The problems with the show start in the second episode, in which Satou starts as a powerless Level 1 player threatened by an army of Lizard Men, only to be saved by a nonsense Deus Ex Machina meteor shower that somewhow jumps his level and wealth up immensely and make him overpowered to the point of nothing that happens in the show really mattering. Every time he encounters a problem, all he does is increase his skill levels and suddenly he can do anything and beat any problem, i.e. there is no tension at any point in the series since he doesn’t need to strategise or plan anything and is never in real danger. Satou also has a consistent love interest throughout the show named Zena (his pseudo-harem being made up of slaves he bought to rescue from abusive masters), who despite being the only interesting character in the show (since all of the slave girls have the same hyper-devoted personality and Satou has no personality) is constantly shafted for screen time so that the other slave girls can be sexualised to disturbing levels (which are even more disturbing when you realise that Satou is 29 and some of these girls are as young as 11).
Fortunately, Satou himself never once actually engages in paedophilic behaviour, but unfortunately despite the fact that the show goe out of its way to show the blossoming romance between him and Zena, it’s impossible to ship that romance since despite specifically talking about places he wants to take her he visits and is serviced by two brothels during the course of the series (and don’t you dare say that he didn’t actually sleep with those prostitutes, since we see that his skill box has several “sexual skills” added to it after one of his visits. So, Satou is unfaithful to his not-quite-girlfriend, overpowered, and has no personality… oh, and he looks suspiciously like Kitiro from Sword Art Online because the character designers were lazy.
To make matters worse, what few action scenes the show has are extremely underwhelming visually, as is the rest of the animation. The battles with the Undead King’s minions during the arc where the elf princess was kidnapped could have been visually stunning, but instead the animation looked cheap and lacked anything in terms of visual effects or dynamic camera movements. This is a real shame because the studio that made this, Silver Link, actually have made some superbly animated action sequences in Fate/Kaleid, and the studio that assisted in the animation, Studio Connect, are known for having almost exclusively made action-based anime… so, everything in this series seems to come down to laziness, both in the writing and in the animation.
Furthermore, during the Undead King arc, Satou cheats his way through the challenges with the help of a teleporting-powered plant loli, so any and all excitement you might feel about him having to find a way through to the top of the monster and challenge infested tower is dashed immediately by a lazy get-out-of-trouble-free-card deus ex machina.
To make matters worse, the Demon Lord who is set up from the start never even features, and the entire series builds towards an unbearable anti-climax that I won’t spoil for anyone insane enough to want to watch the show (but involves saving a forest from a noble that wants to shop it down), we never find out anything about why the events of the series are taking place, and there are so many cringy moments of underage fanservice that it made me almost want to gouge my eyes out.
In the end, what starts as a cliché but promising fantasy series gradually waters down into a boring tensionless “cute girls doing cute things” series with no character development or plot of any kind. It. Is. Terrible. 0/10, not recommended.
