The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life

Rein the Enchanter is a support mage with the ability to enhance weapons and armor. But when he gets fired from his guild for the simple reason that he's already enchanted everything they own, he decides to take the power back into his own hands—literally. Rein recalls every enchantment he ever put on his guildmates' gear, retrieving the bonus points for himself.

The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life is based on the light novel series by author Asa Rokushima and illustrator kisui. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

Does it count as a variation on the theme if Rein is kicked out of an entire guild rather than just a party? Probably only on paper, because guilds in this series' world function more like guilds in an MMORPG – they're basically large parties that can split off into smaller ones, and each guild has a name like a party in a typical LitRPG series. So when Rein's stupid leaders fire him from the guild, they're essentially kicking him out of the party. And they show precisely as much forethought as most morons who do the same do, because Rein is an enchanter. His guildies note that his enchantments are so powerful they can turn a regular item into a super rare one. But they apparently never bothered to learn that enchantment is done by imbuing something with skill points, and those points can be revoked if you piss off your enchanter…and you'd better believe that the minute Rein calms down enough to remember, he disenchants absolutely everything in the guild.

This is an odd balance of very silly and very dull. Rein himself is endearingly puppyish once he stops screaming his way out of town. (Please take that literally.) Recalling all his points, then shoving them into his regular clothes and knife, is pretty smart too, and his excitement at testing them out is fun. But most of the episode has Rein wandering around a mostly brown cityscape, talking and getting excited about everything. He meets three women – Nina, Ellie, and Lily – and talks to them. Then he skips around some more. Thugs appear, try to beat him up, and his enchanted items thwart them. That's basically it, and I wish the episode had done something different to help set it apart from so many other similar stories.

That said, someone had an absolute blast designing the background characters here. All of them are unattractive in different and sometimes creative ways, and almost none of them have any chins to speak of. Crazy teeth, weird eyebrows, awkward cheekbones…I don't think I've ever seen so many unique designs for characters who aren't even important to the story. It helps to balance out the brownness and the unsettlingly wavy lines on all the buildings. Seriously, everything looks like it might be melting due to extreme heat, and while I suspect it may be an attempt to craft a stylized world or one that looks deliberately unreal, it kept bothering me.

This is one of Crunchyroll's simuldubs and…it's fine. I preferred the sub primarily because something about Megumi Han as Elsie really worked for me (not that KyLeigh Zimmerer is bad; she's just not Megumi Han), but both are fine, and the dub script adjusts the lines in ways that work well. I can't say that I'm excited to watch more of this, but I also didn't hate it. At least I'll get to see more interesting background character designs!

I think the nicest thing I can say about The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life based on its first episode, “Everyone knows what it's like when nothing goes right, but what do I do when that happens? Why, it's obvious! I run and scream my head off!” (hitting my minimum word count for this review is going to be a BREEZE) is that I think it might be as good as any of these cookie-cutter LitRPG anime can be.

Laid off from his previous guild for no other reason than his boss is a power-tripping jerk, the enchanter Rein decides to try his hand at the more glamorous role of an adventurer. To help this effort out of the gate, Rein recalls all the enhancement “points” he put on gear for members of his previous guild and applies those buffs to his otherwise shabby clothes and basic dagger. That's right, this is a “hilarity ensues because one character is way stronger than everyone else” kind of anime.

While I think that formula can only do so well, especially with the first season of One-Punch Man and Mashel still loom large in this subgenre, I think Cheat-Granting Mage is a pretty good execution of the LitRPG version of this premise. Rein himself is a hyperactive, medium-unhinged bundle of pep and enthusiasm, and Justin Briner does a great job filling this character with manic energy in the dub. Similarly, the world and supporting characters are already starting to get built out in a way that I'm not used to seeing in these kinds of overt power fantasies. The Blue Crystals guild that Rein ends up joining nails the feel of an “it's here, or you're out of this industry entirely" kind of workplace, and I'm curious to learn in he next episode if Rein's adventuring companion Lily really did lose her monster-slaying mojo after taking a two-year mental health break from adventuring.

Of course, I'd like The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life to be a bit quieter if it actually said something and wasn't just a comedic take on an extremely overdone power fantasy in anime. Rein getting fired in the opening moments just because his boss wanted to fire someone really undermines the more calculated callousness that can inform layoffs in real-world workplaces. Similarly, there are already a lot of attractive women giving this bulletproof bundle of energy a lot of undue attention, and I won't hang with this show for long if it devolves into route harem shenanigans.

All in all, though, this is the most I've liked one of these kinds of anime in a minute, and I hope The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life doesn't betray my cautious optimism like other isekai/LitRPG anime have this season.

If nothing else, we can at least say that The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life is making some kind of choice in regards to its main character. Now, if any of these anime studios were taking my pitches for junky lit-RPG cash-grabs, I don't know if my first pick for a hero would be “The Screeching Doofus Who Can Run Crying Like a Pathetic Baby For Miles and Miles While Flailing His Arms Like He Was Ron Burgundy Trapped in a Glass Cage of Emotion.” It is still a choice, though, which mean that this anime has more guts than the vast majority of its competition, who are all content to place a crumpled up piece of plain white paper with some googly-eyes attached to it in front of the metaphorical camera and call it a protagonist. Speaking of our hero, Rein, I don't have too much to say about the dub other than the fact that Justin Briner capably translates Rein's shrill, idiodic wails into English, which ensures that viewers in both hemispheres will get an honest portrayal of the character. Make of that what you will.

Unfortunately, that extra dose of personality is not exactly enough to make a good anime out of The Laid-Off Cheat Granting Whatever, especially since the personality that has been bolstered is, by design, kind of annoying. Everything else about the show's whole setup is just far too familiar to come across as anything but tawdry and cheap. Hell, I would at this point even be willing to give the show a little grace if it were ripping off a premise that we haven't seen done-to-death across the last few seasons of this year alone. If Rein were, like, a psychopathic healer that brought noxious vibes with him wherever he went, I could probably be tricked into thinking that was an original premise, because the industry's LitRPG rot has done some real, genuine damage to my brain. We can't even have that, though. This setting and story trappings of this tale are so bereft of ideas that it shares an essentially identical premise and main character to a series that premiered just three days ago. By the time Rein was magically repossessing all of the buffs he had granted his traitorous party of idiots, I was ready to call Magic Repo Man's lawyers on behalf of the anime on my own dime.

Like I've been saying, the only thing this anime really has going for it is the aggressive, manic energy with which it tackles all of the tropes and archetypes we've seen before. Rein, Elsie, Nina, and the other characters we meet are all generally pretty likeable and lively, which helps all of their breezy little scenes go by fast enough. If you're down to clown with these bozos, I could hardly blame you, because their interactions are sometimes enjoyable enough that you could almost forget that we're once again just running around in narrative circles with absolutely nowhere to go. Almost.