Hell Mode Season 1 Anime Series Review

In a never-ending sea of isekai titles where our protagonists are reborn into wealth as a child or adolescent and are overpowered, Hell Mode should, theoretically, be a breath of fresh air: Our protagonist—formerly a hardcore gamer named Kenichi Yamada, now named Allen—is reincarnated as a newborn baby into absolute poverty, with summoner abilities that are unique but demand a truly staggering amount of grinding for him to learn, let alone level up. This is because Allen (or, depending on how you see it, Kenichi) has been reborn into the world of a game that he's playing on the hardest possible difficulty with the hardest possible settings—the game's Hell Mode. Indeed, our protagonist sought out a grind-heavy trudge, and for better or for worse, he found it.

While not as much of a slog as its light novel source material, few introductions in anime are as slow and tedious as Hell Mode's—which follows Allen's life as an adult-brained, newborn baby trying to grind levels by doing simple tasks like throwing rocks, at least at the beginning. Because nothing says thrilling like watching someone throw rocks at trees while they think about their stats. He does soon move beyond the realm of rock throwing, to be fair, but never beyond obsessively thinking about his stats. And since there's nothing in the realm of story this season, you're definitely going to notice how much Allen thinks about his stats, because there's not much of anything else going on. Ironically, this gives this anime a slowness that it was obviously trying to avoid, considering how breakneck fast things are happening in this anime compared to the light novel.

I seriously can't emphasize enough that flawed as this anime is, it's still an infinitely easier way to consume Hell Mode's anime than its source material, which gives way too much real estate on each page to the granular details of Allen's stats. The pacing is infinitely faster by comparison, and you don't have to wade through Allen going through stat screen after stat screen after stat screen. Still, that doesn't mean the pacing is great in Hell Mode, nor is it without its overly detailed explanations of Allen's stats. Hell Mode very obviously revels in the fine details—the hyper-specific hows and whys—of Allen's leveling up process. It's numbers all the way down, and for those of us non-accountants, it does feel like, well, Hell Mode having to sift through it all to get to anything else. Or at least, it would be if there was anything else to get to.

When you take all the numberslop of it all out of the equation, there's not really anything left in this season of Hell Mode since that's all this season revolves around. Allen promotes himself from throwing rocks at trees to getting his summons to fight monsters that, up until the very end, never rise above mid-tiers. To emphasize: Allen isn't personally fighting them; he's having his summons do the work for him. And these fights lack the spectacle, hype-factor, or cool choreography you might crave in an anime fight, because they often boil down to glorified animal attacks.

There's something to be said for how in the background there's a little bit of political intrigue and worldbuilding, but nothing that ever comes to fruition in a way that's meaningful or memorable in this season. The characters, similarly, have nothing going for them. Allen, especially, is so obnoxious as a protagonist, because he's only concerned with his stats. He comes to care for his new family, but it always feels firmly secondary to his stats obsession, and it raises a lot of questions about his previous life that never get discussed, so it's easy to shrug this off.

Unfortunately, the only other memorable thing about Hell Mode—for better or for worse—is how it's home to some of the all-time worst CG I've ever seen in an anime. It's astonishing how dated it looks. Broadly speaking, CG in anime gets a bad rap and usually at least looks serviceable—but there's no defending the CG in Hell Mode. The 2D animation isn't fantastic, but I've certainly seen worse. It's nothing exceptional, but it's fine. But the CG is extremely jarring, blocky, moves poorly, doesn't always look like it's on the same plane as everyone and everything else, and there's really no better word for it: It's ugly. Plain and simple, it's hideous. And all the summons, all the monsters—those are all in CG. Meaning, yes, you'll be seeing a lot of it.

Finally, as far as sub versus dub goes for this anime, this is definitely a sub watch. Less because the Japanese voice actors do such a great job (although it's worth saying plainly that they all do a fine job—nothing exceptional, but fine nonetheless), and more because the dub just lacks the oomph you'd want from known, powerhouse talent like Luci Christian (Allen) and Natalie Rial (Krena).

Hell Mode is a show that, in theory, sounds like it should be so much cooler, and so much more clever, than it actually is. This would-be adventure series about a hardcore gamer trying to optimize a speedrun to the top of the food chain is bogged down by a lack of any story, no interesting characters, boring fights, and way more stats and numbers than it needs. But weirdly specific as it is, if you wanted to ever wanted to combine the thrill of rock throwing, with the excitement of stat screens, and the joy of terrible CG, you might have finally found the show for you.