Beyond that though, there is very little to recommend here. Virtually every character besides Fran and her sword is either annoying or unmemorable. The overarching story (Fran joins the adventurer's guild and attempts to rank up) is as lifeless as it gets, but not even in a relaxed "slice of life" way. There are plot things happening, it's just that it's all very uninspired and nothing really matters because the series has no interest in selling the importance of Fran's goal and journey to the viewer. The writing is ham handed even in its best moments and reaches unfathomable lows when the knight lieutenant August Allsand is introduced, banishing the concept of subtlety to another dimension entirely. It's not enough that he just be villainous, he also needs to be morbidly obese and pick his nose and fart constantly to make absolutely certain that you know this is a bad guy that you should hate. This sort of fundamental childishness and inability to depict conflict as anything more than the starkest possible contrast between the angelic Fran and villains with no traits or goals other than being maximally evil and/or disgusting is a line that runs through the writing of the entire series.
However, even the writing is no match for the greatest sin of this series, what should now be familiar to most isekai viewers as the Stat Screen Slog. This is a frequent problem in modern JRPG-based isekai, but TenKen takes it to an entirely new level. It does get less obnoxious over time, but your eyes will bleed in episode 1, where Shishou (the name the sword is given by Fran) spends literally over half the episode's run time grinding against nameless fantasy monsters and flipping through his inventory and stat screens while vomiting exposition about his various capital-S Skills. It's like watching a bad twitch stream for a game you can't even play. The generic video game setting has other drawbacks as well. Much of the lore of the series has simply been outsourced to whatever you know about fantasy video games. There's no attempt whatsoever at worldbuilding here, and the series simply presumes a familiarity with game mechanics and a generic fantasy setting rather than trying to create any of this itself. This becomes a serious problem for the central motivation of the series, that Fran is a member of an oppressed race called the Black Cats and wants to become the first of her kind to Evolve. What is Evolving? Why does it matter? What effect will it have on Fran? None of that is ever explained and it makes her entire journey feel hollow and aimless. The laziness of the worldbuilding, if it can even be called that, becomes a weight dragging down the entire series.
You can absolutely watch this series just to watch Fran be cute and you'll probably have a decent time with it if you ignore everything else. But looking at it as a complete work, it can't be viewed as anything other than a failure given the low quality of the writing and the uninspired setting.
