-Visuals. They are mostly fine, but there are enough cheap looking scenes, and tre CGI is still ugly, clunky and looks horrible.
-Sound. Nothing impressive, nothing memorable.
-Plot. Horribly rushed. As I have already mentioned, the whole season follows the rule “take the source, cut details, stitch together whatever is left”. The result - most of the events feel rushed, some of them completely lose sense and weight. Most of the fights feel like the MC doesn’t even care about the fight as he just wins without trying. And considering that some of the fights in this season SHOULD be tense as the enemies were pretty hard - the overall feel goes into the usual “generic immortal OP MC”.
-Characters. To make the “generic” feel even more obvious we are given a whole village of side characters. While it could work in a longer anime where those characters have some development and actual screen time, right here it feels more like a fan group or a missed opportunity. The characters from this fan group are lucky if they are even mentioned, as most of them are somewhere in the background. While this was the case for the source material too, in written form it was more of a background workload for our MC. But much worse is the state of the main heroes, as they, on one hand, are finally given SOME development, but on the other hand the quality of said development is abysmal. One is reduced to a joke character, two others have basically the same edgy-dark story but under different sauce.
To be honest I wish I had more to say, but the problem is that without the details that were mercilessly butchered, the shield hero is just a bland, generic isekai show. All of the positive traits were lost in adaptation, what you get is something that you have already seen thousands of times. Just don’t waste your time, read the LN if you are still interested in the title instead.
