Review:
Grimoire of Zero on paper probably looks like a really great anime. All of the ingredients are there. You’ve got witches, humans and beastfallen all with their own agendas, prejudices, and ignorances in various states of conflict, you have a paired up witch and beastfallen on what amounts to a magical fetch quest, and you have sufficient obstacles to create some interesting action sequences on their travels. So why and I finding it so dull to watch?
Part of the issue comes from not particularly caring about any of the characters yet and episode 2 did little to make me care any more about them. Other than the mercenary stating he hates witches, repeatedly, and then at the end apologising half-heartedly for it, we learn nothing about him in this episode. Zero can’t decide if she wants to be mysterious, wise, passive or smug and just kind of pulls on whichever personality suits the moment. New witch boy, who I cannot remember the name (sorry, alias) of is an angry ignorant witch but deep down he’s a good person.
Other than not caring about this group, last week they set up a quest to find the grimoire and this week yellow haired boy tells them, oh yeah, that’s in our hideout. Okay, that was easy. I assume getting it back won’t be easy but really, way to shortcut a quest.
And did we seriously need an arrow to the knee joke here?
Grimoire of Zero is available on AnimeLab.
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Karandi James.
Imagine if anime started releasing an entire season at one time instead of making it weekly. I think a lot of shows could benefit from that. Especially because, sometimes, it really does feel like some shows would have been better off as a movie, with all the extra bits cut out, vs. being made into a weekly episodic type of thing.
This show being one of them.
There are some shows that would definitely benefit from that sort of release, but others that wouldn’t go so well. Honestly though, I don’t know that this one would feel better all at once, mostly because I’d probably have dropped it during the second episode because despite wanting to like the show, I’m really finding it quite dull. If I hadn’t had the break between episodes I may have just decided to let it go.
Trying to watch this episode felt like a slog to me, and that’s so disappointing because episode 1 was one of the most surprisingly-compelling first episodes I’ve watched this season! I went into episode 2 hoping to learn more about these characters I liked a bit and the world I was getting interested in, but then, as you said, everything was just so dull and nothing interesting was really revealed and is it just me, or did the animation this episode become SIGNIFICANTLY less fluid than it was in the first?
I didn’t really notice a change in the animation but that’s probably because the first episode of this didn’t really grab me either.
I think you are right in that watching this episode feels like a slog. It isn’t actually unwatchable, but it isn’t really enjoyable to watch either.