Is this because I am a cold-hearted person ? I would like to think otherwise. Do you cry when you read about murder on the news ? I have asked this question to several people I know and the unanimous answer was "no".
Why is it that we cry when we lose a loved one but not when we hear of the death of a random stranger ? This is because we have no memories with this person, no relation, no personal connection whatsoever. Thus we cannot bring ourselves to feel sad when we hear of the death of random strangers.
Hai to Gensou no Grimgar is essentially the same. It is a drama story about death set in an MMORPG-like world with amnesic people as the main characters. And while on paper this mixture of elements may have sounded fantastic, it is actually a mess that is highly heterogeneous. I will proceed to explain why.
This story starts off with a rather unusual setting: a group of people who have amnesia have all been transported from what we can guess from their clothes to be "our world" to an MMORPG fantasy world. Up until that point, everything sounds good.
These people are then told to enrol to the Reserve Army, which is essentially a fancy name for Adventurers, who explore dungeons and monster-filled locations and make a living out of selling the loot they find there. And here again, instead of creating yet another story like "Log Horizon", "Sword Art Online" or "Is It Wrong To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon?", the story focuses on the weakest people banding together as a "party". And these people will not go through any kind of Deus Ex Machina power up. They are weak and will only progress very, VERY slowly. This is acknowledged from the beginning. There again, this was an interesting concept but this is not what the actual core of the anime is about.
It is impossible to read the rest of this review without going through a SPOILER ALERT although what I am about to spoil is very heavily foreshadowed from as soon as episode 1. Anyway, you have been warned.
What this show actually revolves around is the death of one of the party members. It can barely even be called a plot twist since the show was almost screaming at us from episode 1 that a character would die, and the title of the anime is already a huge hint.
But while this was aimed to be the major selling point of the anime, this is unfortunately where everything starts going wrong.
You see, you can make an incredible story revolving around the loss of a loved one. An example of this is "AnoHana". But making this the core of the anime means that you have to dedicate enough time to each character for us to care about their emotions as they try to cope with the death of their friend. This is where the show contradicts with its original setting.
Hai to Gensou no Grimgar tries to make its audience care about the death of a character we literally knew nothing about. The characters did, but we did not. Why ? Because their backstory was brushed off as "amnesia". Although a bit problematic, this would not have been an issue if the character who died had enough screen time to make us care about him. But this is not the case here. This brings us to another huge problem of this anime: its pacing.
The pacing of this anime is... terribly slow. Slow to the point where you can actually say that a maximum of 1 or 2 things happen per episode. By that I mean the characters going to one location, then going back and it's already the end of the episode.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't mind slow paced anime. If done right, this can lead to some amazing world creation along with great character development. This is actually something that is needed when you introduce us to a world with a different setting, such as this MMORPG-like world here. However, it is important to remember that this anime is only 12 episodes. Take any other anime that has the same pacing such as "Log Horizon" or "Utawarerumono" and you will see they are 25 episodes long. To sum it up, the pacing does not fit the amount of episodes at all.
Coupled with the slow pace of this anime is the fact that past the death of this one person, the anime becomes incredibly repetitive. If I had to sum up episode 6, 7 and 8 in only a few words, I would probably say the exact same thing: "they wake up, talk a bit, go hunt for goblins, loot them, talk more and go back in town".
All in all, this story had some potential to be really interesting but it just tries to do too much at the same time and ends up accomplishing nothing.
Onto the characters now... is what I'd normally say. But there's almost nothing to say about the characters because the fact that they all have amnesia strips them from the beginning from having any kind of important backstory. The only thing I can use to judge them is the glimpse of personality I can see forming over the duration of the long, long 25 minutes I spend watching these characters do nothing... every single episode.
But even then, I don't want to go into details about their personality because it brings nothing to the show. If anything, I'd like to mention that this show might have been a little less annoying without Ranta. For one, I can't stand his voice actor but his overall attitude just makes me wonder how anyone else in the party can tolerate him being around.
In the end, the one question that sticks with me for the entire duration of the show is: "Why should I care ?". Why should I care for that person who died ? Why should I care if the characters are sad ? Why should I care about what they're doing ?" Only after asking this question over and over again do I realise the harsh truth: I don't care about any of these characters.
Now if we are talking about the artwork, I can praise the effort A-1 Pictures made to try to go down an original road and use watercolour backgrounds... And although they do look gorgeous as standalone backgrounds, it is stunning how badly it merges with the characters who are obviously drawn using a very different art-style. This unfortunately also makes the already mediocre animation suffer.
The artwork of the character... well I can't say I like it. If anything it looks like the typical kind of artwork used in a majority of A-1 Pictures' shows although I still would rate this one amongst their worst ones.
In fact, I have a hard time accepting the fact that they almost forgot to draw eyebrows on one of the main female characters (Shihoru) and left it that way for the rest of the show. And yes, I checked the original artwork from the light novel and she is supposed to have normal eyebrows, so I don't know what happened there.
The music is probably the only thing that saves this show from being a 1 or 2 out of 10 for me. It was really beautiful and fitted very well with the sad scenes. I find myself wondering though if it was a good idea to use upbeat music during the fight scenes after the death of that one character instead of carrying on using calm and tragic music for the rest of the show. Maybe that would have made me a bit more sad (in a good way). I found the OP very good too and equally fitting.
I probably don't have to describe my personal enjoyment at this point as I have made it clear from what I already wrote that I was bored during the entire show, during each episode. I don't remember feeling so emotionally detached from the entire cast in a long time. And this is clearly a bad thing when the whole point of the show is to try to have me care about these very characters.
Overall, this is one of the very few anime I would recommend you to outright skip, unless you're ready to invest time into characters that are as uninteresting as a brick.
