Trapped in a Dating Sim
A short review of the first season
[June 19, 2022]1
With no budget to speak of, consigned by many to the guilty-pleasure dumpster, Trapped in a Dating Sim delivers an excellent fantasy adventure with action, drama, comedy, and romance, along with giant robot suits, surprise marriage proposals, pirate airships, racetrack gambling, and high-stakes tea parties. Defying expectations, it’s one of the best shows of the season: that’s the value of consistently good writing.
The hero, being trapped in a dating sim, is thrust into conflicts of love, money, war, and class, some of which cannot even be resolved by beating people up in a giant robot suit. Many of them can, though, and the action scenes are exciting, despite the cheap animation, because we care about the characters, who stand to gain or lose a great deal in this surprisingly credible matriarchal teenage dating-sim aristocracy.
Speaking of characters, a lot of them seem generic at first, because they are indeed ripped from the plot of a badly written dating sim. That turns out to be a great setup for character development when the game goes off the rails: look at what the show does with the rich mean girl, who is in fact the best girl. Meanwhile, the game world brought to life is wonderfully imaginative and at the same time comically inconsistent.
Trapped in a Dating Sim manages to be quite funny without being overly clever: it’s less about carefully constructed comedy scenarios than about setting up fun characters with different personalities and motivations and turning them loose to interact in entertaining ways. The hero, his little robot, the mean girl, the queen, the prince, who sucks: you can drop them into pretty much any situation and watch the chaos unfold.
The whole season is well paced, with meaningful conflicts driving character growth, imaginative world-building, a satisfying conclusion, and roughly zero filler. If any show deserves a second season with a much bigger budget, it’s Trapped in a Dating Sim.
Looking back, “one of the best shows of the season” is an understatement: Trapped in a Dating Sim is one of the best shows of the year. It does everything right on a budget of two nickels and a banana peel. It belongs on the trophy shelf, next to Chivalry of a Failed Knight.