Despite being the founder and individual after whom the blog is named, for the past several seasons I haven’t been covering as many anime as the other two writers because most anime airs on the weekend and I work 12 hour shifts all weekend long. However, this one managed to get overlooked over the past weekend, so hooray! I get to cover a weekend anime for once.
It, uh. It does not look promising.
So the fun thing about fantasy is that you can do whatever you want in it. It’s not based in reality (unless you want it to be), so as long as you don’t break the rules you establish for how your universe functions, you can go ham. The flip side, however, is that if you introduce an element that’s a serious problem in reality, you need to address it as a serious problem in-universe or else you’re trivializing it at best, and condoning it at worst.
Point being, this episode has a joke about train groping.
They swap it out for ‘canal boat groping’, which is one of the dumbet possible replacements because most people’s image of a canal boat isn’t big enough to get crowded
to the point where it’s actually too dumb to really be offensive, but come on, dude. That’s not cool. Besides, trains are not considered out of place in Genric JRPG Fantasyland so changing it just kind of implies whoever wrote the joke knew better and did it anyway.
Similarly, the reference to black companies would be fine if the anime wanted to, like, do something with it other than using it as a threat to get Our Boring GeneriDude to accept the job he is almost certainly massively unqualified for (though what CEO is actually qualified for their job, amirite?), but that would require this show to have a modicum of ambition, which it does not.
I’ve never heard of this game and probably wouldn’t have played it even if I had because none of the three video games I play are strategy games. Sure they all have strategic elements, but such elements are more about crop rotations than the movements of armies, and this anime does not make a great case for itself as an advertisement for the game.
The conceit of treating an adventurer party as employees of an otherwise typical white collar office job could be amusing if this show was a parody, or even had any sense of humor to speak of, but it doesn’t have one of those either; and the main character thinking there’s anything ‘complicated’ about the basic mechanics of every dungeon crawling RPG since the invention of dungeon crawling RPGs makes him seem kinda stupid. Which would be fine if we were supposed to think he’s stupid, but I don’t think we are.
Based only on this episode I’m not even sure where the ‘strategy’ part of this anime the claims to be based on a strategy game comes in. Party balancing, determining and exploiting enemy weaknesses, etc, are the basic strategic elements of every dungeon-crawler ever. Maybe the game becomes more strategic as you grow your company, but this commercial does not inspire in me any interest in playing the damn thing to find out.
The setting is uninspired, the characters are one-note samefaced archetypes, and even though the other characters are wearing typically over-designed JRPG outfits that would get them attested for indecent exposure in the actual middle ages, Our Boring GeneriDude is just wearing a school uniform, and doesn’t even have the excuse of this being an isekai to justify it. Furthermore, the incongruity of having modern-looking desks and blinds in an otherwise medieval-ish fantasy setting is distracting and weird.
This anime gets points for being a rare non-isekai fantasy, but it was better off being overlooked. Pass.
Ace Anime Reviews 