I'm always bad at starting reviews, so I'll just jump into the thick of it. Rokka No Yuusha's pretense and world are pretty standard in the fantasy genre, and because of this can be explained and absorbed easily. The characters of this world are pretty interesting. Many suffer from under development or fitting an archetype, but some are given quite a great deal of depth. Then the story itself had a setup I particularly liked, but overall fell short in my opinion. These areas (Story and Characters) are where i'll be focusing on, since to me they are the most important aspects of any show.
The setup of Rakka no Yuusha is the age old tale of many JRPGs. A demon god wishes to take over the world, and only you and your party can complete the quest to defeat him and save the land. However, here is where things change. Rokka no Yuusha's predominant focus is not on this quest, but on a major complication that happens to the party. I won't count this as a spoiler since it's in the synopsis, but there are 7 Pokemon in our hero's party. Thus begins the mystery of discovering who the fake hero is. Everything so far sound great? Well here is why I wouldn't give the anime above a 6. The entire plot turns into ass pulls and poor setups, which in a mystery show are straight up insulting. From gigantic plot holes, to withholding crucial information from the viewer, this anime completely fails the mystery genre. Since the entire second half of the plot is dedicated to this mystery, the show suffers immensely. However, all of this hits the viewer in the final 2 episodes, and to be honest the trip to those episodes was very enjoyable.
Next are the characters. The development of characters varies majorly among the main cast, and this is something I particularly didn't like. First we have our MC Adlet, who is the self-proclaimed "Strongest Man in the World". He for the most part is a typical over-confident lead like Kirito, Tatsume, or Yusuke. However, he does go beyond the archetype in many ways, and by the end of the show i really did enjoy his character. The only other character to be fully developed is Fremy, who is a very interesting character to follow. Her personality is pretty unique, and she is a character who actually felt human to me. The rest of the characters, maybe with the exception of the assassin Hans, are not given enough screen time to be developed to any useful extent, thus fall into default archetype roles. Even still, the characters are one of the things which raised this show up. The interactions between them are fluid, and quite a bit of drama and story telling comes just from these interactions. Particularly the relationship between Adlet and Fremy, and Han's quest out of the generic shady guy archetype.
The animation for Rokka no Yuusha is a rollercoaster. It starts incredibly strong, and sets a really high precedent for the rest of the series, but then drops in quality quite a bit, and looks very lazy by the end.
The sound is nothing too special, the VA was pretty good and the ost was decent, so there really isn't much more to say about that.
To conclude, I really did enjoy this anime for a large part of its 12 episodes. The setting was cool, some of the characters were interesting, and I was genuinely curious about the mystery and how it would effect their quest. However the last few episodes just fell flat, and the ending was the author reaching out of your monitor and bitch-slapping you.
