Kenja no Mago Review Episode 5

The calm days before a war.

Episode 5

After seemingly rushing to show us a demonised human, this episode just kind of sets a few things in motion and continues the Shin-is-awesome propaganda campaign. Still, dopey first love, magic lessons, designing new swords, and caring grandparents are more than enough to fill in this episode without it feeling like things are getting dull.

That said, it is very much determined not to break new ground within its genre. Shin offers the girl he kind of likes an accessory and then it turns out it is for defensive magic purposes causing her to be all embarrassed and angry and then Shin realises how it sounded when he asked the question and he’s all discombobulated in a way that I’m sure is supposed to be endearing but the entire sequence was just a tad too trite even for the this anime.

The set up for the war was very abrupt. Like literally a guy just walks up to this other guy and gives him one bit of intel and the other guy decides he’s going to war. After that we don’t see either of those two again, but because this anime also doesn’t do subtlety or delayed reveals, we soon find out that the guy giving the information is actually connected to the escaped Demonoid Schrom from last week.

grandchild5d — Nobody here intends on using Shin… Nobody.

Which could be kind of cool except that they reveal this while he’s laughing maniacally in bed. There’s something about bad guys just sitting around cackling to themselves that just makes them hard to take seriously.

In case it seems like I’m getting down on this anime, I’m really not. It has been pretty fun to watch. While it is hitting all the usual tropes and standards, that’s probably what makes it so relaxing and just kind of casually fun to watch each week. Certainly it is at best average, and scenes like the early on in this episode where nobody has a face don’t help make it feel anything but average, but sometimes average is enough.