Leadale no Daichi nite, In the Land of Leadale, or World of Leadale (choose your preferred title) is the pretty standard story or girl wakes up inside video game. We do have the context here of girl being on life-support before a power-outage somehow cut her free from her body but this first episode does little to make you care about her situation before she woke up inside the game so I’m just going to put that to the side for now.
The real question of course is whether or not Leadale no Daichi nite is worth watching this Winter 2022 anime season.

Thoughts on Leadale no Daichi nite
Honestly, I didn’t expect much from Leadale no Daichi nite but I did expect it to be pleasant enough viewing given the Director, Yuuji Yanase worked on In Another World With My Smartphone and If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat a Demon Lord and while neither of those was revolutionary they were both entertaining enough for the season.
But you know, even going in with low expectations wasn’t really enough to really sell me on this first episode.
From the somewhat obnoxious sounding OP ‘Happy Encount’ right through to the lacklustre ED there really wasn’t anything in this first episode that in any way made me curious about the story or the main character.

The opening scene, pre-OP has the city going dark, presumably the black-out that cuts off her life support but it lasts seconds and we’re given no context for what caused it or the impact that will have on anyone because we’ve met no characters yet so by the time the OP has ended you’d be forgiven for forgetting the scene even happened. After the OP we get a standard anime girl wakes up sequence followed by her eating an enormous number of bowls of food.
A joke or character point they clearly thought was interesting enough to repeat mere minutes later when we skipped the whole day until dinner.

Visually there’s nothing particularly striking here. The main character design is nice enough but so far every other character is your standard mob fantasy design and none of them have really stood out.
As for the world-building, so far this world feels narrow and limited and very much empty of new ideas or even just good building on standard fantasy tropes. It isn’t that there’s anything wrong with this perfectly serviceable representation of a fantasy RPG setting, its just that we’ve seen more than enough of these now and there’s nothing in Leadale no Daichi nite’s portrayal that is going to leave a lasting impression. At least not from this first episode.

I’ll admit, Cayna, our protagonist elf, is a nice enough character and she is at least asking questions about the world which I guess will eventually lead to something resembling a story but she’s not particularly interesting. Her reactions are the usual over-the-top anime girl gasps or shock and/or embarrassment and there’s really nothing in this first episode that makes her compelling to watch.
Largely that would come down to knowing nothing about her prior to this situation and having no clarity about what this character wants.
Leadale no Daichi nite might well be setting up a more slice of life story rather than an adventure/fantasy one in which case this one has been poorly tagged. But if it is supposed to be an adventure or fantasy than this first episode is clearly lacking as it gives us no clarity about our lead character or what sort or adventure the story has in store for us.

By the time our main character one shot kicked a horned bear to death on the way home from her fully stocked tower I was more or less already checked out of this title. It just didn’t grab me and while I might pick it up in a few episodes if other reviewers indicate that it finds some direction for now I’m pretty happy to let Leadale no Daichi nite slide by because honestly there’s just not enough going on here.
But that’s just my thoughts on the episode and as always I welcome my readers to share their impressions so if you gave Leadale no Daichi nite a go what did you think?
Images from: Leadale no Daichi nite. Dir. Y Yanase. Maho Film. 2022
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Karandi James