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Before you dive into Suicide Squad Isekai, it helps to know just what an “isekai” is. In an Isekai (pronounced ee-say-kai) story, the protagonist is plucked from their mundane, workaday world, and dropped into an exciting fantasy world to which they must adapt. Often that world is that of the video game they already use to escape reality, but made literal. Other times they end up at the center of a beloved piece of literature or something like that. So it’s all about a character from one world being dropped into a new, unfamiliar one. Isekai stories have grown in popularity over the last 10 years, with shows like Sword Art Online and Overlord as popular examples. The general idea goes much further back–think of Inuyasha as a major example–but the trend itself is much more recent. Now, it’s time for the Suicide Squad to find themselves in a whole new world. Spoilers for Suicide Squad Isekai Episodes 1-3 follow.
Suicide Squad Isekai
If you know your way around the Suicide Squad, you can probably imagine how things start. While the Suicide Squad Isekai anime is not related to the two live-action films in any way, it starts much the same way. Harley Quinn and some other dorks are pulled out of Belle Reve prison and implanted with ticking timebombs in their necks. The ever-pragmatic Amanda Waller gives them a mission to accomplish with the reward of a reduced sentence and the threat of a sudden, explosive death hanging over their heads.
Things take a left turn into the weird from there as Harley finds herself in a chopper with Deadshot and a few other characters: a spotlight-loving dandy, a man with a bag mask over his head talking about his noble mission, and a big, unmarked crate.
The crew quickly moves from the battlefield to a jail cell and back. The dandy reveals himself to be Clayface, and discovers that his powers are amplified in this strange new place. He can control not just his own clay body but any rock around him, given enough moisture.
It lives up to the title
These first three episodes are kind of a perfect encapsulation of what Suicide Squad and Isekai are, both for better or worse.
Suicide Squad stories are generally ultraviolent to a slapstick degree, giving their villains-turned-heroes plenty of room to be themselves, knocking and biting off heads. There’s no shortage of violence here, and Nanaue–better known as King Shark–gets his fill of fantasy world flesh in no time. But Isekai anime are usually lighter fare, meant for the reader to imagine themselves in the protagonist’s place, escaping their boring life for a magical one in which they’re the center of the universe.
This anime goes around the self-insert protagonist idea since it’s all about the question of what would happen if you dropped Harley Quinn into a brightly-lit fantasy world. But it doesn’t quite avoid the chronically light tone of Isekai stories despite how violent its main characters are. The second and third episodes move slowly despite the characters mentioning several times the ticking clocks in their heads and the need to check in before the 72-hour mark to keep from exploding.
The real stars here are the animation and comedy of it all. Clayface is described via on-screen text as “unpopular movie star.” When the heroes run into Rick Flag later, he unintentionally insults his captors by addressing them using language he learned from the orcs around him in prison.
The animation is colorful, flashy, and fluid, and is a surprisingly great fit for the zany criminal insanity of the Squad. Despite there being another anime about Harley and Clayface hanging out, it doesn’t feel like Suicide Squad Isekai is treading the same ground as Harley Quinn.
One downfall of the show is that, intentionally or not, the characters native to this new world look quite generic with the minor exception of the kingdom’s princess, who has blonde hair and big blue eyes and bears a striking resemblance to a certain member of the squad. The show also gets in the way of some of its own jokes.
While the Japanese writing shows a generally excellent understanding of the cast and tone, there are weird things that made me raise my eyebrow. The biggest example is Peacemaker. He spends the first two episodes hiding his face beneath a burlap sack mask that makes him more like a jacked Scarecrow than anything, talking about how exposing his face could endanger the mission. This plot point is brought up several times. But the next time we see him, he’s in full Peacemaker regalia, and the disappearance of his sack mask is never mentioned. I was preparing for them to take off his mask only to show that he’s already wearing his helmet beneath it or something like that, but nothing is made of it.
With ten episodes planned for this event series, the story will need to pick up the pace to keep things interesting. This isn’t meant to be a meandering Isekai story with 26 or 52 episodes in which the characters are meant to explore and experience the world piecemeal. Suicide Squad characters are bigger than life and their stories need to move like it. This is not to say that this show won’t get there, but just that it has some work to do.
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