Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry's main claim to fame is its romance. If you ask any fan of the show why you should watch it, they'll tell you "Its not a harem anime, its an actual romance!" and that will be it. I'm going to be brutally honest here, the romance of RKnC sucks, but those people do have a point. The chemistry between the leads (Ikki and Stella) is noteworthy, and there are some really realistic and sweet scenes between the two ("Why are we arguing?" "I don't know!"), but one of the key aspects of a good romance is actually having good characters. The characters in Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry are garbage. As a result of the characters being awful, the romance really doesn't hold any weight and can't technically be called good. That being said, the dialogue between Stella and Ikki is very enjoyable and is definitely the best thing this anime has going for it.
When I said that the characters were awful, I wasn't joking. Seriously, the leads consist of Ikki (Cliche harem protagonist who's saving grace is the fact that he isn't in a harem. He's also really overpowered despite being built up as weakling who sucks at magic.) and Stella (Starts out as nothing more than a tsunedere bitch, but loses those tsunedere qualities by the halfway point of the show. After aformentioned halfway point, she essentially has no standout character qualities to speak of. Tsunedere bitch > no standout qualities.). What's really sad is that the cast of side characters are all just as generic and, in some cases, outright disgusting. Shizuku, Ikki's little sister, is a white haired loli who wants to fuck her big bro. Classy. What's worse is that the anime tries to explain this disgusting behaviour through this big, tragic backstory of how she always looked up to her brother and just wanted to help him with his problems. The only thing worse than pedophilia is self-hating pedophilia that tries to justify its own perversion. Embrace the fuckery, damnit! Oh, and theres also a tranny named Alice who's somewhat of a sassy gay(?) mentor figure to Shizuku and others. Out of all the side characters in the series, the only one that I really liked was the final villain, Todo. She was this badass chick who was also really likeable and charismatic. On top of that, there writer(s) goes out the way to place parallels between Toda and Ikki. I honestly felt like she would have made a better protagonist than Ikki.
The plot is awful as well. Threats are hyped up (student council is an example of this) and then totally disregarded. There's also this big subplot at the end of the series involving a hearing that doesn't make any sense whatsoever (Why the hell did Ikki go to the hearing and let himself be tortured? He literally did nothing wrong and had no reason, psychological or legal, to go. Kissing a rich, talented girl is not illegal last time I checked. So contrived.).
So why do I like this series? Like I said, the romantic dialogue was good and realistic and Todo was beastly. Also, while the romantic plot is bad and the characters suck, the romance progresses at a pace that is pleasing, fulfilling, and unique. Also, the soundtrack (particularly dat opening) was fairly good.
All in all, Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry is a shitty series with some really fun aspects. I wouldn't reccomend it to anybody other than an experience fan of LN adaptations.
This is Horatio_Nelson, signing out.
