Overview:
A mercenary who is half-beast meets a witch who calls herself Zero. The two strike a deal where the mercenary must protect the witch while she searches for a book that might destroy the world and once that’s done she’ll turn him back into a human.
Review:
This show has ideas and this episode sets up a fairly basic premise of fetch the book and turn the beast back into a human and it all looks like it could be quite good. Unfortunately, at no point during episode 1 did I feel like I needed to care about any of these characters or the events.
Possibly it was the info-dump opening that just kind of tuned me out, or maybe the overly cutesy design for the titular witch, but while I watched the events play out and it all makes perfect sense so far and it feels like it should be interesting, it really wasn’t.
Actually, I had two points that didn’t make sense. First, the guy was born half-beast so why do they keep saying ‘turn back’ into human? Wouldn’t it simply be to transform him into fully human? The other one is the witch states twice that her magic allows her to cast without invocation or circle but she sure is spending a lot of time chanting for someone who doesn’t need an invocation. I’m hoping that’s a translation error because otherwise it makes no sense.
I’m going to watch a couple more episodes of this because I do enjoy fantasy, but episode 1 has done little to really appeal.
Grimoire of Zero is available on AnimeLab.
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Thanks,
Karandi James.
Yeah, the first ep seemed to mostly just be informational but I think it also gave the beastfallen a bit of character development. As far as the whole “beastfallen” thing goes… I can’t say for sure but it’s probably a technicality that he was human first; it could be that he was human in the womb since it would be unnatural for a human to give birth to a beastfallen. I think his Mother was cursed and that, in turn, made him quickly grow into a beastfallen. But that’s JUST A THEORY! AN ANIME THEORY! Thanks for reading.
I think they could have been clearer about the because it was kind of confused (or maybe I’m just confused). Either way, it is logical to assume that he started human but his mother was cursed and that changed him prior to birth and then change back makes sense.
Well, I think they wanna keep information about his birth parents under wraps. Probably gonna be a reveal that his Mother was actually a witch. Very likely, actually. Maybe his Mother even cursed herself.. (No nvm, that’d be stupid…)
Maybe because it is unusual to have a non-human character as the main lead. I only remember a character from the seiken densetsu III game having a beast-man as one of the lead characters.
Which would be enough to make people try the first episode, but having watched it, there’s still quite a bit of hype around it. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with the episode but compared to other shows this season it was so-so.
im still not sold on this show, but im curious to see what ppl see in it. it seems really hyped…and im sure it has more to it than being similarly named to re:zero
This has had a lot of positive hype and I’m not really sure why. The first episode wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t particularly mind-blowing either. World End was far more interesting in terms of set up.
yup, i agree completely