Tensai Ouji no Akaji Kokka Saisei Jutsu has a serious problem. Largely that Wein isn’t likeable enough for me to enjoy his antics and the story doesn’t have enough meat to really make me invested in seeing how it all plays out. The end result is as Wein is forced into another awkward political situation after visiting another nation I honestly found myself tuning out and not caring who the latest rivals were or even how Wein would ultimately deal with the situation.
Then again, this episode of Tensai Ouji set the audience up to not want to invest in the people Wein was meeting when it opens with an explanation as to why Ninym had changed her hair colour from white to black. And given Ninym is about the only character that this anime has given us any reason to care about, a nation that wouldn’t welcome her as she is wasn’t exactly going to ingratiate itself.
Tensai Ouji really doesn’t want to give Wein any down time.
With the political situation from the previous episodes more or less wrapped up, we are forced to try to recall the events of the first war we watched, the one where Wein somehow ended up owning a gold mine, and we see the last dregs of the military there trying to hold on. The difficulty here is that the enemy Wein faced was also racist toward Ninym as well as brutish and idiotic.
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Somehow they hope to counter that view by representing the enemy forces with a cute and somewhat reasonable girl who ends up accompanying Wein and his entourage into Cavarin. Oh the power of kawaii girls in uniform. Of course that leaves Tensai Ouji no Akaji Kokka Saisei Jutsu with the problem of having only shown this kingdom in a negative light during the entire first encounter but now needing to reposition the audience’s view because they are no longer the ‘bad guys’.
Which would actually be possible except that Tensai Ouji no Akaji Kokka Saisei Jutsu does not have the strength of characters or writing to actually pull it off. So instead we’re just kind of told they are making a temporary alliance, Wein does a really over the top speech about trust and communication, and then we’re all happy and riding into enemy territory together.
Once they arrive in Cavarin my focus got a little fuzzy. The group split up and Wein encounter the usual lack of subtlety I’ve come to expect from Tensai Ouji no Akaji Kokka Saisei Jutsu as one of the generals delivers such a thinly veiled insult in passing that he may as well have just walked up to Wein and called him a hick. Wein was then nominated to join some religious council and even though we knew practically nothing about that religious group it was quite clear that wasn’t a good thing.
The smart money would be on Wein and company getting out of there and just going home but instead he comes up with a plan and perseveres but it is kind of like out of the pan and into the fire.
All of which could have been a compelling plot line except that Tensai Ouji no Akaji Kokka Saisei Jutsu doesn’t really make me want to care about this. Or anything else. Even Wein’s original motivation of make money and sell his kingdom seems forgotten as we just seem to move through a series of lame political intrigues that inevitably Wein will succeed at getting the upper hand in because otherwise the story would come to an end and he wouldn’t be the genius prince.
Images from: Tensai Ouji no Akaji Kokka Saisei Jutsu. Dir. M Tamagawa. Yokohama Animation Lab. 2022
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Karandi James