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"Reincarnated as a Sword" is what I like to consider "Isekai light", which is where the line between where a story can be considered to be within the "Isekai" genre or the more general "High Fantasy" genre IE Lord of the Rings is blurred. The reincarnation element exists in these stories, however it is only very loosely explored and not given much degree of importance, often taking a backseat to the rest of the plot. This type of writing often gives the impression that the only reason the author decided to include the reincarnation element is to make one of the characters more relatable, but ... otherwise you can tell that they really just wanted to write a non-Isekai fantasy so they included only the barebones.

This specific anime is one where the low attention granted to the Isekai element actually works in its favor, allowing the show to focus more on the second main character as she tries to grow from a young and weak girl into a capable adventurer to restore honor to herself and her kin.

The show however is not at all perfect and without clichés. The main annoying cliche being that the Sword/"Shishou" is just a little bit too overpowered for his own good, and the catgirl/"Fran" is just a little too weak without him. So under the hood this anime is actually an extremely generic fairly straightforward Father-Daughter drama plot with the Sword playing the father figure and the catgirl playing the daughter. It's just wrapped up in a Fantasy RPG setting package to give a plot that would ordinarily be very basic just enough action and spice to make it less boring and seem less predictable than it is. It's just good enough to recommend, especially if you happen to be a Dad yourself and have a daughter to watch it with for some feelgood relatable moments, just don't expect some deconstructive groundbreaking masterpiece.

Once again, Madhouse deserves mad credit for showing all the ****ing scrubs how it's done.

Very few anime manage to pass the 9.0 average rating mark on MAL. The ones that do usually tend to be highly overrated shounens**t that is being voted as "10" by legions of kids who are not yet experienced enough to recognize the subtle differences in animation and storytelling elements that make something truly high quality or not. An excellent example being Gintama, which is a fun show to watch if you're a teenager, but as one grows you quickly realize that Gintama is more like a 7.5 anime. Decent, but ... not anywhere near the masterpiece that shounenbabbies think it is.

Sousou no Frieren on the other hand, is a blue moon event. A once in a decade genuine masterpiece. This show fully deserves the praise it gets and is a strong contender for best anime of 2015-2025, possibly all the way to 2030 depending on what else comes out.

Everything about this anime is good, including the hilarious drama caused by woke twitter being out of touch with reality and unable to accept the fact that equality and compromise aren't always realistic solutions, one of the key elements of Frieren's story. The animation is good. The art is gorgeous. The worldbuilding is good. The characters have depth and are likeable. The story is good and almost matches studio Ghibli in what it has to tell us about time, relationships, and just what it means to live, along with the soft elements it uses to paint it.

But most importantly, Frieren proves that there is still so much more that can be done with the fantasy genre as opposed to generic Isekai haremtrash #78948945.

QUICK REVIEW:

This is essentially extremely degenerate softcore lesbian bondage porn mixed with a "subversive" but otherwise generic mahou shoujo plot that is just good enough to be funny and watchable, but not good enough to be...well...good.

The main sell beyond the ecchi is that the main character is very emotive and likeable. However, a lot of the other Magical girls and characters in the show are kind of bland so far. The generic flying mascot character even knows it's supposed to be generic, and the evil organization really is just unironically evil for no explicable reason so far. It would not be entirely inaccurate to ... consider this a mahou-shoujo parody first, and an ecchi second.

All that really matters though is a really dirt simple question: Does watching magical girls getting hogtied by a monster and having their titties spanked and played with by an "evil" magical girl sound appealing to you? You might enjoy the show. If that idea repulses you, skip. It really is that simple.

6/10

< concise review >

Verisimilitude: The "lifelikeness" or believability of a work of fiction.

Well, in Seven Spellblades, this is not the case. Something just feels "off". Character interactions feel forced and cliche. The script is boring, idiotic, and campy. Character expressions fall flat. And thus the show fails the believability test. This is sad, because on paper this should have been a fantastic show. But the people who put it together just didn't know what the flying f**k they were doing.

The worst part of the writing is the transitions. Switching from grimdark to happy-go-lucky friendship slice of life time is entirely possible to ... do well, the caveat is that to do this there needs to be something in the plot that logically ties the two together giving each more suspense. Things that hint at something more going on with one side of the story when you are watching the other. Seven Spellblades fails to do this, or to be more accurate it doesn't even try, emphasizing its verisimilitude check failure even further. It almost feels like you are watching two different shows that just switch between each other at random with no connection whatsoever, like a drunken fever dream you can barely remember.

5/10. Wasted potential.

< Concise review >

Sekai Saikou no Ansatsusha is another controversial, although slightly less so, story from the maker of Redo of Healer. For many of the same reasons Redo of Healer has a much lower average score on MAL than it should have, so does this anime. Unfortunately, the anime fandom is filled with tons of easily triggered helicopter-parented adultchildren snowflakes who get irrationally buttblasted whenever a series doesn't cater to their childish sensibilities.

The truth is this show is one of the better Isekai of its year and does a lot of things right that similar fantasy series gets wrong

-The main characters previous ... life is well explored and explained in an entire episode instead of just getting Truck-kun'd
-Well fleshed out 3 dimensional characters with hidden motives
-Good world building
-The MC has to actually EARN his women instead of them just falling for him for random dumb bluepilled reasons
-Plot that isn't afraid to get dark, dirty, and brutally honest when it needs to be, just like classic anime used to be in the 80's/90's Golden era

There are rough edges. There are a few moments of cringe and boredom. This is not a masterpiece show by any means, but it is very watchable and deserves an average score more in the 7.80~8.10 range.

< Concise review >

Oftentimes, when the shows average score highly disagrees with the reviewers, it's the sign of a misunderstood anime. MAL ratings are notoriously unreliable.

However, when it comes to idol anime, this is generally not the case. If anything, you should be even more skeptical of a show when you see this pattern. The producers of idol themed anime know full well that the idol fanbase will gladly eat up poor writing, lazy direction, and cliche ridden garbage so as long as it includes some cute girls singing while wearing cute clothes. Unfortunately, that's exactly what Lapis Re:LiGHTs is. This anime is nothing ... more than yet another installment of boring uninspired near-plotless nonsense, with the only conflict of the show ( OMG We Gonna fail and get expelled ) being an excuse for said cute girls singing in said cute clothes. I couldn't even include spoilers in this review if I wanted to because there is legit nothing to spoil. The only saving grace is that the animation quality isn't horrible, but at the end of the day this anime is like an extremely bad musical fanfic of Harry Potter stripped of everything that makes the "Magic School" setting interesting.

4/10. And ONLY because the animation quality is acceptable, otherwise it would have been a 2. Unless you are a rabid idol fan who has finished consuming your previous idolproduct and are now seeking to get excited for your next idolproduct, avoid.

*short review*

Princess Connect stands as a straightforward example as to why you need an actual story and well written characters, as opposed to painfully one-dimension caricatures, in order for a work of fiction to be enjoyable by those of us who pay attention to the quality of a shows writing praxis.

This anime has a lot of qualities you would expect from a good show. Well done art, decent animation, OK jokes from time to time, a nice easygoing fantasy setting. But the story is horribly predictable, filled with cringe cliches we have seen done better hundreds of times. And yet even that could be ... forgiven if the character cast had any personality. They don't. Princess connect has some of the most stale characters I have seen in an anime for a long time. There really is no way to emphasize how horrifyingly cliche and boring they are. There is nothing about any of them that stands out. This absolute failure creates a massive problem: Princess connect is essentially just Konosuba, but replace the wacky cast of interesting and relatable characters from Konosuba with the most boring and generic cast imaginable. Instead of Kazuma's selfish, fun, and unpredictable personality, we get a super generic nice guy self insert MC Marty-Stu with absolutely no self agency to speak of. Instead of Aquas multiple faceted ego, we get a total doormat female sidekick that checks all the boxes of amateurishly written generic puppydog sidekick who only serves a role of blind support and absolutely nothing else.

In conclusion, Princess connect is an OK anime if you turn your brain off, but dreadfully boring otherwise. It makes for good "background anime"( IE: anime that you have on a second monitor while doing something else ) due to the nearly nonexistent easy-to-follow plot and decent visuals. But it doesn't really have any real value beyond this.

Verdict: Hard pass on this trash. There are better things to do with your time.

Mushoku Tensei is an example of two things.

First, just because a story has a "generic" setting doesn't automatically make it bad. As long as a show is written honestly with high attention to the fine details, such as making sure the characters are not just predictable caricatures, it can be good. This is the essence of Mushoku Tensei. High quality animation and production values is also a nice bonus, but it's not the main reason that makes this anime shine. It's the fact that if you have an eye for quality writing, you can tell that the author genuinely poured his soul into crafting an ... interesting and complex world. Part 2 continues and expands on this perfectly.

The second is that woke midwits will shower a show with hate over irrelevant technicalities if they think that doing so will make them look sophisticated and earn virtue signal points. The number one case against this show is that the main character is a reincarnated 35 year old NEET allowed to keep his memories in his second life, and his personality is less than politically correct. Oh no! Things that are not PC in 2021-22! Shock! Horror! Dismay! And so the midwit legions who got triggered by this can be found writing pages of psuedointellectual claptrap on how horrible a person he is while trying to convince you to ignore everything good about the show. But the truth is that if you ignore them instead, you will find that Mushoku Tensei is a strong contender for best anime of the season.

Mushoku Tensei is an example of two things.

First, just because a story has a "generic" setting doesn't automatically make it bad. As long as a show is written honestly with high attention to the fine details, such as making sure the characters are not just predictable caricatures, it can be good. This is the essence of Mushoku Tensei. High quality animation and production values is also a nice bonus, but it's not the main reason that makes this anime shine. It's the fact that if you have an eye for quality writing, you can tell that the author genuinely poured his soul into crafting an ... interesting and complex world.

The second is that woke midwits will shower a show with hate over irrelevant technicalities if they think that doing so will make them look sophisticated and earn virtue signal points. The number one case against this show is that the main character is a reincarnated 35 year old NEET allowed to keep his memories in his second life, and his personality is less than politically correct. Oh no! Things that are not PC in 2021-22! Shock! Horror! Dismay! And so the midwit legions who got triggered by this can be found writing pages of psuedointellectual claptrap on how horrible a person he is while trying to convince you to ignore everything good about the show. But the truth is that if you ignore them instead, you will find that Mushoku Tensei is a strong contender for best anime of the season.

A long time ago, in an anime community far far away...

There was once an ancient fandom of the 80's and 90's, who watched gore filled animation such as Akira, and anime containing sexual exploitation such as Perfect blue, and we enjoyed it for what it was. Because beyond the offensive content, beyond the often intriguing psychological horror, is a showcase of the somewhat morbid underbelly of how twisted the human mind can truly be. Hardly anyone ever complained. But time passed, the cult-of-woke gained traction, and now apparently anything remotely offensive gets the socjus crowds panties all in a bunch. Offensive content? In my Chinese ... cartoons!? Gasp! Shock! Dismay! Surprised Pikachu face!

Then along comes Redo of Healer, and laughs in everyone's faces.

It has been said in the past, that any artistic work of fiction that offends enough normies while still having a cult following behind it is almost always worth watching. This anime is not an exception to the rule, and is thus very much a case where reading the reviews will more accurately give you an idea if this show is for you or not than simply looking at the average score. Kaifuku Jutsushi is crude, unapologetically not politically correct, and completely insane. And you know what else it is? One of the most unique fantasy-setting ( It's technically not Isekai ) shows of this genre in a very long time. The characters, plot, and general mood of this anime are completely different than what most fans these days are used to. But does this mean it's "edgy"? Sort of, but the reality is redo of healer is in many ways just returning to roots. Watch some fantasy anime of the 80s and 90s, such as Legend of Lemnear or Vampire Hunter D, and you will find this isn't as terribly off the mark of what anime can be after all. Kaifuku Jutsushi is really only guilty of simply not giving a flying crap about modern progressive standards of morality. It's less about breaking the rules, and more about forgetting that these rules were made at some point in time in the first place. Rules schmules.

But enough about the controversy, the more important question is just how good this show is and what the heck is it about? Well, the most important thing to understand before getting into this anime is that it's what many like to call "Hentai Lite". There isn't exactly a clear definition of where "Ecchi" ends and "Hentai" begins, but many agree it starts somewhere at hardcore sex. Redo of Healer has plenty of hardcore sex, but it's directed and storyboarded in a way that you never see anything close to their genitals - only asses and titties - so it technically still qualifies as "Ecchi" BUT OH BOY does it push that boundary HARD. And the content also includes some pretty nasty sex, including rape and murder-sex and brainwashing to bring uncommon questions to the table such as "Is it still rape if the girl has been mindwiped and brainwashed to think she wants it ?" Yeah, probably. As mentioned earlier, this show really does not care about how many normies get offended by it.

If you still aren't turned away by everything I have stated, the next set is how Redo of Healer stands plot wise. This is where Redo of Healer has to lose a couple points. The plot, while good enough to grab your attention and unique enough to not be predictable, is still fairly simple. Without spoiling anything significant, our Hero is a Healer-class who is horribly abused and tortured by his party members. He manages to rewind time to before when he met them in order to both redo his life and enact revenge upon those who have wronged him. Along the way, he finds various friends who have also been abused and eventually comes to the conclusion that the problem is ultimately a kingdom ruled by corruption. Thus the quest to bring down said "evil empire" has begun...but not before another good sex session. It's a fantasy setting where the Hero is out for revenge, and the results of his revenge often lead to more revenge as blood begets blood. It's well written enough to keep interest, but not the best of the year or winning any awards by any means. Besides the extreme violence and unusual cast of characters, Redo of Healer still commits a few sins of cliche storytelling. Not enough to drop the score too far down the toilet, but just enough that it deserves mention. Plus the question of a possible second season to finish things is anyone's guess.

In conclusion, what really makes Redo of Healer stand out is the dark nature combined with the characters unique attitudes that takes what would otherwise be a fairly straightforward fantasy-Medieval story about taking down an evil Kingdom and turns it into something fresh. Very few anime manage to create a main character that is so unquestioningly devoid of any moral dignity, easily comparable to Rance, and yet still somehow remains somewhat likable. It's a show that pushes the concept of subjective morality to the extreme, while being entertaining in a "stroking your morbid curiosity" sort of way. For that, I give Kaifuku Jutsushi no Yarinaoshi a thumbs up, but with the caveat that this show is definitely not for the faint of heart.