself the whole show (heck, even Kino’s Journey had a talking motorcycle), but handling the first episode this way does work to highlight what will probably be Ivy’s strength as a tamer, which will be wanting to connect with the monsters she finds. As someone who was born without power (at least in this life) and abandoned, she connects with those in similar situations. Even with something so weak that it could die from a gust of wind, she wishes to communicate and take care of it as if it were her fellow man. Hard to be sure, but I have a feeling that will pay off for her in the long term, likely with a bunch of stronger monsters by her side that she showed kindness and empathy to at vulnerable moments. But that’s something we’ll have to look out for in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, there are definitely worse ways that a show can start than this.