Seirei Gensouki

The Seirei Gensouki anime is going to be a challenge to fairly review. Because objectively it isn’t that bad. There’s actually a number of positives I’ll discuss throughout this review. However, with the anime series ending the way it does it more or less makes this an impossible recommendation in terms of anime to watch. Largely because clearly this is for people who’ve read the source as there’s little satisfaction to be found otherwise.

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Seirei Gensouki anime – It’s a race to adapt.

From early on in the Seirei Gensouki anime it became fairly apparent that this was an anime intent on getting through material fast. Characters get isekai’d (at least through a bus accident rather than main character getting hit by ubiquitous truck) and the main character rescued a princess, is tortured, accepted into some academy, learns sword fighting and magic, is framed for potentially putting the princess at risk, runs away, saves the assassin sent after him, and so on and all of this is within the first third of the series.

The pace doesn’t slow down after that as Rio, our main characters, plunges on to new settings and situations, learns new skills, meets new characters, faces various potential challenges (none of which actually seem to challenge him and we’ll discuss that in a moment) and then moves on.

What this means is for anime only viewers of Seirei Gensouki is that none of these characters or settings leave much of an impression. None of it is actually bad. I kind of think the world we very quickly see in this anime series could be incredibly interesting. But nor can I say that the anime gives us time to appreciate any of the places or people Rio meets and by the end they all just kind of blur together. I’d really struggle to name more than three characters and all three of them would be characters who appear at the start and end of the series.

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Fortunately though, while we’re doing this travel style anime, visually Seirei Gensouki looks really pretty. That isn’t quite the same as saying it has good animation because the actual movement is serviceable. But backgrounds and character designs are really nice to look at and I like the bright use of colours. If I had to continuously watch a character move through different locations, this at least felt like it was visually up to the task of bringing those places to life.

And if you went in knowing you were going to very hastily skate over a story and settings that are probably told better in the source (never read it so won’t say for sure) you can probably end up appreciating the Seirei Gensouki anime for what it does do and in terms of isekai light novels, while there’s definitely some of the common tropes I get the feeling that this story could be a lot more interesting than the usual cliché paint-by-numbers efforts.

Where Seirei Gensouki stretched my reasonably favourable view to far was in how it ended. I’ve kind of made my opinion of episode 12 clear in the review so I won’t rehash it here. However, in reviewing the whole series let me be clear that this story won’t resolve any of the main plot line and will still be introducing new ideas right up to and after the closing credits. If you want any sense of resolution, this adaptation will not deliver it.

Which actually makes me wonder if they ever had any intention of making this anime a story or if they really were just making an advertisement for the books. And even if they were making an advertisement for the books, that’s no excuse for not considering viewers at all and thinking about where a decent resting point might be for a season end. The way they’ve done it here really does just feel lacking and somewhat lazy and it leaves a bitter taste in the viewer’s mouth when actually the series as a whole wasn’t brilliant but it also wasn’t bad.

Talk about shooting yourself in your own foot.

Anyway, the Seirei Gensouki anime follows Rio/Haruto who at first is kind of an interesting isekai protagonist. Sure he’s overpowered in some respects and being able to access Haruto’s sword training from Japan gives him some advantages. However Rio makes the decision to live in his current world and while he takes advantage of some of Haruto’s abilities, he really sets out to make himself his own person. It’s an interesting decision and one that feels different from so many isekai characters who lean heavily on their former lives.

Equally, Rio starts out in a quite low position in society and a lot of characters work to keep him there. This inevitably leads to him finding out that his mother was… you know what, it is a pretty obvious reveal but even so I’ll let you find out for yourselves if you ever watch the anime or read the source.

At times, the younger Rio even has glimpses of an actual personality.

Unfortunately, by the very short number of episodes we have until Rio is older, somehow that all kind of gets washed away and instead we have the usual kind older brother character who saves girls but asks for little or nothing in return. He’s nice to everyone except those who have clearly demonstrated themselves to be evil (or completely idiotic) and then he easily defeats them giving them their much deserved comeuppance.

He usually doesn’t even break a sweat. Not against idiots. Not against wyverns. Pretty much the only fight that even damages his cloak is the final one in episode 12 and even then he wasn’t really in danger.

This makes it hard for the Seirei Gensouki anime to really get an emotional response from the viewers. The main character is never in danger so there’s little to no tension. He equally has insufficient personality traits to really be more than your standard isekai trope wandering through a story that is being rushed so I’m left with little to say about him other than he’s good with a sword, has learned spirit arts, has a harem of girls, and is nice. We could apply most of that description to way too many other characters so Rio isn’t really going to stick in my memory very long.

The girls, for the most part, are very cute and most of them seem to have a personality, they just don’t ever get enough screen time to really let it shine. This is another case where the Seirei Gensouki anime’s pace hurt it. None of the girls travel with Rio for very long so as he moves on they disappear from the story until he passes back through their lives. While each one could be an interesting character, they inevitably don’t get the chance.

All and all, I wanted more from the set up here and I feel that the worst offense the Seirei Gensouki anime commits is wasting the potential of this story and these characters. If the goal had been to tell a decent story based upon these ideas and with these characters, that fit within the confines of an anime season, they really could have done a better job. The waste of potential hurts more than anything else.

Which means, I can’t recommend this anime. It isn’t the worst thing you’ll ever watch, but nor is there any point to watching it. If you want this story, its probably better to explore it through a medium that takes a bit more time with each part and may at some point conclude. Here, you’ll just be left with an incomplete narrative and feel like the goal was to get through it as fast as possible rather than to enjoy the journey.

If you watched the Seirei Gensouki anime what did you think?

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James

I am fine with an anime series wanting to leave room for a sequel. I’ve even come to accept anime that exist just to promote source material and so never actually intend to adapt a full story. But anime like Seirei Gensouki that just stop practically mid-sentence and not only don’t resolve existing issues but actually throw more in to the final few minutes are really just kind of annoying.

It’s like someone gave you a book but ripped out the second half so you get through what you have and it just stops.

Absolutely spoilers below.

We’ve arrived at the end of Seirei Gensouki

In fairness to Seirei Gensouki, they do at least close a loop with Rio returning to rescue Celia and succeeding (like that was in any doubt given Rio hasn’t actually faced anything that even vaguely presented a challenge since the first episode). It would have been nice if this rescue had in any way felt rewarding or like somehow Rio had gained something by doing it, or even if the characters had been able to spend a moment actually enjoying the success.

Instead, the final episode of Seirei Gensouki has all these coloured lights shooting into the sky, plays the closing credits, then we see a sequence where some Japanese kids are getting attacked in this fantasy world, loaded onto carts, Rio comes and does some violence and reaches out to cute girl who is probably childhood friend because he really needed yet another additional to his harem.

In case it sounds like I’m being snarky, I kind of am.

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You can forgive a lot in some anime provided it remains kind of fun to watch. While generic overpowered protagonists who are nice to all the girls feature far too often in isekai stories provided there’s enough else it can still hold your interest.

What I won’t forgive is utterly inept story-telling now it is clear that the anime of Seirei Gensouki has no clue how to create or capitalise on dramatic tension, has no desire to actually flesh out characters, and even the world building has been ploughed through so quickly that those in the audience who are experiencing this story for the first time (such as myself who has not read the source) kind of feel like we’ve gotten the cliff-notes version of what should actually be a fairly rich fantasy world filled with some interesting magical lore.

At every point prior, there was a chance that once Seirei Gensouki found its feet it could overcome these issues. But with the final episode of the season airing more or less doubling down on every issue the series has had (poor, wooden villains, overpowered MC with limited personality or clear motive, supporting cast who mostly stand around and do little, plot that seems to be character goes from here to here, and mystery of the whole being reborn thing utterly unaddressed), episode 12 more or less serves as an object lesson of everything wrong with the anime.

When I go to review the whole series, I will actually revisit the positives, because there was some fun to be had on this journey, but right now I just watched a final episode that left a foul taste in my mouth so I’m really not in the mood to play nice.

Charles remained pathetic at every step of this final episode and truly displayed his full range of incompetence. As did most the soldiers who were the worst kind of mindless mob that Rio more or less just jumped over. That was when they weren’t shooting the houses of their own citizenry.

We did get one vaguely decent fight when Alfred took on Rio in the street but rather than offering any resolution here Seirei Gensouki left it more or less a draw with Rio leaving the scene and Alfred searching but not finding him.

Even red-eyed villain who has been kind of drifting through this whole story kind of launched one attack but mostly just watched everything unfold.

With so many characters standing around passively or uselessly, there’s little to say other than Rio came to the wedding, kidnapped the bride, ran away and escaped the entire army (that’s got to hurt the kingdom’s credibility). And rather than dealing with any of this, we instantly move onto a totally different plot point and then the episode ends.

Sigh.

Oh well, I guess I could always read the books and find out how this story is actually supposed to go.

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James

After feeling that episode 10 of Seirei Gensouki was a little ho-hum I was genuinely caught by surprise at the end of this week’s episode. Admittedly, the end credits rolled over part of the wedding procession and there’s an after credit’s sequence that must be watched, but this episode still felt like it simply flew by and it was a very solid penultimate episode setting up what will probably be a decent season conclusion next week.

Seirei Gensouki reunites the cast from the early episodes in these final ones.

While it really does feel like Seirei Gensouki has really rushed through a lot of content leaving the world building and a lot of the supporting cast feeling a little paper-thin, I can’t deny that there’s a fairly exciting story here. Part of me wishes the execution had been a little more on point given this could have been a really brilliant, epic fantasy.

Instead, we get something that works well enough but never quite satisfies.

Speaking of not quite satisfying, Charles really continues to lack any kind of menace. He’s just such an open bully and idiot and it is kind of clear that without those backing him he wouldn’t have risen to any height. The only real question is who can stand being around him long enough to give him a hand-up, but at the same time he’s probably the perfect patsy because he kind of believes he deserves everything and that somehow his own merit has allowed him to achieve it.

Fortunately, this episode isn’t asking us to care about Charles so much as to understand Celia’s current predicament.

And that’s actually enough tension to drive the episode and make this one of the most interesting Seirei Gensouki has put on offer yet. Unlike Rio, Celia isn’t easily walking through her conflict. Instead, she’s trying very, very hard to keep a brave face on during a situation where she is forced to marry a someone she really doesn’t love in order to protect her family.

Worst, the guy already has multiple wives who have made it clear they intend to look down on her. And even if she does go through the marriage, there’s no guarantee her family will be any safer.

Celia’s reaction when she saw Rio during the procession was kind of perfect and was just the right emotional note after such a tense and highly strung episode.

Still, it is really hard to really get a sense of the politics at play here because we’ve been following Rio and the exposition dump at he start of the episode gained from Rio’s questioning of the guy at the academy isn’t enough to really fill in all the ins and outs.

About the only clear danger in Seirei Gensouki is that Celia is going to be utterly miserable if this marriage happens and honestly they made me care enough about her that the overall lack of understanding of the political ins and outs isn’t actually that much of a problem.

As I said in the beginning, this is a solid penultimate episode in that it does everything you really need from a next to last episode. It feels like we’re close to a climax and they’ve made me invested enough in the outcome that I’m now excited for the final episode.

While I’m not entirely sure what my overall opinion of Seirei Gensouki will be as it has had its moments but also lacked in some areas, I do know that I’ll be pretty excited to see what Rio does in the final episode and I really do want to find out what happens for Celia.

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James

What a difference a few years makes, or at least that’s what Rio is going to discover when he finally returns to see Claire this week in Seirei Gensouki.

Last week ended with him waking up beside a naked girl, which is quickly explained as harmless because she’s an amnesiac spirit who ends up just dressing herself using mana. Anyway, Rio quickly sees that she bares an uncanny resemblance to the childhood friend/crush he had back in Japan when he was Haruto and so naturally he gives spirit girl the same name, Aishia.

Not entirely sure it makes sense to cling on to that life, particularly when Rio has spent a lot of time making sure he’s living in this life and not in the past, but hey, childhood crush.

Meanwhile, Aishia is wowing everyone in Seirei Gensouki by being able to control pretty much every element and she fights Rio and matches his level of amazingness which given he has protagonist plot armour deeply wrapped around him is an impressive feat indeed.

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Does it feel like Seirei Gensouki is missing something?

The whole way through this season, Seirei Gensouki has been driving forward. Rio seldom stays in one place longer than two episodes (outside of the initial kingdom which he lasted three episodes in) and he meets different people and makes different friends in each location.

Problem is, at episode 10 with 2 episodes to go, I’m left wondering if enough has been done to really make me care about this trumped up conflict Claire is now in. Plus, Rio seems to pass in and out of Latifa’s life pretty easily and it would be good to see if he at least intended to eventually settle down in one of the locations he’s visited.

With all that said though, Aishia was pretty awesome to see in action and the fight between her and Rio was solidly entertaining and perhaps the most dynamic fight we’ve seen from Seirei Gensouki yet. That they spent a little too much of it on reactions from those watching isn’t really a problem given visually Seirei Gensouki hasn’t been a disaster but nor is it particularly impressive.

Return of the lame villains.

Still, one of my earliest complaints about Seirei Gensouki was how incredibly lacking in nuance the villains or antagonists were. They are bullies or blunt instruments and they don’t manage to ever feel even vaguely threatening or even plausible as a real character. So it is with the smug faced Charles this week and if this is the final confrontation for Rio I really don’t think I’m gonig to be that invested.

See, I was kind of hoping for Rio to confront the guy who killed his mother, a potential actual threat, rather than deal with some arbitrary issue that really doesn’t seem to be connected to much of anything we’ve seen so far.

But we can’t have everything and episode 10 of Seirei Gensouki delivers cute girls, magic battles, yet another scene change for Rio, and it does set up this new conflict even if I’m not so keen on watching it play out. There’s little more you can ask for this late in the season so lets hope Seirei Gensouki can end strong.

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James

Seirei Gensouki episode 9 more or less opens with Rio explaining his origins to his cousin and then telling her he intends to leave the village in a year. What follows is a fairly truncated view of his life in the village over the next few months with seasons changing and Sayo making her own preparations as she’s not quite ready to let go of Rio.

Ultimately, other than being a snap-shot of a nice life Rio could have settled into, nothing really comes from any of this other than Rio leaving on his own and leaving yet another girl pining in his wake.

Seirei Gensouki has Rio leaving a girl in every village.

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But if I was watching a fantasy slice of life rather than expecting an action or adventure story, episode 9 of Seirei Gensouki is actually pretty pleasant viewing and draws to a close this chapter of the story. Rio has reconnected with family and has found a place he is welcome to return to, should he ever wish to, and while scenes of seasons changing, festivals and rice planting may not be thrilling, they are certainly calming and make you reflect on the life Rio could have had ‘if only’.

Even Sayo gets a nice few moments in this episode as we see her spending months frantically training in the hopes that she might perhaps travel along with Rio. As her confession is calmly but certainly shot down, she accepts it and sees Rio off in the end without much in the way of strong emotions. I have to wonder if she’ll come back into Rio’s life at some point but for now Sayo is behind him and he’s returned to the village where he left Latifa (at least momentarily).

Part of me feels like Seirei Gensouki is taking the voyage and return narrative model very literally with Rio having travelled away from the kingdom he was raised, meeting people and learning skills along the way, and now he’s making the return journey as an older and more prepared character to face what might have been an insurmountable challenge earlier in the story.

My only real criticism of this would be that nothing Rio has encountered along the way has really felt that life-altering or dramatic, leaving us without a dramatic escape and more a leisurely hike back to his point of origin. Certainly events could have been portrayed that way as he killed a wyvern and then learned of his royal heritage, but instead these events have come across as very low-key steps. Even Rio connecting with family, while we have seen Rio seemingly come to some kind of conclusion, hasn’t exactly been an emotional affair.

Still, for those who missed the village where Rio left Latifa, Rio returns and is reunited with the gaggle of fairly generic but cute girls. They are thrilled to see him even if he explains he’s only there for a few months before moving on again.

This all of course leaves me wondering if the reincarnation of various people into this world is ultimately going to have any bearing on the story. Early episodes were promising with Rio, despite resolving to live this life in this world at least acknowledged that Haruto existed. But it has been a fair time since any real reference or link has been made to the reincarnation element in this isekai story.

Not to mention he’s met at least two other characters who were also reincarnated (possibly more) but nothing really seems to have come from this. Leaving me to wonder if the writer just got bored of the gimmick or whether it will return as a plot point prior to reaching the end.

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James

I know I more or less knew that we were going to find out Rio was of some noble blood line, and even Seirei Gensouki deciding to reveal he is royalty wasn’t too surprising. What did surprise me was how poorly this plot development was handled overall within this anime.

Sure the foreshadowing throughout the series and the excessive number of people willing to rub Rio’s nose in his commoner background made it an obvious reveal, but even then it could have been done with some fanfare or even just made some kind of critical character point. Instead we have an episode that gives the punch-line in it’s title (Royal Lineage) and then a character who reacts to the news like he’s just been told that you’ve run out of cereal and you’d like him to go buy some more.

Now, Seirei Gensouki has never been a particularly thrilling watch, but it has been pretty fun, relatively entertaining, and most of the character moments have been handled competently enough even if nuanced antagonists wasn’t this story’s strength. Even the plethora of girls who’ve swooned for Rio as he’s moved from the school to the forest village and now to his parents home village have all had enough character moments to distinguish them.

Episode 8 therefore was the first episode where I really felt this story was just going through the motions.

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Has Seirei Gensouki slipped or is this just a transition to the next part of the story?

It is difficult to know without seeing the next episode whether this was an anomaly or whether after a reasonably credible start this series has now lost momentum. It is quite possible that while this particular character moment wasn’t handled well, it was because they just wanted to get this moment over and done with so that they could transition Rio on to the next part of the story that Seirei Gensouki wants to tell. While that would still be disappointing it would mean that we could anticipate things picking up next week.

Anyway, the episode basically has Rio going to the town to deliver supplies or sell stuff or whatever they are doing and in the process he gets to eat ramen, or whatever they decide to call the bowls of definitely ramen. In honesty, this section was the most emotive with the food reactions being far more exuberant than anything we get later in this episode.

Likewise, we transition to Rio taking the girl from the village out shopping and we get the usual they are mistaken for a couple moment before he buys her a hair-stick and she gets all starry eyed at him. Rio is seriously going to have at least one girl pining for him in every town the way he’s going which kind of explains all the cute girls who appear in the opening of Seirei Gensouki.

He also casually stops an abduction which later turns out to be someone’s sister but this feels like it is absolutely unimportant because it kind of just happens and later on they run into each other and they just kind of mention it and then move on. Don’t actually even know why someone was getting kidnapped (seemed like an almost everyday occurrence the way no one made any kind of fuss about it).

However, then we transition to the Rio meeting his grandparents, finding out his mother was royalty before needing to flee to avoid a forced marriage for political reasons (parents helped her flee). Rio reacts with a slight widening of eyes but otherwise is almost completely expressionless. He then recounts his mother’s death, also with little emotion even as he expresses that he won’t forgive the man who killed her.

On that note, what did the guy force him to drink? Is that going to be important later?

Finally, the end of the episode has Rio visiting his parents ‘graves’ once again and declaring he won’t run away but will move forward. This scene actually kind of surprised me because I can’t really see any moments in Seirei Gensouki where Rio hasn’t faced forward. Admittedly, he hasn’t stayed in one place but his goal was to visit the place his mother lived and he has moved toward that fairly steadily. Why he can’t now just stay there is anyone’s guess.

So yeah, as much as I had been enjoying Seirei Gensouki, this episode was pretty bland all around and I’m not entirely convinced by Rio’s character at the end of it. Hopefully episode 9 returns to feeling just kind of fun and easy to watch.

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James

Seirei Gensouki has an ongoing problem in that so far not one of the episode antagonists has felt like a particularly compelling threat for protagonist Rio and they are written so terribly you just can’t take them seriously as a character. Whether it was the school bully teasing Rio for his magical ability, the knight who tortured Rio and then tried to beat him in a sword tournament or this week’s visitor to the village, they lack subtlety or even brain cells and honestly it isn’t particularly satisfying watching Rio beat them down.

While the wyvern fight from last week was over amazingly quick, at least a natural disaster threat set up by the somewhat more credible villain (who we know nothing about) felt like it was worth Rio’s time. The guy this week is more like an annoying fly at a picnic who just needs to be swatted before he ruins the cake.

Seirei Gensouki villains so far haven’t really measured up.

Weak antagonists are fine in your usual school drama because normal people do struggle overcoming these petty kind of annoyances, particularly when they become persistent. But when you have a fantasy series with a protagonist who seems perfect at everything from spirit magic to hunting to cooking to being polite to sword fighting and so on you kind of need some kind of threat that at least measures up. Seirei Gensouki has really yet to deliver on that front.

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If we assume there isn’t supposed to be an actual confrontation and we’re meant to just enjoy Rio hanging out with the girls in every town or village he comes to, then it kind of works, but why keep throwing in antagonists at all then? Why not just let Rio make bath-houses and train shirtless with his sword while the girls watch approvingly, even though they turn away while he puts his shirt on (yeah, no logic on that one).

But outside of this complaint, I continue to enjoy Seirei Gensouki.

This week, Rio finally arrives in the Yagumo region that he had promised to visit with his mother. He reunites with family though there’s some secret here (and I’m betting he’s going to find out he’s actually nobility of some sort because foreshadowing here is about as subtle as a brick to the face). Then the episode plays out much the same way as when he arrived in the forest village as the girls all kind of swoon and he engages in a range of activities and everyone kind of loves him.

The only real difference being that some of the boys in the village are obviously jealous of the fact that he’s literally good at everything.

Still, there’s a nice contrast in Rio’s personality in this episode of Seirei Gensouki as we start with him being the polite visitor and pious son visiting his parent’s grave.

However, after taking down the bully we see an infuriated and blood soaked Rio who needs to be talked down before he beats the guy to death. This blood splattered Rio is a little dangerous looking and its hard to tell if this is the real Rio when he lets his control slip or whether this was just a momentary lapse. More interesting is that it doesn’t seem like Rio really knows either.

All things considered though, it will be interesting to see what the next episode brings and whether any of that foreshadowing is leading to some actual reveal. Rio’s heritage has been kind of vague all along but with so many obvious put-downs about him being a peasant early on it seems like the obvious reveal is that there’s going to be some great family in his background. I guess we’ll see next week on Seirei Gensouki.

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James

In what could potentially have been Rio’s most exciting challenge yet as the wyvern horde from last week close in on their missing egg, conveniently being taken in the direction of the village Rio and Latifa are in, Seirei Gensouki actually lets some of its weaknesses show a bit more clearly this week. The animation quality has never been awesome here and here between the motion of the dragons, crowd scenes that were clearly stills, and the underwhelming fight all kind of took away from an episode that was otherwise a nice continuation of the journey Rio has been on.

That said, anime and dragons have a bit of a rocky history.

I love dragons. I love stories with dragons in them. And yet, time and time again we’ve had anime dragons that are just underused, comically used, actually just transform into stock-standard cute girls, or look hideous and move like they are made of a stack of bricks.

Worse yet, the monstrosity in Arifureta with the horrors of CGI gone very wrong.

So I guess on a sliding scale the dragons (sorry, wyverns) here in Seirei Gensouki aren’t the worst we’ve ever had on offer. But they also look ugly in flight and close ups of them look even worse. Rio’s fight sequence, while Rio came out looking pretty cool, does little to impress with the monster he is fighting and honestly it looked like he’d just knocked it out and then at the end he’s given a coat made out of it for armour and you realise the creature that was really just trying to retrieve its egg is now dead.

Not that I actually have an issue with Rio killing it. After the wyvern egg is destroyed the creature really is just on a rampage and lives are in danger. I just feel that somehow this should have been clearer in the moment.

Regardless of how lame the action was, Seirei Gensouki knows to make the protagonist look cool.

But, I did say Rio looked cool and I’m standing by that. We really see how far he’s come in the year he’s stayed in the village and clearly been trained to use his spirit power. The thrashing he gives the wyvern is very impressive and if it had been visually a little more spectacular this could have been a seriously memorable fight sequence instead of just another step in Rio’s path.

Either way, episode 6 of Seirei Gensouki delivered a few surprises this week.

Firstly, I’m kind of glad the red-eyed villain had more of a plan than just steal a wyvern egg and run away. While he’s clearly an awful person as he set up his lackey to die (and not even by the wyvern hands but by his own) that there was another purpose to his plot just kind of upped his credibility in terms of actually being a problem for Rio further down the track.

We also see Rio let Latifa know he’s going to move on. She doesn’t react well initially but we get a nice moment after the fight where the two talk it through.

Which is where both characters actually admit they were reincarnated and had previously lived in Japan. I didn’t actually expect Seirei Gensouki have the characters actually admit it even though Rio kind of already knew because of Latifa’s sleep talking.

The last thing I really noted this week was just how many outfits Rio has been in since the beginning of this series. While so many anime characters are one-costume wonders he’s gone from rags to the school uniform, his travellers outfit to now acquiring a look that more or less makes him look like Kirito from Sword Art Online but I guess that was to be expected given his look in the OP. Still, that’s a lot of different outfits in six episodes and it feels weird that I find that note-worthy but for anime it kind of is.

As much as I would have appreciated stronger visuals and animation this week, Seirei Gensouki continues to progress its story and it remains very pleasant viewing. I am curious about the next phase of Rio’s journey and I kind of hope he finds someone else to travel with soon.

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James

I haven’t quite figured out what it is yet about Seirei Gensouki but so far it is my preferred isekai of the Summer 2021 anime season. It’s up against the likes of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, My Next Life as a Villainess and How A Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom which together with Seirei Gensouki make up the four isekai anime I’m actually covering this season.

Part of me wonders if it is just that of all of those titles what Seirei Gensouki is delivering is a sense of exploration and wonder in a world that actually seems worth exploring. As fun as Villainess is, Catarina’s world is pretty small and the story is more about the characters and the comedy. Slime has become so bogged down in political talks any wonder has long since been sucked out of the narrative and I can only hope we get to explore more soon. And Realist Hero hasn’t quite figured out what sort of story it wants to be spending way too long being a reality cooking show.

Yet in Seirei Gensouki we’ve continually moved from the slums where we first met Rio to the academy before Rio was forced to flee and now we’re in a village of demi-human characters. The world seems vast and there’s a lot of potential exploration points and it really doesn’t feel like it has settled yet on which direction it will go but I’m curious enough about this world and Rio to want to be on that journey.

And maybe that’s what I’m after from an isekai story.

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Seirei Gensouki feels like it wants to take the viewer on a journey.

That isn’t to say that the series hasn’t had some of the usual isekai short-falls and that Rio is the most compelling character ever. Plus there’s this continuous influx of female characters who all seem relatively interchangeable at this point and for some reason they all love touching Rio.

Now, he’s a nice character and all but I’m just not sure he’s nice enough to warrant that much attention particularly from characters who have literally just met him. At least Latifa makes sense given he rescued her from slavery and has the connection of knowing a bit about Japan because clearly they have both been reincarnated (whether Rio wants to admit that or not).

The demi-humans reaction to Rio was understandable with the first ones who met him being pretty hostile because quite clearly humans are not the greatest of neighbours in this world. Their blatant prejudice against their own commoners doesn’t bode well for inter-species relationships. Though, they were also upset with him for calling them demi-humans but we never really got clarity on what we could call them so I’m kind of at a loss there.

The elders then fall over backwards apologising and of course the tree spirit, cute girl that she is, instantly fell for Rio which more or less cemented his position. Oh yeah, there was also something about him having a spirit inside of him that might be some super-special thing and I’m sure that will become important later, but mostly I think it was just an excuse for Rio to finally get some pampering given so far he’s more or less been treated like dirt by everyone around him.

Again, as much as I’m enjoying Seirei Gensouki, it doesn’t do subtle. As much as the class discrimination was on full display in the previous episodes, the blatant contrast between Rio’s treatment by humans versus the treatment he receives in this village comes across loudly and clearly and humans are not coming off so great so far.

And just in case we hadn’t quite figured out that the red-eyed guy was bad news the final sequence of this episode has him stealing a large egg from a cave and heading back toward the human kingdom. His helper naively asking if the parent won’t get angry and come after the egg… in perhaps one of the clumsiest attempts at foreshadowing I’ve seen in awhile.

So yes, while I am very much enjoying Spirit Chronicles for what it is, I’m not going to be making an argument that it is a perfect anime any time soon. A few too many rough edges. Still, for seasonal viewing I’ve watched plenty worse and right now I am really keen to see what is next for Rio.

Images from: Seirei Gensouki. Dir. O Yamasaki. TMS Entertainment. 2021

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Karandi James