I don’t know what I was expecting from a series allegedly about star-crossed lovers who fight on opposite sides of a war, but I think it was something actually fun.
Our Last Crusade or Rise of a New World is the adaptation of the light novel series of the same name, centered on Iska, a kindhearted super-soldier who wants to end the war his country’s been waging through extreme violence, and Alice, a kindhearted super mage who wants to end the war the Empire has been waging on her country through extreme violence and world domination. That is not to say that their positions are equally valid, and comparing them may not be particularly fair, but if the show wanted me to be fair, it should have been better.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s… fine. There’s exposition explaining the setting, info dumped right in the beginning as part of our protagonists’ motivating thoughts; there’s some awkward moments of animation, like near the beginning when Iska just sort of waves his special sword up and down without toughing anything with it and yet magically cuts through an imprisoned mage’s ankle cuff; Iska and Alice are perfectly solid examples of protagonists in a combat-heavy series, who want to do The Best Thing possible and believe they alone can make a better world.
Also there’s some romcom hijinks very clumsily muscled in. In an actual romance series they might have worked; in a series where these two are the “ultimate weapons” of opposing sides in a war, it just feels very clunky and ill-conceived. I’ll give this a couple more episodes, but honestly, you may as well skip it yourselves.
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