Arifureta

Aiko vs Hajime

Arifureta Episodes 9 + 10

I wouldn’t actually say that Arifureta has gotten better given even after ten episodes we’ve barely managed to scrape average for an isekai in terms of quality, however, to say that these two episodes were actually bad would not be doing them justice. In honesty, if these two episodes had come on the back of some decent world building and set up, and if they hadn’t been as horrifically rushed, they could have actually been reasonable in terms of what they offered even if we have finally reached the introduction of Tio, who was my least favourite character in the books.

I like that Hajime’s meeting with Aiko is forcing him to evaluate his current personality and decisions and that while he isn’t totally caving in and instantly returning to a nice guy personality, he is at least having to consider the long term implications of his shoot first and ask questions never attitude. Arifureta, at least the novels, was fascinating because of how Hajime transitioned throughout the events of the story, and seeing at least a little of that play out in the anime was probably the most interesting thing this series has offered, but again, without having spent any time establishing these characters before jumping into things the impact is pretty minimal.

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Anyway, Hajime and company get to the mountains and promptly use Hajime’s drone type things to find the site of a fight. Soon after they find Will hiding behind a waterfall and Hajime is all set to return Will home just as he agreed. That would have been the end of it except that the dragon responsible for the death of the rest of the party shows up.

And yes we are in for another round of terrible visuals, though the fight ending with Hajime shoving a rod into the dragon’s butt is one of the many reasons I found Tio’s introduction less than enjoyable. In fairness though, the dragon is less hideous than the marching army of monsters that they face off with next.

As usual though, there’s little tension in the story even when Aiko has to confront the fact that one of her students raised the monster army and is trying to kill her. Arifureta, the anime, just doesn’t get how to do dramatic tension or characterisation in a way that has any impact. On the surface this all works but the emotional impact is practically nil.

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Karandi James

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Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.

Another Labyrinth Bites The Dust

Arifureta Episode 7

It feels like this anime is sprinting toward some imaginary finish line and it really doesn’t care what it skips over, leaves out, or just kind of dashes past to get there. In this episode we find the next labyrinth, defeat it, and get a gag sequence as the group try to check into an inn.

Not to mention a brief glimpse of the classmates that have chosen not to return to the dungeon after Hajime’s death now deciding they should accompany their teacher when she gets sent out next. The whole sequence would have made a lot more sense if it had been made clear students were just hiding after Hajime’s death outside of the group that are crawling the dungeon or what Ai-chan, the teacher, is actually doing.

Again, the story is not bad because if anything here was given actual time and emotion, this could actually work. The problem is other than Shea having a bit of a temper tantrum, the characters basically walked through the dungeon and knocked out the next liberator with little effort or fuss. It took barely fifteen minutes and at no point did the characters seem to be in real peril. Even Yue’s comment that she couldn’t use projectile magic carried no weight because they didn’t dwell on how that perhaps limited their abilities and why they were relying on Shea’s muscle strengthening to get them through.

Basically, this episode feels like someone summarised the events neatly because they just wanted to move on. And given the whole anime has felt like that at this point with nothing getting sufficient time to actually be made interesting, I’m stuck wondering why they bothered to make it at all.

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Not to mention, Hajime and Yue are both so incredibly flat here. Reading these characters was infinitely more interesting than watching them and maybe that was because of the rushed pace, the poor introductions, or maybe it is the lack of being able to really see what they are thinking, but honestly if I hadn’t read the books, these two characters would be basically substanceless outside of stoic and just plain rude at this point.

This train wreck apparently has 13 episodes and I guess if they are counting the recap that means we have 5 to go. I wonder just how far along they are going to try to cover in one season and just how poorly they are going to deliver this story? That’s about the only curiosity keeping me going at this point.

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Karandi James

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Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.

A Quick Hi and Bye

Arifureta Episode 6

With the start of what is ostensibly a new arc as it was more or less the start of the next novel, the introduction of new settings and characters and the first leg of Hajime’s new ambition to conquer the labyrinths, get the magic he needs, and go home, you would think this would be a good chance for Arifureta to up its game and pretend like the first five episodes hadn’t really happened. Particularly after dropping a recap episode on the audience essentially giving this the sense of a new beginning for the story.

And in some ways it kind of is a new beginning. Gone are the hideously bleak and poorly contrasted walls of the dungeon and instead we have blue skies and forests with flowers. We also have a weirdly slap-stick vibe coming through with the introduction of Shea who for whatever reason not only puts up with Hajime and Yue’s attitude but voluntarily throws herself onboard their mission. Admittedly, I can’t blame the anime for that weird tonal change that is entirely coming from the source and is one of the reasons why the book series had increasingly diminishing returns in terms of entertainment. Every new female character seemed to reduce the overall fun of reading the story.

Yet despite the new characters and the scene change, Arifureta hasn’t managed to shake the real problem that it has had since episode one. It continues to charge through content, checking off plot points rather than actually exploring them or making them in any way interesting or palatable for the viewer.

Even if I ignore what I know of the characters from the source and assumed this was the first I’d seen of Yue and Shea’s interactions, I would know that this episode does little to build a foundation for that relationship. We have a few moments where Yue, for whatever reason seems to soften in her open hostility of the rabbit-girl and a fight sequence that ends with Yue agreeing to bring Shea along with them, but honestly there’s no chemistry or feeling between these characters. While they could certainly develop it as we go, it really feels like they wanted to just jump right over dealing with establishing anything (once again).

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Equally, Hajime essentially changes the core nature of the rabbit-men and it is handled with zero care. He gets mad at them, stomps a flower, and suddenly they are killing machines. It makes little sense and it certainly isn’t riveting viewing. When we throw in that the novels actually looked briefly at the small feelings of guilt and unease Hajime had and the tiny wondering of whether he’d done the right thing, it really makes you realise just why this viewing experience feels so devoid of any meaning. Because it literally is. Hajime makes killer rabbits. Then they travel on. In the anime he gains nothing from the experience and the viewer doesn’t see anything of his inner character. It’s just Hajime going through the motions and it isn’t even really clear why he bothers at all.

I’ve really given up expecting much from this anime but it would be nice if we could get a character moment that felt genuine at some point. Or at the very least if they would stop charging headlong forward like they had some race to win and if they actually let the narrative develop and flow in a way that felt in any way natural.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.

Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.

Why Not Remind The Audience How Poor The Opening Act Was

Arifureta Episode 5.5

I’ve previously devoted a feature to discussing my feelings on recap episodes. When they work, when they don’t, and wondering just why they even bother including them sometimes. Well, Arifureta has me scratching my head and wondering why on earth it bothered as after the small hope at the end of the last episode that maybe we were finally moving beyond the atrocious start to this anime they felt the need to rehash the whole thing in small pieces.

About the only decent thing this recap brought was it put the events in order and potentially reminded us of the classmates’ names so when they become important further down the line we might have a chance of recalling who they even are. But that is such a small accomplishment and could have been solved if they hadn’t butchered the introduction in the first place.

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Nope, there’s no new insight, no new perspective, and only the faintest, blink and you’ll miss it teaser for a new character coming. It really is just a cut up version of the first five episodes with minimal voice over linking the scenes and events. What is sad is that it is almost a more coherent telling of the first five episodes than the first five episodes were.

I guess we’ll see if next week if we can finally get the right foot facing forward with this series of if this is as good as it is going to get.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James

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If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.

Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.

Power Ups All Around

Arifureta Episode 5

You know, by Arifureta standards, episode 5 was actually pretty decent. Certainly less absolute disasters in terms of pace or characterisation than previous episodes and only one short monster fight with a CGI eye-sore.

Now, if this episode had come on the back of some semi-decent introduction episodes it would actually put this anime in a reasonable position to move forward given it really does set up the next phase of the journey for Hajime. Alas, it is standing on the sludge that we’ve been dished out so far and while there’s actually a tiny bit of hope that maybe the next stage will be better handled, it isn’t exactly an expectation at this point.

There’s two parts to this story this week. On the one hand we have Hajime and Yue exploring the home of the one who built the labyrinth and on the other we have the classmates who are still going into the dungeon having a second attempt at the monster that was partly the cause of Hajime falling in the first place. Neither of these is particularly brilliant but nor can I really say they demonstrated the same ineptitude as previous episodes (at least not if I’m trying to be fair).

Again, both of these stories suffer because the characters haven’t been properly established previously which leads to an overall lack of investment. The visuals have not improved in the slightest and I think Hajime’s voice actor possibly needs to learn how to deliver a slightly more nuanced performance because I’m still wondering what Yue did to him in the bath that resulted in whatever that sound was supposed to be. It kind of sounded like he’s had a leg severed but I somehow doubt that was the intention.

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On that note, for those wanting loli-vampire fan-service this episode delivers in its opening with naked Yue sleeping next to naked Hajime and then throws us the hot-tub scene just because it can. That said, this neither really added anything to the episode or detracted from it. The whole thing was more just kind of there.

However, credit where it is due, by the end of this episode Hajime has a direction to travel in towards his goal of returning home. He’s prepped and ready and realistically any time a character sets out a journey there’s a sense of anticipation. The rest of the class defeating the monster and feeling a little more optimistic is also reasonably handled. Again, if this had come on after even a half-decent start this anime would be in a reasonable position.

But, my episode highlight was definitely Yue’s shoes.

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Karandi James

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If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.

Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.

Yue, Hajime, and Some Terrible CGI

Arifureta Episode 4

Look, it is the final boss of the dungeon. That should be exciting, right? A real sense of tension, a spectacular fight, and top class animation? It should, shouldn’t it?

Well, Arifureta at least hasn’t set its own bar too high so I guess I wasn’t expecting much. I did have to flinch at just how badly done the CGI dragon was and as the fight continued, and oh boy does it continue for almost the entire episode, it actually managed to look even worse. My favourite part was where they essentially reused the same image of the three heads lunging forward. Maybe this was actually an entirely unique sequence and I certainly didn’t go back to compare, but it looked pretty much identical to me.

So the monster doesn’t look good. At all. Not even vaguely like any thing that should appear in a modern anime. But what about the characters?

Apparently Yue is Hajime’s beloved. Yeah, the anime really didn’t build up to that one. It just kind of happened. He kissed her and woke her up from some mind control, when he was on the edge of dying he saw her in danger and essentially got a power up meanwhile thinking about his ‘beloved’ who was going to be killed.

Once again Arifureta, this isn’t how you do characterisation. See you can’t just give us a minute of meeting a guy and then transform his whole character and expect us to care and you can’t have one episode of two characters expositioning their way through a dungeon and then pull out the ‘beloved’ card. It doesn’t feel genuine or earned. Actually it feels pretty trite.

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Naturally they beat the monster but we still don’t know what is at the end of the Labyrinth because we cut to seeing the teacher and then the other students doing some stuff. Nothing that we get to see for any length of time and as we essentially skipped any kind of intro to these characters they are having to do introductions on the fly which sounds totally natural (not) and honestly I just can’t bring myself to care.

Watch if you are in the mood for repetitive monster attacks, a predictable outcome, and zero sense when it comes to character development. Why aren’t I dropping this? Mostly because I just want to see whether it can maintain this level of ridiculous from start to finish at this point.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
Join the discussion in the comments.
Karandi James

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If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.

Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.

Battling Monsters and Bad Visuals

Arifureta Episode 3

Outside of the still incredibly ugly visuals that make is difficult to figure out what is going on and what is monster and what is grainy textured background, Arifureta is kind of settling in as an underwhelming entry this season. Now that we’ve moved past the introduction, the fact that we skipped all the back story (or got the cliff-notes version of it in a couple of flashbacks) just means we have a main character with little depth to him because we have no actual connection to him prior to him becoming an unstoppable juggernaut within the dungeon.

We briefly, as in blink and you’ll miss it, get a scene with the main kids from the class who are about to go back to the labyrinth and again we have no connection to these characters, who they were, how they’ve changed since arriving and since Hajime’s death because any context that might have helped us figure out who they are outside of their name and title was stripped away. So other than knowing some of the class are still going into the labyrinth the scene serves little to no purpose. Though I guess it at least gives us an outdoor scene that is actually bright because otherwise this episode was just a murky mess visually.

As to Hajime and Yue, they’ve insta-bonded over being betrayed (which I remember being more affective when reading) and that’s more or less fine. They work together to bring down some scorpion monster thing at the start of the episode and this is where the visuals were at their worst. I know the monster was supposed to be blending in with the rocks but it became almost impossible to really distinguish what was going on in the fight and so the ultimate victory for Hajime and Yue wasn’t that amazing.

We then speed run down to the 100^th floor stopping only long enough to deal with some flower monster. That wouldn’t be a problem if they used the time to do something but in the duration we learn practically nothing new about Yue other than she’s maybe well over 300 years old and doesn’t need to eat so long as she’s drinking blood. Otherwise there’s little to nothing going on in the second half and then we arrive at the 100^th floor and find a mysterious looking door.

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This episode definitely wasn’t a disaster because we’re past the introduction to this story now and there’s no going back. While the absence of it is sorely hurting these characters and the world building, this episode did the best it could with the foundation it had been given. It isn’t good and I’m still miffed they have managed to make it this unimpressive, but in fairness it is a reasonably average episode in terms of story though a bit more going on would have been nice and if it wasn’t for the awful visual choices they’ve made in portraying the labyrinth the episode overall would be about average for the genre.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
Join the discussion in the comments.
Karandi James

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If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.

Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.

Have They Managed To Get Anything Right?

Arifureta Episode 2

It is rare that I watch a show when I have pretty much no positives to discuss. Yet Arifureta falls into a very weird space where I feel oddly compelled to continue watching mostly just to see whether they ever manage to reveal the potential of the story in the light novels while at the same time I’m just weirdly fascinated that clearly the people who have adapted this do not understand at all what readers enjoyed about the story.

After the first episode aired, there were so many comparisons made in reviews of Arifureta to That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, but the thing is, other than both being isekai there really isn’t all that much that is similar about them beyond superficial genre elements. Yet you can’t actually blame them for the comparison given the anime version of Arifureta just seems like a failed attempt at a grim version of Slime. And that’s kind of appalling for a whole bunch of reasons.

However, even ignoring the source that is being adapted and just looking at this anime, two episodes in and it is pretty bleak. Not just because of lack of contrast in the scenes within the cave that make it almost impossible to distinguish what is happening, though way to save on drawing backgrounds.

This week we get a little bit more of a flashback about how the class ended up in another world but the characterisation is a simple matter of one liners from a few of the more prominent students with the teacher wailing in the background. Not one of these people comes across as an actual person. They are stand-ins for characters that might eventually develop in the space they are occupying but they’ve yet to do anything two episodes in.

Then we have our protagonist, Hajime. Putting aside the fact that I really feel they’ve butchered his character arc as presented in the light novels beyond salvation, I’d probably accept a different Hajime except that the one presented here is incredibly boring. His transformation was instantaneous last week and this week we see none of his struggle in these incredibly tough levels. Instead we get a simple montage of him knocking off monster of the week type creatures (only he covers it all in one episode) and now we’re fifty floors further down and knocking on the golden haired vampire girls’ door. Mostly it feels like no one writing the anime had any interest in actually developing their protagonist, or even cared for a moment if he came across as anything other than a stand in, so long as they could get to the naked vampire.

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So was the naked vampire girl worth getting to? Not so far. Other than a few wispy lines of dialogue that sketch out a minimal back story she’s had no time to do anything. While Yue was a really great character in the source I’m not holding my breath at this point given the treatment the rest of the cast have gotten.

Arifureta may easily take the crown for most disappointing anime of the year. However, even if we removed any expectations readers had going in, this one isn’t even managing to hold its own against the rest of the isekai this season. It has so far been a bland and dull affair taking two episodes to jump through huge amounts of exploration and character levelling up but not taking any time to actually make us feel anything for a single character in the show.

All and all, this one is a train wreck of the highest order and it isn’t going to fall into the so bad it is amusing category. I can assure you, I’m not amused. Bemused, maybe, by how you take this story and make it this boring. I’d have settled for being a generic and fairly lame isekai over this effort.

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Karandi James

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If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.

Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.

Let’s Just Skip The Intro

Arifureta Episode 1

When I picked up the first light novel volume of Arifureta, I was drawn into a story that really hit me emotionally as I watched Hajime’s character get broken down and literally rebuilt from the ground up. It was horrifying and compelling and truly a riveting reading experience. I really do recommend grabbing the first volume of the light novel series.

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Then we have this first episode of the anime, which outside of being so dark and gloomy visually that at times it is almost impossible to actually see what is happening in a scene, drops us into the middle of the action and fills in a few details through flashbacks but leaves a lot still unsaid. Admittedly, it is a first episode and they probably didn’t want to go through the standard isekai motions of showing us the class getting summoned etc, but we’ve lost some important points that would make the character transformation actually have impact along the way.

Because in the anime so far we don’t know anything about Hajime other than he was a bit of a punching bag for some of the others who were with him and that there’s a girl who is a little concerned about him. The impact of his transformed character is incredibly diminished because we’ve spent no time walking in his shoes as he’s struggled to train his ill-suited ability into something usable and the few flashbacks we get don’t really give us enough emotional connection.

Again, it is a first episode and these details might get filled in later. However, that would mean that we at least got an exciting fight filled opening that drew us into the action of the story… Only as I said, visually this one is pretty bleak and the fights with the monsters have so far been pretty pedestrian.

Now part of this is a problem on my part because I really loved the first book of this series and the anime has literally just skipped over all the foundation of it as though it was filler. However, even if I back away from knowing what the story was about, this episode isn’t very compelling. I’d put it on par with Demon Lord Retry for the season, which is to say there’s potential for growth and it is a genre I like but the first episode was not overly exciting or promising.

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
Join the discussion in the comments.
Karandi James

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If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.

Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.