Another Labyrinth Bites The Dust
Arifureta Episode 7
It feels like this anime is sprinting toward some imaginary finish line and it really doesn’t care what it skips over, leaves out, or just kind of dashes past to get there. In this episode we find the next labyrinth, defeat it, and get a gag sequence as the group try to check into an inn.
Not to mention a brief glimpse of the classmates that have chosen not to return to the dungeon after Hajime’s death now deciding they should accompany their teacher when she gets sent out next. The whole sequence would have made a lot more sense if it had been made clear students were just hiding after Hajime’s death outside of the group that are crawling the dungeon or what Ai-chan, the teacher, is actually doing.
Again, the story is not bad because if anything here was given actual time and emotion, this could actually work. The problem is other than Shea having a bit of a temper tantrum, the characters basically walked through the dungeon and knocked out the next liberator with little effort or fuss. It took barely fifteen minutes and at no point did the characters seem to be in real peril. Even Yue’s comment that she couldn’t use projectile magic carried no weight because they didn’t dwell on how that perhaps limited their abilities and why they were relying on Shea’s muscle strengthening to get them through.
Basically, this episode feels like someone summarised the events neatly because they just wanted to move on. And given the whole anime has felt like that at this point with nothing getting sufficient time to actually be made interesting, I’m stuck wondering why they bothered to make it at all.
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Not to mention, Hajime and Yue are both so incredibly flat here. Reading these characters was infinitely more interesting than watching them and maybe that was because of the rushed pace, the poor introductions, or maybe it is the lack of being able to really see what they are thinking, but honestly if I hadn’t read the books, these two characters would be basically substanceless outside of stoic and just plain rude at this point.
This train wreck apparently has 13 episodes and I guess if they are counting the recap that means we have 5 to go. I wonder just how far along they are going to try to cover in one season and just how poorly they are going to deliver this story? That’s about the only curiosity keeping me going at this point.
Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James
If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.
Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.
Yes, really just watching to see how they animate certain aspects of the novels, they’ve lost pretty much all of the character development from the light novels. So disappointing, as it is one of the better isekai stories out there 🙁
I really did love the first volume of the series and just devoured it. While the story got less interesting as more girls were added, the books remained fun to read and I liked seeing how the different characters dealt with various situations. I could understand the anime doing a hash job on the other students, but to just lose all of the development or actual personality from the leads is just sad. Yue and Hajime were both fairly complex and interesting characters in the book who maintained a hard shell for a fair while to prevent others getting close; in the anime they just come off as jerks.
“What’re you feeling?” From the look on her face, I’d hazard the guess: “constipation.”
It really does sum up how a lot of the audience have been feeling watching this anime so far.