Our story centers itself in Adlet Mayer, a loud and arrogant redhead who constantly proclaims to be the strongest man in the world. His strength comes from his wits rather than brawn. He and the other braves assemble inside a mountain cave only to find a seventh brave. Conflict quickly breaks out and each one of them becomes a potential traitor .
It was fun seeing the mystery on the 7th brave unravel but it quite honestly dragged out for too long. RNY only has 12 episodes so the entirety of the show is spent searching for the traitor rather than killing the demon god. The anime feels like a prologue to a story that never was. I don't know how faithfully this anime adapts the novel but having the narrative get sidetracked so early on is a bad way to write a series .
Two characters I particularly disliked were Fremy and Mora, the former moreso because she's a karma Houdini. Mora is supposed to be the wise one of the group but had a adamant belief Adlet is the traitor based in her own leap in logic. Her reasoning made little sense and there's no reason for her to accuse solely him when there's an assassin and serial killer on the team. She goes as far as too manipulate the others to attack Adlet and refuses to back down even when her poor logic and gets exposed.
Fremy is my most hated type of character. She does horrific actions and faces no consequences for them. She's responsible for killing multiple innocent braves in her past but adlet protects her because " she's one of us". That piss poor reasoning really dampened the respect I had for Adlet but he's still the best character here. Fremy feels no remorse for what she did and said plot point quickly gets brushed aside. It's ludicrous how the cast could be so comfortable hanging around a serial killer. The narrative seems to think her tragic backstory of having an abusive mother can excuse her actions but that kind of logic is beyond childish. Tired of watching shows that don't know how heavy murder is .
The others are mostly meh. There's an assassin and little girl who's in the teams but they don't really stand out and their character designs are so bland. Nashetania wins my love with her perfect bunny girl character design and her loyal knight Goldof brings in fan service with his gender-bent black rock shooter attire. The two make a nice pair of eye candy and their interactions were always fun. Nashetania is the up beat princess who's a bit ignorant on how the world works and Goldof is Mr muscle who love his princess and his answer to everything is usually violence.
Rokka No Yuusha had the unfortunate fate of being animated by a low budget small name studio, leading to some hideous CGI monsters amidst some shoddy animation. I've seen psp games with better graphics and the terrible CG really messed up Nashetania since her sword attacks are always horribly rendered. Would animating actual swords cost too much money and effort as opposed to weird silver spikes?
Another glaring flaw is how utterly underutilized it's Meso-american setting is. Fantasy series are European based 99.99 percent of the time and Japanese or Chinese based if its anime, completely ignoring the other cultures of the world. The meso-american setting is really only apparent in the first episode and the cast are ridiculously pale skinned European looking. We could've finally gotten a Mayan based fantasy but any meso lore to be found here is simply superficial icing on the not so well done cake. This flaw doesn't influence my rating but it certainty shows japan has it's head stuck up it's homogeneous ass.
After several episodes of our heroes fighting over whodunit, Adlet reveals in the impostor is none other than Nashetania ! Certainly didn't see that one coming and I don't mean that in a " Wow you got me!" type of way. There were no hints or clues to this reveal beside from Nashetania briefly acting psycho in one episode. We find out her motive is to create harmony between the human and demons by reviving the demon god, even if it means sacrificing thousands of people. A villain who's so innocent and pure hearted they can't see their own vileness is a interesting concept but we barely get know about her before the show ends. The anime has the audacity to end things off by having a cow costumed girl show up at the last minute to join the heroes on their journey to kill the demon god. The cast barely even react to it and accept it as they head off. All that struggle and conflict over who was the seventh brave turned out to be for nothing. Overall,I'm gonna have to
give this a 6.5/10. There were definitely some good concepts and characters to keep interest but not enough to genuinely make me excited. I recommend it if you're in the mood for a mystery with a unique setting but don't expect much from this.
