Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi Episode 1 Impressions - Cool Visuals and Overwhelming Power

Reviews of Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi sponsored by Scott from Mechanical Anime Reviews.
https://mechanicalanimereviews.com/

Peace is the enemy of resilience…

It’s been a long time since a premiere episode of an anime has left me feeling this excited and Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi (or The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace) has a second episode out immediately so as soon as I finish writing my thoughts here I’m going to go check that out.

This isn’t to say that Episode 1: Peace Time was by any means a perfect episode but it certainly had energy and pairing that with visuals that are engaging and certainly standing out from the crowd of generic character designs this season has so far trotted out (particularly in isekai titles) has very much left me wanting more.

Full warning though: this first episode of Heion Sedai no Idaten has got blood splatter including a mentor more or less beating her student into a bloody pulp as well as characters portrayed after being pierced through the chest. If you also throw in the sequence at the end of the episode where a nun attacked and raped (stylised visuals not-withstanding that is what happens) and you have a series that really isn’t aiming to be kid friendly but also isn’t trying to be grim-dark or depressing.

Can Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi keep up this pace and enthusiasm?

I will admit, when Scott suggested this title for his sponsorship and I saw that it was from MAPPA (you know the studio behind Yuri on Ice, Banana Fish, Inuyashiki and the final season of Attack on Titan) I was kind of intrigued but the promotional images weren’t giving much away other than a host of odd looking characters and the synopsis more or less leaves you wondering just what this anime would be about.

However while the opening narration of Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi is more or less standard tongue in cheek dramatic fantasy prologue, once the story kicks off and we meet Hayato, a young god who is kind of sick of training for a conflict that happened 800 years ago, the episode just never hits the brakes after that point in a good way.

By the end of the episode we’ve met three young gods, their mentor who also looks pretty young but has been kicking since the demons were first expunged from the world, and an old man who knows a lot about both demons and the Idaten, had a fight with a revived demon and it really feels like we’ve gotten a sense of who all these people are and what their role in the story will be.

Except of course the nun at the end of the episode because I’m not entirely sure where that is going or how it relates but I’m sure we’ll get back to it.

Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi also boasts a pretty great OP and even the ending song was great. The visuals to both are kind of mind-bending and I’m going to try to pay a bit more attention to them in the next episode now that I have a better sense of who the characters are.

On that note, the central trio established in this episode are so far pretty awesome. Hayato is your pretty standard over-powered protagonist who seems like he’s going to solve things by hitting them. Paula is pretty cute and much stealthier and can apparently also get information from birds which is actually more useful than it sounds. Meanwhile Ysley is definitely more book smart.

They each bring something to the table and more than that, they each have an actual personality that seems like they’ll be a bit more than just their trope.

Even the hook-nosed villain Dr Obami seems to have a bit of spunk to him and a lot of his lines were actually pretty funny.

Basically, this was a really promising start and as long as the subject matter isn’t a trigger for you there was a lot of fun to be had in this first episode of Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi. Really looking forward to more from this series.

Images from: Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi. Dir. S Kidokoro. MAPPA. 2021