…but it’s mostly downhill from there. There are some really good fights later into the series run as various otherworldly characters come into conflict with other powerful beings (many of whom would be participants in a future tournament that would necessarily pit them against one another anyway), where they really get to strut their stuff against calamities, sometimes in epic fashion.
However, that’s not the focus of most of this season. Instead, we focus in on a conflict between the Aureatia Kingdom and the New Principality of Lethia, which… is not what I came here for. I love a good war story, but you’ve introduced characters whose functions in the story render most militaries moot. You’ve established that most of this world is made of soggy cardboard compared with these fighters and introduced them with the promise that there will be a tournament used to determine who is the strongest. Telling your audience to care about the normal humans at this point just seems like an attempt to get us to care about doomed characters so their deaths can hit us that much harder, but what it does for me is make most of the deaths ring hollow. Even deaths of named characters just don’t matter much. The series does scant little to get us to care about its relationships, mainly just showing us “backstory” through brief glimpses into the past that barely help us connect with them, and that’s the best-case scenario.
But then there’s all the other elements. When a series leaves me with this many questions and only the barest of hints at the answers, I start to wonder why I should stay invested. This is a world in which the Demon King, widely agreed to be the most powerful and terrible being on the planet, was killed. Everyone assumes it’s one of these champions who did it. Fine. Now they want to hold a tournament to determine who the hero was that killed the Demon King. I guess they assume that whoever is the strongest must have done it and they want to reward them, but a) this seems far more likely to kill whoever the actual hero was, especially since just announcing the tournament guaranteed the kind of free-for-all kill fest that has resulted beforehand (especially considering just how diverse the sets of powers are), b) the fact that said hero hasn’t come forward means they’re pretty unlikely to take part in a tournament meant to uncover their identity, and c) that’s compounded by these characters requiring some national representation, which may just leave out the hero even if they wish to compete. Maybe they just don't care who killed the Demon King and just want a tournament for the sake of eliminating a bunch of these powerful beings and posting a figurehead - that's true for at least some of the stakeholders - but if that's the case, that just raises further questions about why they're doing it this way. Why couch any of this in the Demon King if you don't even care who killed him? Wouldn't this just result in a single powerful individual (or a small group of them) that no one can possibly defeat and that can take over by default?
Who these champions really are, where they came from (it’s only lightly hinted at), and why they arrived in this place are all up in the air. Much of the reveals deal in the warfare between the two countries instead, but even so, there’s so much we don’t know and this enigma is the kind that only serves to frustrate rather than intrigue. If you’re going to dedicate so much of your plot to these elements, the lack of a reason for them only serves to disengage your audience.
Beyond that, there are several other characters who have their own machinations in play, so there are all kinds of political power games going on that have little to nothing to do with the broader plot. Combine all that with a magic system that somehow gets specifically defined while simultaneously feeling almost entirely useless and a world that feels surprisingly small despite a broad variety of characters and environments, and what you get is a good seed of an idea that both feels like it’s been dramatically overcomplicated in many ways and overly simplified in others. And I haven’t even mentioned the CGI, which does look pretty bad in places. It’s not awful, but it does detract from opportunities to make the most of this series’ sakuga.
I don’t mean to make this series come off like a complete mess, it’s just a lot of interesting ideas that are thrown together haphazardly and result in a product that is less than the sum of its disparate parts. It does not help that the last episode suggests a lot of plots at play that just seem to make less sense the more you think about them. It’s the kind of show that prefers to use much of this season as setup for interesting stuff down the line, and while it might eventually get there, I don’t think that’s a substitute for engaging your audience early and often. Whether they’re talking about the period before the story where someone fought the all-powerful Demon King or the period after this season where an actual tournament is set to happen, everything sounds more interesting and narratively satisfying than this. As someone who is not a fan of series that seem to put off the good stuff in hopes that you'll be just hooked enough to see it through to the end, I can't recommend this one.
