I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level

Amateur exorcists should not watch this episode.

After a one episode break from the standard formula of insert new character and then have scenario play out, I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed out My Level kind of defaults back to form though this time at least Azusa is going to have to commute. Halkara (elf-girl) has bought a new factory and wouldn’t you know it, it’s haunted. Apparently so badly that people won’t actually work there and that’s forcing the elf-girl to work increasingly long days and into the night.

This naturally triggers Azusa who decides that something has to be done because people shouldn’t have to work long days.

Anyway, given Azusa doesn’t like ghosts and scary things either, she summons the demon-girl, Beelzebub to help them out. Why a reincarnated witch who lives with a dragon-girl, two slime-spirits and an elf, who happily summons a demon, is scared of ghosts is a matter this anime is utterly not-wanting to address but let’s just roll with it.

The summoning is slightly botched and Beelzebub ends up in a cold tub of water that is intended for the garden in what is a pretty lame joke except that it is a set-up for a plot point later in the episode so at least this story is trying to have some continuity even if at times it feels like they really had to force that particular foreshadowing.

Killing Slimes for 300 Years is pretty loose with its timeline.

One question I was left with at the end of this episode was how much time actually passed during the episode. We see Halkara looking at property advertisements and the rest of the group thinking she’s about to move out so it seems like the whole factory thing is kind of new. But then it’s apparently been operating long enough that the locals have all now heard the rumours of the ghost and won’t work there.

Did this all happen in a day or was there a number of incidents leading to this? What did the ghost do that scared them all? None of this is actually addressed and while the cute-teen ghost with a bad attitude ends up being kind of fun later in the episode you have to wonder what she was doing to people in the factory that made them all run away.

That point aside, Rosalie is the ghost and after hearing her sad story about how she ended up as a ghost they decide to help her leave the factory. Problem is she’s bound to the location. That should leave some kind of tension but Beelzebub more or less knocks that on the head by providing a near instant solution.

I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years did at least make it an imperfect solution which leads us to the final third of the episode and where things are either funny or idiotic depending on your mind-set while watching. I actually found it kind of amusing and the eventual return of the cold tub of water worked nicely to bring the episode kind of full circle.

The end result after all the silly antics and terrible methods suggested for removing a ghost from a possessed person is that Azusa now has one more house-guest. I know she mentioned having lots of rooms after dragon-girl rebuilt her house but how many is ‘lots’. I mean, are we going to end up with anyone else under this roof?

Again though, the episode hits enough moments that make you laugh or at least smile and the characters continue to be pleasant and play-off one another. Halkara even felt a little more interesting this week, though she did spend nearly a third of the episode possessed.

Images used for review from: I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level. Dir. N Kimura. Revoroot. 2021.

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Karandi James

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Dragons Unite in I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years

Clearly even the writers of I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years seemed to get that they couldn’t just perpetually have new characters move into Azusa’s house and so episode 4 shakes up the established formula by having Azusa actually travel. Laika (the dragon-girl) gets a little more fleshed out as a character (though emphasis on the little part) as we travel to her home to take part in her older sister’s wedding.

It isn’t all smooth sailing as the blue dragon clan crashes the wedding and Azusa’s over-poweredness is required to save the day.

It was nice for the anime to shift its focus back to Laika. Since episode one where she brazenly challenged the witch of the highlands, she’s really just been the server of tea. As much as Azusa told the elf-girl last episode she’d have to help with the cooking, you never really see anyone outside of Laika preparing food or serving the meals.

While this episode didn’t give us a lot of insight into Laika, she did at least get to be more central to the basic story unfolding and we got to see her interactions with her older sister and parents which adds a little more to her character (it is kind of like she’s starting to be filled out from the very sketchy outline we previously had).

That said, this episode also kind of established that elf-girl isn’t going to be anything more than the butt of repeated jokes. Whether it is playing dead during the dragon fight, getting drunk at the party, or left out of Azusa’s make believe family ties, elf-girl really isn’t getting to do anything more than be the punch line.

That said, I couldn’t help but sympathise as she got dragon-sick having had to get on a plane twice in three days and being incredibly sick myself on both occasions (I do feel bad for other passengers who are unlucky enough to fly with me on small domestic planes – international flights I’m usually okay for… usually).

Though if elf-girl has become the butt of every joke, the slime spirits don’t even have that going for them. They just get the occasional cute line and get to huddle at the first sign of any danger. I will give them credit for actually being pretty adorable, but that doesn’t give them any more character points.

But, the award for worst character motivation so far in this series, I’d have to give it to the leader of the blue dragons who rocked up at the wedding just to cause trouble because they could. Even the characters even the show remarked out petty and pointless the whole thing really was and again I feel the need to point out that being self-aware of lame moments in a story does not make them less lame.

If I ignore the motive behind the dragon attack though, the episode that unfolds is actually pretty fun and more or less reinforces the point that this story isn’t about what is happening or even why it is happening so much as just enjoying what is there. The fight between Azusa and the dragons is kind of fun and feels very reminiscent of something from Dragon Ball or a similar type story.

The demon’s reappearance later in the episode is perfectly done and her attitude and manner is actually genuinely funny. Then we have some touching family moments with Laika and her sister followed by Azusa and her group and it leaves us feeling like we watched a fun episode and then got a feel good ending so its difficult to really be overly critical of the show.

If I was going to be a little more critical, the visuals took a bit of a hit this week. Maybe it was the sheer number of dragons they were attempting to animate or the difference in size between the humans and dragons. However there were a number of scenes that really just look a little bit on the lame side visually and moments where characters (particularly their faces) seemed to lack detail.

For a show really being carried by cute girls being front and centre that seemed a little odd for the cute aesthetic to take a hit.

All and all, this episode did expand the world a little more as we finally moved out from Azusa’s home and village. It also gave us a slightly different variation on the set-up that the first three episode delivered. It definitely gives the series a bit more room for movement going forward with more possibilities for scenarios or I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years could just go back to doing what it was doing with the occasional episode like this to break things up. Either way, I’m pretty happy to sit back and watch it all unfold.

Images used for review from: I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level. Dir. N Kimura. Revoroot. 2021.

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Karandi James

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An elf and a demon come to call in I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years.

I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level has now repeated its episodic formula 3 times with little variation. In episode 3 we have an elf girl appear at Azusa’s door and she come complete with bouncy anime breasts, a scene involving aphrodisiac mushrooms, and is potentially being chased by a demon over an energy drink business. So you know, business as usual in Azusa’s house as the slime spirits share their breakfast and dragon girl serves tea.

With little changing from episode to episode in terms of plot, Slime 300 is very much relying on its cast of girls and its calming slice-of-life antics to hold the audience’s attention. That and the occasional comedic moment which are a splattering of hits and misses.

I will admit, there is a very good set-up in this episode where Azusa puts a barrier around her home early on and it comes into play at the most opportune moment later in the episode. I’d actually almost forgotten about the thing and so when it became important, it actually hit just the right notes to be pretty hilarious.

I felt less so around the elf-girl’s attempt to wear the clothes provided by Azusa and then her efforts with mushroom sorting that lead to her being under the influence of an aphrodisiac. While I’m sure there is an appreciative audience out there, largely I felt these scenes added very little and they made it kind of hard to really care about the elf-girl and her plight.

Where elf-girl got to shine was in her initial introduction where she described her work and she kind of cut into her own commercial montage. That worked for me and I really thought it was quite amusing and it gave me some insight into her overall commercially driven character (which plays nicely into her justification for staying at the end of the episode).

I am really struggling with remembering any of the characters names (as you may have noticed from my references to them as dragon-girl, elf-girl and slime-spirits). I think the reason for this is most of these characters haven’t moved beyond their introduction as one-note or one-problem characters but they are still hanging around.

Potentially we’ll get more attached to them as the series progress however we might also just continue repeating the formula of adding new characters indefinitely in which case it is unlikely I’ll ever take the time to figure out their names. (On that note, I just had a very interesting image of what Azusa’s house would look like if they kept building extensions for additional characters.)

There’s not a huge amount left to say about this episode. It looks as good as the first two and the scenery remains really pretty. The characters are definitely maxing out cuteness even if they are also hitting all the stereotypes. The plot isn’t doing much but is doesn’t really need to because the enjoyment comes from watching these characters interact rather than any compelling plot twists or turns. This one continues to be enjoyable enough with enough of the humour hitting the mark and enough sweetness to bring a smile to the face.

Images used for review from: I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level. Dir. N Kimura. Revoroot. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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A 50 year grudge – over in an instant in I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years.

Anyone who found the first episode of ‘I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level’ a little lacking in excitement will probably not care for this follow up episode. For me, episode 2 gave me more or less what I expected from this premise and the end result is something that is very watchable but not particularly remarkable.

If anything, it seems like this series is going out of its way to downplay any of its interesting ideas out of fear it might shake the audience out of their feel-good lull and they apparently really don’t want to.

The episode of I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years begins with Azusa giving Laika lessons on how she got so strong, but given all she did was kills a few slimes each day, its a pretty short lesson. Instead, Azusa seems determined to steer Laika onto the slow and steady path that she’s embraced since reincarnation. Her comments to Laika are very much equivalent to stop and smell the rose and while it makes perfect sense given how her character died if that’s all she’s got then this story is going to run out of steam relatively quickly.

What did grab my interest was the shadowy girl watching Azusa and threatening revenge.

Also, the very brief sub-plot introduced by Laika about the village potentially being in danger which led to them building a magical barrier around it. That was a cool concept and felt like it deserved more than the few seconds of episode time it got. I mean, it immediately stunned a thief in his tracks and the villagers were all celebrating their new defence and then it literally doesn’t get mentioned again, nor does it play any role in the rest of the episode.

There is the possibility that the barrier is being set-up in order to be in play for future plot developments and it just hasn’t been used yet, however it really did feel like an out-of-place little side story in amongst the whole someone trying to kill Azusa plot that ran through the rest of the episode.

And if we go by the theory of Chekov’s Gun, here we had a gun that wasn’t fired, picked up, or even mentioned again after we set in on the wall. Of course, this is a series so there’s always the option that we’ll get back to it however it was something that stood out to me as flow breaking here as it definitely didn’t feel integrated with the rest of the story.

Fortunately, once Falfa appears at Azusa’s door with her ‘your my mother’ proclamation as well as the declaration that her younger sister intends to kill Azusa, the rest of the episode flows pretty well. Falfa and her sister Shalsha are as adorable as you would expect for 50-year-old slime spirits in an isekai (meaning they are cute girls with contrasting hair and hair-tie colours).

The girls’ very existence made the basic premise more interesting. Azusa had been killing slimes for 300 years and here were two slime spirits who could feel the deaths of slimes. In Shalsha’s case she was actually angry enough to spend 50 years learning a specific magic to fight the evil witch.

Given Azusa’s slime massacres had so far been down-played as just her daily grind, it was kind of interesting to think about the consequence on the eco-system of that many slimes being depleted as well as the ramifications when the girls could feel those deaths.

However, this is not a story that really wants to get into that and so after a super cute smack-down, followed by a moment where Shalsha tries to use magic she no-longer has (in a scene that looked like it was cut straight out of an episode of Love, Chuunibyo and other Delusions), the slime girls more or less decide to move in with the witch and they all go to the village for ingredients for dinner.

Honestly, I’m glad we have some additional characters because it has become clear in this episode that Laika is going to ride the devoted disciple trope for all it is worth and that kind of thing would wear thin fast. The final dinner at the end of the episode looked like there was some good chemistry between the cast and with more characters it is less likely that they’ll wear out their welcome if they can play off one another.

All that remains to be seen is whether or not this anime can continue to be light-fun or whether it ends up feeling just a little too empty to engage for the duration. So far it is hitting the light-fun side and I honestly enjoyed this second episode even if I still wonder about the whole point of the barrier section.

Images used for review from: I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level. Dir. N Kimura. Revoroot. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
Join the discussion in the comments.
Karandi James

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Witches, Slimes and Dragon Girls… in Killing Slimes for 300 Years.

It is probably just as well I don’t require stories to be overly original to get my attention as the basic premise here seems as copy and pasted as they come for current isekai stories. And I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years is no exception.

Company worker literally works herself to death and on given a chance at a new life decides she wants the easy, slow life (I don’t know why corporate Japan thinks farming and self-sufficiency is actually an easy and slow way of living given how stressed most farmers are these days about just trying to keep their heads above water but that’s a whole other blog post about delusions of ‘simplicity’ that crop up from time to time).

Anyway, after 300 years of killing slimes she’s overpowered and pretty much untouchable and so now we get a whole bunch of other characters turning up to either fight her or learn from her, thus disturbing her quiet life.

This story probably doesn’t even need to label itself as adapted from a light novel given the mouthful of a name and the Japanese title is just as bad: Slime Taoshite 300-nen, Shiranai Uchi ni Level Max ni Nattemashita.

The fantasy world is your standard rural medieval-ish setting we get in these sorts of stories with adventurer guilds, levelling up, low level slimes and dragons who turn into cute girls. In twenty minutes not one idea comes out that is new of particularly distinct from the host of other anime and light novels that cover much the same ground.

However, don’t take that as necessarily a negative. This story isn’t trying to amaze us with bells and whistles or gimmicks that get old by episode 3. It is just embracing what it is and that saves some room for actually thinking about the characters a little.

I actually really enjoyed this first episode. It was incredibly low-key, had enough moments that were kind of funny and made me smile to keep it from becoming dull, and Azusa is actually a pretty pleasant protagonist. She isn’t whining too much, she’s fairly capable as a person, and her former life has heavily influenced her attitudes in this life including the advice she gives the hard-working dragon-girl. It also remained free of the fan-service elements we’d usually come across in this kind of anime despite the cute girl protagonist and the cute dragon girl addition by the end of the episode.

Visually, the character designs here are super cute but the setting is as ordinary as it comes. The bright colour palette works with the overall tone but there’s little remarkable about it. Even the dragon vs witch fight ended up being pretty ordinary with a few orange fireballs and then some basic ice-magic just kind of appearing without any real oomph behind them.

This anime seems to be going for really casual and it isn’t relying on big visuals to keep the viewers hooked. It is definitely hoping we got lulled into a happy numbness while watching and to be honest, this first episode succeeds quite admirably leaving me wanting more just to binge out and switch off for a few hours.

Part of me wonders how this anime will sustain itself for a season. I know the MAL synopsis claims that friends and foes are going to come looking for the most powerful witch as rumours of her max level status spread but does that mean we’re going for a visitor of the week style with a more episodic approach or is there some greater narrative that we’ll get around to.

Hard to tell from the first episode, but if they are sticking with the very chill tone established here it would seem to lean more toward an episodic approach. There’s also a lot of cute female anime characters appearing in the character list on MAL so I’m guessing we’re going to get a bunch more characters drop in outside of Laika the enthusiastic dragon girl.

Right, so if you are in the mood for a truly relaxing premiere episode with a cute girl at the centre, a cute supporting cast starting to form, and you don’t object to treading over ground we’ve seen before providing you are entertained, then Slime 300 is going to work for you.

This first episode is solidly calming, cute and a little funny. If you need something original to really hook you or a strong storyline, you probably aren’t going to get much joy here. That said, I’m looking forward to more of this one as it seems like it will be a nice, calm twenty minutes of viewing each week and I really did enjoy Azusa, the protagonist, and would love to spend more time with her.

Images used for review from: I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level. Dir. N Kimura. Revoroot. 2021.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
Join the discussion in the comments.
Karandi James

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