Light Novel Adaptation by Silver Link
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Sasaki is a middle aged office worker, tired and underpaid and just barely scraping by. He decides to get a pet bird, but his life is forever changed when the bird starts talking and claims to be a powerful sage from another world.

Jel’s verdict: Doin’ Too Much

I had a feeling of dread halfway through this episode as I realized they were rapidly blowing by major plot points, even with a full hour to develop the premise. It was clear they were trying to get to something, but what? Turns out nothing much, the author just seems to have a lot of ideas and decided to try and cram them all into one story.

In most cases, a regular dude getting a talking bird to teach him magic to use in his daily life would be enough of a premise for one series. Or, perhaps having that talking bird assist said man in setting up a trade network in the another fantasy world using common modern day goods would be a show in itself. Maybe another idea, we have this dude get magic powers and he gets picked up to work for a secret government organization that tracks down other people with powers. That could be entire series by itself, right? Sasaki and Peeps dares to ask, what if we tried to do all of these things at the same time?

I went in watching this knowing nothing about the source material, but it was during the reveal of the secret government organization I got the hunch this had to be a web novel. There’s a certain quality I call “amateur chaos” to a lot of web novels, the results of people who are possibly first time writers pouring out their ideas without the benefit of an editor. The end result is something like Sasaki and Peeps, which has some potentially good ideas but the author did not have the skills to make them work together.

In addition to the chaotic plot, it’s also just badly written and paced. In the rush to get to all the plot points, a lot of the episode is montages with Sasaki explaining what happened. We don’t get time to let each major life changing event sink in, making everything feel empty and meaningless. How this episode felt so rushed despite being double length is baffling. I suspect some of this may have been an adaptation choice and some blame should go to the director. If this is what the source material is actually like though, I can’t imagine how bad it would be to read, let alone watch it.

On a positive note, Sasaki and Peeps does broadly manage to avoid the usual wish fulfillment traps of the isekai genre, even with ample opportunity to do so. There doesn’t seem to be any romantic chemistry between him and his new pretty lady psychic cop partner (yet), and while there is a neighbor girl who shows some implied jealousy, I suspect she’s putting on an act. Sasaki himself is also an interesting character. Despite being the usual chill, nice guy protagonist, he is still perfectly fine lying and cheating to get his way when the situation calls for it. There are hints of something decent here, but we never get time to appreciate them.

For my tastes, if they had focused on Sasaki learning magic and using it in his daily, boring life, that could have been a good show. That’s not the case though, and instead we’re left with a big pile of ideas that don’t really mesh. The fact that they had an entire double episode to setup the premise and still felt extremely rushed is telling. If any of this sounds really interesting, I think this may still be worth a watch to judge for yourself. I wouldn’t recommend it though.