Just like with the whole Isekai Otome Game fantasy shtick, the idea of getting booted out from the Hero's Party and making a new life out of it feels just as fresh as when the sub-genre started, such as the case with last Fall's Shin no Nakama, which was one of the best adapted LNs of last year, and a show that I really enjoyed the heck out of it. But where there're a handful of good ones, lay some bad eggs, and in the proceeding Fall that is this season, we get novelist Suzu Miyama's Yuusha Party wo Tsuihou sareta Beast Tamer, Saikyoushu no Nekomimi Shoujo to Deau, or as it's simply known: Beast Tamer, because why the hell would long-winded names be translated into a clusterfish of sorts. This is almost single-handedly the biggest improvement of the source material overall.
As previously mentioned, not everything is a life worth a bed of roses for some characters, and in this show, it's the beast tamer Rein Shroud that gets booted from his "so evil it's cliche" Hero Party because his skillset is not strong enough to support the party, full of a wad of selfish and/or loyal followers that only do what they're summoned here for: to defeat the Demon Lord, that's who. Everything else works out the exact same way that Shin no Nakama did, only except that Rein finds new life in acquiring girls like they're gacha material. And these girls are no slouch either: they're ultimate species, the best and strongest of their kind, and are often a rare sight in the fantasy world to begin with. It just so happens that Rein coincidentally managed to find one such race, in the form of Kanade of the cat race, and after saving her from the oh-so-typical "maiden in distress" cliche, Rein finds out that Kanade is an ultimate species, wandering alone in the woods, and as the approach goes, Rein can only try his beast taming skills on her, only to succeed, and the companionship starts with more girls found along the way for a new-found better way of life.
There's just something about stories like these that provide a good hook, but you can only meander around this route so much that it becomes stereotypical genericness over time. And as to be expected, Beast Tamer follows the formula to a T, that it's hard to expect anything new from the growing story and plot, except more evil in the form of the Hero Arios adjusting his targets from the Demon Lord to Rein for his confounding wad of jealousy to even think that Rein could be stronger than him after leaving the Hero's Party as Rein sub-consciously develops a harem around him with more ultimate species in the form of girls, because that's just how LN authors needn't think so much that it hinders creativity while their sales reap the progress. And that to me, spells a disaster that the anime industry just would not get over with on differences between Japan and the rest of the world.
Back to Rein, it's the adage of "good guy gets girls because you can sub-consciously create a harem", and in his case, he has a new party in the form of 5 girls: Kanade the Cat, Tania the Dragonoid, sisters Sora and Runa the fairies, and last but not least, Nina the Fox demigod. Each one of them has powers that are unique to each of the species they come from, and Rein's beast taming skills hide one interesting tactic that would prove him useful in battles: the ability to use close-to-replica powers from the girls that he makes a contract with, thereby powering him up from his usual ability of being able to tame multiple monsters at once, as opposed to the stereotypical single monster that an ordinary beast tamer can only deal with. It shouldn't be a surprise that like cats, Rein is a natural good and kind-hearted guy, and the girls all fawn over him, so much enough to realize that as time passes by, his saving grace in the form of other girls is to be expected, and not calling it a harem is a way that he would've objected seeing them as such, apart from growing to be more OP with each and every beast taming contract. It's just absurd when LN authors try to think of a way to possibly stand out from doing something different in regard to the genericness, only to shove it in your face that it's the same goddamn formula, just layered at the expectation that this would feel different, when it's not, and literally isn't improved upon to leave it as such.
Given studio EMT Squared's in-house director Atsushi Nigorikawa's standards overall, most of his directed shows have been a miss: Ren'ai Boukun a.k.a Love Tyrant, Boku no Tonari ni Ankoku Hakaishin ga Imasu. a.k.a A Destructive God Sits Next to Me (this is an unexpected surprise hit), and now Beast Tamer, which references to the tick-tock formula of having a bad, good, then bad for shows under his belt. Though in this case, he did a decent job on adapting the LN source material, which I almost got a stroke as to why the manga version of the LN went at a breakneck speed. Regardless, a show is only as good as the indentments done to add from the source material, and this by all accounts, was a decent showing. Everything is (and was), to be expected when low-budget studios can only muster the best they have to give the shows they are chosen to adapt at acceptable levels, and this was certainly the case for Beast Tamer here.
The OST...really was a hit-and-miss affair. For the boyband group MADKID, the Tate no Yuusha a.k.a Shield Hero series have always been their best caliber, and it hurts me to say that I'm not really a fan of their OP song here. It sounds so out of place for a show like this, and it's so mind-numbingly boring that it's an easy skip. Marika Kouno's ED fares somewhat better, though it's only good for a few listens and nothing more than this. What a shame that was so generic, but I guess that's only so much you can do about lots of generic stuff that are plentiful all around.
It's anemic to say that the entire show may have been doomed from the start, because all of this premise and characters feels like a cakewalk into what is your typical average cliché of a story plot, and from then on, it has absolutely no chance of recovery at any form of creativity nor interest to keep its audience hooked, me included. I'd guess that this exists in some form of bad dream, and Beast Tamer for one, is one lucid dream of a harem's worth of anthropomorphic girls that can be likable, but that's all that it has going for. What a fall from grace.
