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The story
A thread on 5ch’s Nanademo Jikkyo board kicked off after a poster pointed out that the plot of the anime That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Season 4 bears a striking resemblance to Overlord. Commenters zeroed in on the lopsided power distribution — Rimuru has four Primordial Demons serving him, while his ally Guy Crimson only has two — as well as the recurring pattern in the light novels where the Great Sage bails out Rimuru’s officers whenever they’re cornered. Opinions were split on the series’ escalating power creep. Some also noted the anime has already overtaken the manga adaptation’s story progress.
What people said
Solo Leveling's way more fun.
Yuuki isn't the final boss.
The light novel version changes a lot from the web novel.
Guess you need the Primordial Demons just to play Overlord cosplay.
Not a fan of power creep.
Rank-wise, that'd put them on par with that guy who runs things as a Demon Lord — name's something like 'Gin' (i.e. Guy Crimson).
They're basically the equivalent of the Guardians of Nazarick from Overlord.
Don't the three demon girls look better in the anime?
These three are the one place the anime staff actually delivered.
I like Violet, the purple one.
Velgrynd, wasn't it?
It's actually funny that she fights her toe-to-toe.
Out of the three girls, White's a rank above the other two.
Last I heard, the most promising villain on the enemy side got countered by a trap (a feminine-looking male character).
Does the leader need to be overwhelmingly strong?
Rimuru's basically a slightly-buffed Liu Bang (the Han dynasty founder famous for winning through his subordinates, not his own strength).
'Sensei' Raphael basically solved the Granbell fight too — and they're doing that again?
From here on it's basically:
Rimuru's officers get wrecked by an enemy officer
↓
They're totally helpless, one step from defeat
↓
The Great Sage grants them power for a comeback win
That's like 80% of the story from here on
Rimuru himself barely struggles at all — he just uses power the Great Sage prepped in advance before things get rough, and wins
It's honestly wild — in a single volume, the Sage pulls off this 'evolve the officer for a comeback' trick seven separate times in a row.
They do it because Overlord-style plots are popular.
Guy → 2
Rimuru → 4
Okay, this is genuinely enough to get mad about.
The power balance is broken to a stomach-churning degree.
As someone who's anime-only, I was already sick of all the meeting scenes, so this was a welcome change.
And going forward, does an enemy stronger than all three of them actually show up?
there's an enemy so strong that even the three demon girls fighting together can't beat a single one of its clones — and that enemy is roughly on par with Veldora.
And that same enemy can't even land a scratch on Rimuru, gets completely shut out.
The power gap is already that big.
And it just keeps widening from here.
Since the enemies attack in a scattered fashion, you do get scenes of the officers struggling against the weaker enemy officers,
but personally it feels pretty lame that even if every enemy officer except the final boss showed up at once, they still couldn't put a single scratch on Rimuru.
It's like watching the weak ones just mess around with each other.
At this point, the Empire's strongest fighter is quite a bit stronger than these three.
Seriously?
I already thought the power creep was out of hand, and it ramps up even more?
Unlike Overlord, where the MC is the strongest from the very start, Slime is a growth-type series.
And from here Rimuru gets an inflated power-up (see Re: #57) and ends up like Re: #84.
It's a real mood-killer.
They didn't need to copy Overlord that hard.
And on top of that, the two demons serving under Guy are the mellow, moderate type.
I figured Lady Luminous filled the 'token sane one' role, but she's pretty absurd too.
The power creep's gotten so bad it's almost funny — you forget why Guy was even making such a fuss about Rimuru back then.
The gap between Guy and the other Primordials is now so wide that even all of them (minus Diablo) attacking him together probably couldn't even slow him down.
The later wave of stronger enemies power-crept so hard that at this point none of the Primordials except Guy and Diablo even matter anymore.
Is Kawakami's Slime (the anime) going to branch off into its own continuity, like how Sadamoto's Evangelion manga diverged from the original?
It's not so much the manga — the light novel is the original source.
The web novel and light novel versions differ quite a bit.
The manga is ultimately just an adaptation of the light novel.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Slime originated as a web novel on “Shousetsuka ni Narou,” and the story was heavily rewritten when it was published as light novels — Season 4 of the anime is following that light-novel version. Overlord is likewise a web-novel-turned-isekai series, but its protagonist is overwhelmingly powerful from the very start, which sets it apart in premise from Slime, where Rimuru grows in strength alongside his subordinates. The thread’s disagreement centered on whether the recurring pattern of the Great Sage bailing out cornered officers reads as “well-paced” or “lacking tension” — a divide that tends to fall along the line between anime-only viewers and those who’ve read the source material. As for the claim that the anime has overtaken the manga adaptation, that comes down to a difference in pacing between the original light novels and the manga, and it raises the possibility that the anime and manga could diverge in future story developments.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nanademo Jikkyo G) thread “[Bad News] The Upcoming Plot of Slime Season 4 Is Way Too Similar to Overlord lol.”
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