Let’s talk about the characters first, like how most of my reviews go. The first character I would like to address is Bell Cranel, our main character. He is a rather naïve, childlike boy who became an adventure after he lost his Grandfather. He dreams of becoming a hero and to impress the ‘Sword Princess’ who saved him on one of his first few dungeon expeditions. Now, even after watching the show, I am not fully sure how their leveling system works but they do make a very big deal about how fast he seems to level up. This show feels a lot like a video game in that way when they talk about leveling. I have to say, he felt very much like a ‘Mary Sue’ style character as he really did not have very many flaws or weaknesses that I could tell. Every time he met a girl they would fall for him, every time he did an action it would normally come out for him in the end, so on. But there was this charm about him that kept me watching. He actually did grow as a character which I think breaks him of the types of Mary Sue’s that people don’t like. Maybe even broke him of that character class all together later on in the series even if he started out as one.
The next person I would like to bring up is the goddess Hestia. Hestia is the Virgin Goddess of the hearth, the family, and the state within Greek mythology… oh wait… That’s her real life counterpart. In this show, the Gods and Goddesses came down to earth in order to live among the humans and have groups of people who worship them. In turn, the people that worship them become adventures who can fight monsters. These worship groups are called Familia. I am explaining this now because Bell is the only person in Hestia’s Familia… and she is overly thirsty for him. She becomes jealous if Bell even looks at other women, seems to obsess about him, and tends to whine when she isn’t able to get him alone or when he shies away from her advances. She may be a very popular character, but to me, I think Bell is a bit stronger of a character then her. I do agree that without her, we wouldn’t get half of the heartfelt moments as we do and she really does show how much she cares about him… but I don’t think I like her much as a stand alone character.
As a lover of mythology, I truly loved how they added the different gods and goddesses within the world. They have gods of all different religions: Greek, Japanese, Norse, Mesopotamian, and so on. And each of these gods and goddesses has their own Familia’s based on what the god’s specialty was. For example, Hephaestus’ group are the largest arms and armor producers in the city while Soma’s group is a large producer of a very expensive wine which seems close to a ritualistic drink in India and Hinduism (Soma is another name for the moon god Chandra if people are checking on this). Now while most of the Gods and Goddesses have similar things to their original mythos counterparts, there are a couple things I frowned on. Namely changing some of their genders like making Hephaestus and Loki woman for example. Still not fully sure why they had to make them female but ok?
The animation is very beautiful and the fighting scenes have a lot of energy to them. There are a couple times when Bell is moving that his body seems to be deforming or losing its form but I think they were just trying to show how much faster he was going during the fight. If you are looking for something that doesn’t have the same look as every other anime that has come out in this time frame though, I don’t think this will help. We still have the normal curvy girls bodies and large eyes for the innocent characters. While the fighting scenes are good, they are similar to many other anime that have fighting scenes that again have come out around the 2015s and later. It’s basically typical J.C. Staff Studio normal at this point (which does not mean it’s a bad thing though).
I watched the English voice acting for this one, and I think it was fairly good. From what I could tell, some of the voice actors were little known names or newer voices in the industry. Bryson Baugus who did the voice of Bell has only been voice acting in anime since 2016 and it was 2017 when this anime got dubbed. It seems like it was only his 11th anime according to wikipedia (I know, sometimes you can’t trust it). There are names you know and love, and are pretty easy to pick out, like Luci Christian or Shelley Calene-Black but they could of easily of used even more large names then they did and I am happy they let some new people shine.
Dispite the name that it has, I had a rather fun time watching it. At first I thought it would be a very perverted type of show with the main character actually trying to pick up girls but it turned out that the show had much more heart to it. We still had a lot of perverted things happen but that’s what you get in comedy anime so eh. You got to pick and choose your battles on that one. I think its one worth trying out.
