Additional note: this review has been slightly modified (about four hours after submission) in verbiage to remove the mention of a manga aggregator as noted by a community moderator.
I don't write reviews very often, so a quick explanation on this horrible scoring metric I've concocted:
Reviews are divided into the five senses-- look, feel, sound, smell, and taste-- as well as a sixth category, "vibe." Each sense is meant to represent one aspect of a show.
For instance, "look" encompasses the physical appearance of a show, "feel" talks about the emotional value and character development of the show, "sound" talks about how I find the design aspects of the show (specifically audio but maybe not always the case), "smell" being a rating of how tolerable the fanservice is within a show, and "taste" is a rating of how I feel it handles its subject matter (and as a byproduct, whether or not that subject matter interests me).
These five metrics are rated out of 4 points.
The last metric, "vibe," is an at-a-whim rating (like how you'd actually rate a show after you watch it, don't lie) and is out of 10 points.
The final score is the average of all six metrics, and is out of 5 points.
For the sake of providing a legible score, the final score of this review (the thing I'm putting into the "score" box) is the percentage score out of the maximum possible.
Of course, remember that this is ultimately still my opinion and you don't really have to agree with anything I write below (or for that matter, like anything I say) so long as you can express that in a civil manner.
I'll be honest: I really like Kenja no Deshi. At least, the manga. I've read parts of the LN and enjoy it just as much, but the manga has managed to hold its own against the everlasting sluice of raw sewage that pop up in my daily manga feed.
Let me preface that I'm not necessarily of the opinion that an enjoyable work must first be an objectively good one-- the core story behind Kenja no Deshi doesn't particularly make it better or more enjoyable, and it's definitely not such a magnum opus of narrative or storytelling that I would sing its praises from the high heavens and proclaim that everyone must agree with me that it's an enjoyable work.
But as far as I'm concerned, the manga is worth reading. The unassuming, uninspired, isekai-trope story is sandwiched between interesting character interactions and small sidepieces that motivates the turning of pages; combined with a serviceable and cutesy (albeit standardized) art style, there isn't a reason to discredit the manga.
So when I saw that Kenja no Deshi was getting an anime (something I only knew about after its delay in 2021), I was unsurprisingly excited, and put it on my plan to watch list. I was itching for, craving, desperately so even, for more Kenja no Deshi, which had gone scarce in activity after Seven Seas licensed the work. After all, I had already read everything I could of the manga three times; scraped the barrel clean of matter-- any new Kenja no Deshi was good Kenja no Deshi.
And then I forgot about it for nine months after it aired.
Now with nine months of fresh air between what I would call "sanity" and my former obsession with Kenja no Deshi, I came into the show expecting very little more than to be reminded of the oddball Mira and the quirkiness of the manga that I knew and loved. Turns out I couldn't even expect that.
Look, I don't have any particular gripes with the use of 3D props or CGI as part of a show. With how much work is involved in the design and animation of a show, 3D and CGI provide alternatives to hand-drawn work that can look good and mesh well with existing art with significantly less manpower required to achieve similar results with traditional art. It's completely understandable why CGI exists and when it's done correctly, it absolutely does not affect the viewing experience in any negative way. When it's done correctly. When it's done correctly.
Unlike some of the more discerning types on this platform, I'm not even the type of person who's able to pick out "bad CGI" from "good CGI" because I honestly don't spend that much time trying to identify it. My opinion is frankly that if it meshes well with the viewing experience then it doesn't matter if that was a hand-animated clay doll or a mechanically animated 3D model, because "if it looks good then it looks good," right? So when I tell you that the CGI is bad, I honest-to-God mean it. The models are very strangely illuminated in these extremely sharp, contrasting tones that fit poorly into the show's visual aesthetic (which of course consists of pastel tones sandwiched between higher-contrast outlines), fit poorly into the show's already half-comatose animation style, and fit extremely poorly into common sense.
Quite literally in the second episode, Mira and company go off to fight ~~Big Bird Himself~~ a cockatrice in a field of flowers. If you were not alerted to the smell of poor CGI in the first episode (more on that in a smidge), this is where it makes its presence truly known. The chicken looks as if the animators had stolen it from the binaries of a dumped copy of Egg, Inc.; the fight scene between it and the super-sized Dark Knight consists of so few frames of animations I wouldn't be surprised if you were to confuse it for a high schooler's slideshow presentation on how to do the dougie; and, when it finally dies, instead of bleeding out or slumping over the way a dead chicken would, it instead blows itself up into gargantuan chunks colored a garish red-- ready to drain and thrown into the nearest deep fryer for a serving of Super McNuggets.
It doesn't do much to impress.
Thankfully, the actual art of the show is serviceable (if not slightly odd-looking at points) and the show as a whole is viewable. There's not a lot of saving graces even when it is being hand drawn, however; the handfuls of fight scenes that do exist in the show illustrate a distinct unfamiliarity with basic animation concepts and the end results look stiff and off-putting, especially when a character interacts with the leagues of CGI monsters in the scene (note: all of the monsters are CGI). The gravitas that the light novel implies exists with Dunbalf and his style of summoning is absolutely upended by the fact that in any given scene, only one or two characters move simultaneously regardless of whether or not there were one or three hundred of them in frame. This means that Dunbalf, the "One-Man Army" famous for commanding a literal army of summoned creatures with the flick of the wrist, never exhibits this ability in any notable manner throughout the entire show.
You've read through a good ten paragraphs' worth of text, and so I think you're entitled to a fun fact.
Fun fact: 50% is a mediocre score, not a bad one.
In fact, I think ten paragraphs' work is worth at least two fun facts, so have another.
Fun fact: Sometimes, a mediocre experience is worse than a bad one.
This section, the "feel" section, is where I usually would put comments and notes about character development. If I had any.
One of the distinct strengths of the manga over the anime is that this anime absolutely does not have enough screen time to portray any sort of 'development' with any character. This, of course, excludes Mira, our protagonist, who serves as our eyes into the world and compared to everyone else, has not a lot of development to do. After all, she's been absent from the ever-changing world for 30 years, shunted into a new body, with a new name, and as far as anyone's concerned, she's a faceless, nameless nobody. The world has more development than she does.
In one of the later episodes in the show she meets up with the guild Écarlate Carillon's leader, a player by the name of Cyril. Dumped into the world ten days after "The First Day," some event that caused the game world to turn alive, he discovers the world turning alive first-hand by encountering a widow named Hannah. Saving her from getting merc'd by some rainy goblins, he proceeds to spend time at her village-- first teaching Hannah about creating effective potions from the dew of the plants they harvest in the rain, then improving the economics of the village, and lastly the quality of life of the children. Hannah becomes a doctor in her own right and spreads her knowledge as a teacher of pharmacology in the village, and after a year passes Cyril leaves the village in order to find his friends who may have made their way into this world.
Now what I just described is the manga's retelling of these events. In the anime, Cyril saves Hannah, makes her some medicine, talks to some merchants, and leaves after a year to find his friends.
You might be thinking, "that's literally no different, you just said the same exact two things with less words the second time," and you would be right. But there lies the main difference between the manga and the anime. I first saw lots of comments about the anime's leisurely pace and how it feels like barely anything happened between several episodes. This is by design. Yes, there's a looming crisis and a future of doom ahead, but by design the novel is first and foremost about Mira exploring this world-- now alive with real human lives all around and growing and changing in ways neither existed nor expected in the game world. It's the small stories that come from these changes that embody the charm and create an enjoyable experience.
The anime is fixated on the major story beats and skims over everything else, which, I guess, I should expect from a more tightly paced medium; but it's specifically this that makes the show mediocre. Absolutely nothing kills the vibe faster than being rushed.
I mean, the sound design (ignoring the monsters cuz I'm so done talking about them, since they're bad on all fronts) is acceptable. Most of the points here come from the fact that they bothered giving Leticia a tune or two, which is a little more care than most. Nothing sounds too particularly flat and the background tunes work; which is to say, none of it is particularly memorable, but it'll work for the moment.
This show, across all of its incarnations, apparently has a pee fetish. Which is whatever, I guess, I'm not here to tell you whether it's healthy or not to have a urine fetish other than to consume in moderation, however you want to take that. What that does mean, however, is that combined with Flicker's entire existence being questionably illegal, it's very hard to recommend this show to your friends without coming across as a person of questionable character.
I've said plenty of this above already, but this show is mediocre, lacking the charm and entertainment value of its paperbound cousin. It smells of a rushed project created by a studio with neither the experience to handle the task provided to them, nor the necessary wit to creatively drive the show in a unique and distinct direction, which is all the more peculiar when you've got Funimation and KADOKAWA and MAGES.'s name-- all big names, comparatively industry veteran companies who most definitely could have overseen this project and question its integrity-- plastered over it as its production team. It's rare to see a work have a steady foundation and completely topple over on the topside, especially in an industry that highly values visual appeal.
I don't want to be here grandstanding over how poorly done this work is compared to its source material. While studio A-CAT has not impressed me, I'm not here to wish for their untimely demise as a studio. I hope with all sincerity that they continue doing what they do, and someday manage to amaze me with their implementation of 3D CGI into a show.
At the same time, I would like to reiterate: read the manga.
To me, there's a lot of disappointment going into this. Like getting an extra pair of socks for your birthday, it feels underwhelming and depressing. There are occasional moments where it manages to capture the initial charm of its source material, but those moments are few and far between and it becomes increasingly hard to validate the amount of time spent with each passing episode.
Especially when talking about the first and last episodes.
Holy shit, what the actual fuck. If I was around for the show's initial run and received the first episode as a preview and the only sign of what's to come (which happened to all the unfortunate souls who were there), there's a decent chance I would have scrapped watching the entire show at that very moment. The first episode consists of some alright world-building, a large fight scene that details Dunbalf's fighting prowess (which is nothing but excessively poor 3D CGI and an occasional 2D still frame with camera moment as opposed to real animation, making it severely underwhelming-- and like I've mentioned above, does a disservice to actually illustrating Dunbalf's power in this moment), and the initial moments of Mira waking up and frolicking around a flower field with backing music that feels reminiscent of an avant-garde voyeur film. Whether or not this choice in direction is better than in its source material (in which Mira wakes up, encounters a group of knights patrolling a field, and exposes herself to a provided mirror once she realizes that this is not, indeed, the body of Dunbalf) is up to your discretion-- I, however, definitely found myself questioning why I was watching the show at that point.
The last episode is yet another grand fighting scene (albeit animated with as much tact and detail as one would a frozen can of Campbell's chunky soup) and concludes in about the same way that the show starts, which seems to be a very common thing to do in these types of shows since it allows you to end in a poignant, cyclical manner while still implying that the story continues on after this concluding point.
It doesn't really work, however, when that concluding point is "I am cute."
Yeah, I guess I expected more. I wish I had a nice climactic note to end this entire review on, but I can only continue reiterating what I've said previously-- it's rushed, it's of poor quality, lacks the charm and appeal of its source material, spends too much time on the increasing unappealing 3D CGI scenes, wastes a lot of time on montages which don't provide anything to the story or the experience, and leaves me with nothing but a desire to go read the manga again.
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