So, here is the thing: The Beginning After the End could have been good. A king who is re-born into a magical world but his memory hasn a second chance of life, and a cool combining elements of swords and sorcery? The formula of success. And, unfortunately, instead, we were served a lukewarm isekai with all the usual tropes and without any seasoning to it, and the protagonist is so overpowered and under-challenged that Superman is but a struggling intern in his presence.

The first of our characters is King Grey, who evidently managed an entire modern kingdom, but displays approximately the same range of emotions as a wooden spoon. He falls out in a rather mysterious manner, likely due to boredom, and is reincarnated as Arthur Leywin, literal magic baby. Instead, we have a protracted montage of the baby genius antics yelling, Look how smart and powerful I am in a series of biting character development or tension (or any other worthwhile thing). The narrative soon degenerates into a formula: Arthur gets to a new place, behaves pre-efferently superior to all, and then departs after an awe-inspiring impression his god-like abilities. Wash and repeat.

The dialogue among characters is excruciatingly showy. The dialogue is like it was going through Google Translate and then another, and then a steam roller of cliches. Supporting characters are there to be appalled at the might of Arthur, impart whatever they can in the few lines they are allowed, or die in a twist that is supposed to be a heart wrenching moment but is not because of the lack of investment in the characters by the audience. Family? Friends? Rivals? They are all cardboard cut-outs revolving around Planet Arthur, play no actual plot role, other than to remind us how perfect he is.

So what about the pacing? And sometimes it works more quickly than the growth curve of Arthur-- other times it is a molasses crawl. The action is associated with the leap in time literally too many times that we cannot see the character develop as exposition dumps replace the apparent personality growth and arches are blatantly and conveniently skipped. There are training montages of the same tense as a mid-tier mobile game tutorial. And when action does come it is usually indistinguishable in its blandness to the ramp-up, with bland choreography and bland magic effects making even tense fights look like uninspired power shows.

The world building is potentially decent, it has nations, races, mana beasts, academies, but it is all just wallpaper. The lore is spoon fed in heavy, clumsy narration or expository dialogue and most of the names used (Dicathen, Alacrya, etc.) are just empty sounding with little sense of life or history. It is obvious that the world should be expanded in further arcs, yet it is too late because it is done too little.

And we should not overlook the tone. The novel keeps alternating between the desire to function like a profound character study of a reincarnated king and like a teenage fantasy power and last trip. It does neither unfortunately. The self-analysis that Arthur goes through has no striking significance of any value whatsoever and when tragedy strikes, it is conveniently swept under the carpet with even more training and more ascending to god-mode. The emotional scenes are defeated by the fact that Arthur never suffers at all in any way, neither emotionally, physically, nor morally.

In one word, The Beginning After the End is an isekai cliche buffet of all the isekai tropes you can think of: overpowered main character, magic school, heritage of royal blood, tragic past, unsolved mysteries of powerful empires behind the scene--take your pick. Instead of spinning all these elements into a cohesive and interesting whole, it layers them on like non-complimentary LEGO blocks. Honest-to-goodness tension is scarce, emotion is even scarcer, and none of the movie presents much idea of actual danger. It is neither a story, nor even a power fantasy checklist but a glorified power fantasy one.

Provided you are the kind of viewer who merely enjoys watching an unbeatable main character go through life with everything going his way as people fall over themselves trying to impress him, then you may like it. But of course, when you want substance, a thought-out and complex characters or originality to your fantasy anime? You should have kicked off anywhere at all.