Here, in Suppose a Kid From the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town?, we have an adventure slash fantasy story based on a light novel that isn’t an isekai.
However, if we wanted that fish out of water experience we instead have a kid who has lived in a mythical village in the middle of nowhere his whole life moving to the kingdom in order to become a soldier, which is apparently a dream of his due to the one book he read as a child and because he considers himself the weakest person in his village. Basically we have a character with no knowledge of the kingdom or its problems stumbling about and being ridiculously over-powered so not so different from the standard isekai plot really.
Is Suppose A Kid from the Last Dungeon enjoyable?
If I had to say whether I liked or disliked Last Dungeon (etc), I’d probably land on the side of enjoying it more than anything else. That isn’t actually indicating that this series is particular good at anything but it does avoid making any unforgiveable missteps and it is following a basic formula that works well enough provided you are into that kind of thing.
Lloyd arriving in the city with his dream and having it dashed pretty readily early on before a weird set of circumstances allow him to move forward before the next obstacle arrives and so on and so forth means we’re always kind of moving forward and Lloyd’s over-arching goal of being a hero keeps the plot from feeling stagnant even as they trot out the same jokes and story beats again and again.
And because this is an anime based on a light novel, pretty much every character Lloyd gets close to or interacts with is a cute girl of one type of another. Whether it is the infatuated older sister type in the form of his house mate (who serves a fairly important purpose in the first arc and there-after just becomes the butt of the loli-character’s jokes), his village chief (the loli), the first girl he meets and saves in town who has instantly fallen in love with him and as built her own delusion around their relationship and so on and so forth.
There are a few male characters sprinkled into the cast but largely this story is all about the different girls who clamour and position themselves around Lloyd despite his absolute obliviousness even when they outright declare their intentions to marry him.
Most of the girls are actually pretty fun to spend time with. I kind of liked the pre-existing relationship between Marie and Alka and Marie’s small attempts at rebellion against her former master that were always fairly quickly shut down. Riho ends up being delightful and really I would have loved to have seen more stories revolving around her and Lloyd. Phyllo who comes in later doesn’t offer a lot but she’s largely inoffensive.
The weak link in the harem is Selen who unfortunately gets the majority of screen time as well as the love-struck maiden saved by Lloyd. Honestly, Selen really just ate screen time and her ongoing, loud delusions were most definitely the low point of the story. That they ultimately use her particular brand of crazy to amusing effect during the climax doesn’t really make-up for all the episodes before where you were just kind of hoping that someone would squish her flat.
The other fairly weak part of the story comes in the form of the antagonists. While there’s a decent enough build up to the various villains throughout the series as they move in shadows, set up their schemes and seem to actually be quite decently suited to challenge the protagonist, when we finally get their motives out in the open it all just kind of falls flat. Less was definitely more and unfortunately what little hope there was of elevating ‘Suppose a kid’ from absolutely mediocre and forgettable got squashed flat as you realise just how poorly thought out the villains’ plots actually were.
A final point of weakness is in the entire male cast. Lloyd serves well enough as innocent protagonist but every other male character seems to exist only to be evil or to be the butt of some kind of joke, usually of the physical humour kind. Whether it is Alan being injured in order for the girls to practice healing magic, the former soldier who ends up falling in love with agriculture or just girls kicking guys just because they can, none of the male characters actually gets to be fleshed out as a character.
I get the story isn’t going for being deep and meaningful but it would have been nice for one of the male characters to not be villainous or a punching bag.
Where I did enjoy the story was in Lloyd’s absolute ignorance of the events going on around him. Despite everything that happens in the first four episodes, he still remains completely clueless as to how strong he actually is. Watching him do that absolute extraordinary and genuinely still have an inferiority complex actually remains fairly amusing for the duration of the anime and is given just enough nuance so that when he falters in the final fight of the series you actually do feel a little bit for this kid who just wants to be a hero.
Likewise Alka’s casual use of extraordinary magic for petty reasons as well as her absent minded-ness, while a repeated gag in the series, mostly hits its mark and remains amusing enough.
Visually, this one is pretty unimpressive with action sequences being very simple and lots of scenes where backgrounds disappear altogether. The characters are cute enough and distinct enough but they don’t move all that much and get used to scenes of the characters eating or drinking tea because they do have a lot of ‘chats’ for an adventure-fantasy story. The monsters, particularly the giant tree thing, are almost comically poorly done and clearly it was intentional, but it doesn’t make it any more interesting to look at.
Basically, there’s no real reason to rush in to watching Suppose a Kid From the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town. Likewise, there’s no reason to avoid it. If you aren’t in the mood to overly think something and actually just want a sweet protagonist and a few kind of lame fight scenes with a plethora of cute girls thrown in, then you could do worse than this anime. For me, I had enough fun here but I know I will very quickly forget about this anime and may very well end up rewatching it in the future just because I forgot I watched it the first time.
Images from: Suppose a Kid From The Last Dungeon Boonnies Moved to a Starter Town. Dir. migmi. LIDENFILMS. 2021.
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Karandi James
This was among my favourite shows of its season, and it’d probably make it into the top 10 of 2020 (but then 2020 wasn’t a particularly strong year). But I really can’t disagree: it’s utterly avarage in every respect. I just happen to click with it. I think I like the colours and the straightforward energy of the show.
Selen was an interesting character for about the first five seconds we meet her, and then she turns into a standard yandere (light), and her character never really recovers from that.
I can’t say I found the guys particularly worse off than the girls. Everyone’s basically riding on one joke. If you want story, there’s only really Riho, but the show doesn’t focus on her (my favourite), with Marie being a distant second, I think. The plots mostly there to drive the comedy, I think.
The best thing about recommending this show is that what you see is what you get; there *are* some character moments I didn’t expect, so it’s not like there isn’t development. But my assessment is this: If you don’t click with the first episode, the show won’t win you over. If you do, the show won’t let you down. What you see is what you get.
That’s a pretty accurate description of it. I quite enjoyed it but I happen to like the genre and most of the characters were pleasant enough. Still not something that will be on anyone’s must watch list anytime soon.
I watched the first episode of this but it did nothing for me, so kudos for watching it all the way through to the end.
There’s really nothing special to see here. Fun enough but nothing new or particularly remarkable.
I found it amusing, in a little-kid sort of way, but, then again, I also found most of the girls fairly creepy (a grown woman, a sorcerer woman who is MUCH older than she looks, and a crazy girl all jockeying to get close to a *very* young and naive boy). The boy’s innocent naivete was actually my low point for the show, because it just gets to the point of ridiculous, willing stupidity for him to remain entirely ignorant of how strong he is in comparison to the people directly around him. And what was the point, again, to the older women working so hard to keep him so oblivious?
Not sure there was a point other than amusement.
Fair point.