Yeah I’m not introing this. In like a year this show won’t need it.
There is so much wrong with Arifureta that its impossible to tear through the show episode by episode and I can’t really break it down into animation, music, characters etc because the flaws of each area bleed together and become difficult to separate. I’ve shied away from doing Plinkett-style reviews because imitating Plinkett reviews is what hacks do, but I don’t have much of a choice here. Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one.
__#1: Continuity, Pacing, and Editing
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Continuity. The establishing of events, characters, and setting in a narrative. It is arguably the most important part of a story, as without it...literally nothing would make sense and no one in the audience would even be able to understand what is happening. Establishing shots tell you where events are happening before scenes in that location start. Character introductions are done to familiarize yourself with a character before they become a part of the story. And from scene to scene things like where characters are located, what clothes they're wearing, their visible injuries, the way they look needs to stay consist to establish a stable and believable continuity for the audience to latch onto. Without this, it is impossible to tell where scenes take place, who is and isn't in a scene and who isn't, and scenes can fall into confusing nonsense when a proper continuity is not established. And good lord Arifureta has a massive problem with continuity. The first 7 episodes are so chock full of this shit that we’re gonna have to go episode by episode to properly show how confusing and messy it is.
The first episode is told in reverse like Memento, but not deliberately. Its told backwards because they wanted to start with an action scene even if it meant the rest of the episode would be a confusing mess.
After the first scene, we start with the main character (Hajime) with a puddle underneath him in the cavern. Then when they do a wide shot of the cavern you don't see any puddles. But then he goes down a tunnel into another part of the cavern and you don't see any puddles in the wide shots. Hajime wakes up after eating the meat, and he's laying down with his face in a puddle. It does look like there's some holy water in the background of the shot right after he eats the meat, but no puddles. Right before he passes out, we do the see the puddle in front of him. So I'm to assume he just happened to fall into the only holy water puddle in that section of the cavern. This is what’s SHOWN to the viewer. Here’s what HAPPENED based on re-watching this scene 6 times:
Hajime first drinks from the first puddle, which is in an upper portion of the cavern. We don't see him move after drinking from it, so I have to assume it’s right next to that cave he himself dug. He then goes down into the tunnel he dug, and the monsters chase him. He then he kills them and eats them, and passes out in this second area, and wakes up with his face in a different puddle. This is all taking place in the same cavern, even though we see Hajime go into a different cavern and travel downwards. This cut is misleading. He is still in the same cavern after traveling downwards through a tunnel. Through the first 7 episodes, this is the general level of storytelling and conveyance prowess Arifureta has to offer, so buckle up.
Episode 2 starts off with current events, then it flash-forwards to some sort of briefing over what happened. After that, they start backtracking via flashbacks to the events of the attack on the traum (I wrote this in my notes and I don’t know what it means!) soldiers. They show half the fight that was used as a flashback in the last episode, again. Then, we're in the scene where Shizuku is checking on Kaori in bed, who I guess is injured. I am unsure if this is happening now or if this is flashback. Then they do a mega super flashback to before the events of the first episode, but before Pope Ishtar can explain anything someone starts doing a voiceover to explain some aspects of the universe. Then they exit the voiceover to go back to the scene with Pope Ishtar.
You notice how some of these events I’m describing sound uncertain? Well this is after rewinding the episodes multiple times. The reason it sounds uncertain is because the show doesn’t give me enough information to be sure, not for lack of investigation. There is no logical progression of scenes and the way they are edited. Every episode feels like a giant jigsaw puzzle that the packaging company threw together while they were drunk. Half the pieces are re-used in places they shouldn't be, none of the pieces that are placed next to each other have the right connecting pieces to fit together, and some pieces feel like they might be from a different puzzle altogether. But the editor, drunk as shit at 4 am, hammered them into place anyways.
After that, there’s some shit about humans, demons, and beastmen that’s placed in the middle of a random flashback for some reason. Then after that scene we're back to maybe current events with Shizuku doing sword stuff in a courtyard area. Then a flashback to events that appear to be before the mega flashback from earlier, which then proceeds to the events from the attack on Traum soldiers and back to Shizuku in the courtyard. That last one all happened in 20 seconds. Then back to the cavern with Hajime. Feel confused yet? Imagine what watching the show feels like.
Finally, at the end of the fight between Hajime and the cyclops giant thing, we get an establishing shot transition that implies that what is happening with the MC and Shizuku in the castle courtyard/Kaori's room are happening concurrently. Good job showrunners, it only took an episode and a half to establish that!
Okay, episode 5. We start with the dungeon boss. Then they cut from the dungeon boss to a different building. I have no idea where this is. They don't show the outside of the building. They're just in it. Initially I assumed they got out of the labyrinth somehow but then they cut to them in the spa again. So they never left? We never find out where that room is actually located.
As a warning, episode 6 is the point where the pacing fucking dies. An entire story arc is crammed into half an episode. This is the most confusing episode and will be the hardest to describe. You’ve been warned.
Episode 6 starts and we are once again immediately thrust into a location we as an audience have never seen before. The geographical schizophrenia of this show is the bane of continuity's existence.
After a quick fight scene they do a montage. You might think this is just a montage of certain uneventful battles, but you’d be wrong. This montage is the show skipping over the entire sequence where they travel to the Sea of Trees. An entire story arc is crammed into a single montage, which results in skipping all of the character development, world building, and anything that might make the audience care about this arc. By the way, the only reason I know this is because it was implied they had finished their journey and I assumed the forest they reached was the Sea of Trees. I’m grasping at context clues to determine what’s actually happening, which is a clear-cut sign of awful conveyance.
Oh, and the bunny girl character (Shea) instantly falls in love with the MC despite being on-screen together for less than 2 minutes. Now in the novel/manga, its likely there was a lot of character development that occurred between the 2 during their journey to the Sea of Trees. Problem is, like I said earlier, the anime skips over ALL OF IT.
Episode 7 starts off at the entrance of a cave before proceeding to the opening credits. From here, we are instantly transported to somewhere else in the cave as they skipped the scenes where they figure out how to get to Shea. They just appear there.
Then right after that they transition to a building. I have no idea where this building is, what it looks like from the outside, how they got to it, or even why they're in it! That is literally the what, where, why, and how of storytelling that the show fails to clearly establish. The only thing Arifureta gets right from scene to scene is continuing to use the correct names for characters. That is literally it!
Then after that scene, they arrive back at a room they claim looks familiar, which...does it? Apparently this was the first room they appeared in, which is news to me! I have no idea how they got into that room from the cave entrance but apparently it didn't require them to enter any more rooms than the one they're currently in! Has it clicked yet? This show tells the viewer nothing and expects the viewer to desperately attempt to piece together its fragmented continuity and plot progression.
Then we're taken to what apparently is the castle the students are in. If you had forgotten about Hajime’s classmates don’t worry, the show did too. There's a red haired guy I'm almost certain I have never seen before talking about a character that either has barely been on screen or we as an audience have not been introduced to yet, and I have no idea who these people are or why this conversation matters enough to randomly cut to it. I know they're his classmates but why are we here? They haven't been relevant in ages if my assumptions about how far into the manga/novel we are is correct.
Then back to the labyrinth with the main characters. Hajime says something about this being the lair of Miledi which...who???? Who is Miledi? Is it a boy or girl? Were they a king/queen? Why would it be in a random labyrinth and why would he instantly recognize it when there has been nothing to establish who this Miledi is before now. Seriously, how does he know that that's the lair of Miledi? I think it may have been the name that was mentioned once at the start of the episode off-hand by the computer thing? But given how batshit confusing the rest of the episode is, there was no chance I was going to remember such a small detail.
Like the episode before, they skip over all the fights and conflict that I assume was in the novel/manga's arc so we basically saw none of what would make exploring a labyrinth interesting. We see them go in, appear in a room, appear in another room for a terrible cgi fight, then they teleport back to the first room, and then they teleport to "Miledi's lair". So in what I assume was originally a large, expansive underground labyrinth; we only get to see the entrance, a cavern, the inside of a building but not the outside, and a throne room. Its also likely that in the original novel/manga, Miledi was built up over the course of their exploration of the labyrinth. But they skip over all that. Fuck this show. Nothing is built up because the show skips over entire story arcs in the course of one episode, and I can't get invested in the fantasy locations they explore because 1, we never see them exploring them and 2, WE NEVER GET TO FUCKING SEE MUCH OF THE LOCATIONS.
And if you don't think establishing shots are that important, I'd like to present the opening of one of the greatest horror movies of all time, The Shining.
The Shining's opening sequence is literally just Jack driving his family to the infamous Overlook Hotel. But why this sequence is so great is that it serves multiple purposes. One, it builds tension. All we're being show is a bunch of pans and establishing shots, and its a good 3 minutes of these shots and nothing else. The music doesn't help in this regard but it fits the scenery. Two, and most importantly, it establishes the isolation of the Hotel visually. We see how far Jack travels to get to this hotel, from the low-laying forests and hills to the top of snow-blanketed mountains. So instantly as an audience you know that this place is way the fuck off the map and if something terrible happens there, no one is coming to help for quite a while. All this done with establishing shots.
We don't learn anything about the locations they're at from wides or establishing shots. And that lack of context serves to constantly confuse the viewer and is a missed opportunity for potential world-building, something that show desperately needs.
Episode 8 starts off with a detour, where our protagonists go to eat rice or something. Why is this the thing that gets full attention? Also the establishing shots in this first part are awful. The citizens are only moving in one of the shots, and the water near the mill isn't moving, so we're basically being shown a slideshow.
It is episode 8 that the main problem with the show changes. For the first 7, it was horrendous pacing and horribly confusing continuity. From here on out though, its…
#2: Visuals (Visual Effects, Character Designs, Animation, Art Design, Art Direction)
A lot can be said about how awful Arifureta’s visuals are, but the sheer number of things wrong with the art and animation is honestly kind of impressive. This show does things wrong with its visuals I didn’t even think it was possible to get wrong.
At some point in episode 8, we get the scene where Hajime attempts to tell the backstory of some war, which is accompanied by crappy drawings that appear to be drawn by a 7th grader with colored pencils. Also in tow are some of the dumbest zooms and pans I've ever seen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show so incompetent that they do zoom-ins and zoom-outs on a still image. It’s honestly incredible. It honestly feels like the cameraman was just fiddling with the zoom and waving the camera from side to side to distract from the fact that they're showing a still image that looks like garbage.
Then we have the scene where Hajime meets the dragon…thing. Visually, this is one of the most pathetic scenes in the entire show. So the dragon is talking but the mouth literally doesn’t even move half the time. Like this fucking thing is center frame talking with its mouth wide open the entire time. That is an incredible amount of laziness. They even have the nerve to close the dragon’s mouth after the entire paragraph of dialogue ends, as if no one would notice she didn’t close her mouth once during that string of horrible dialogue until she was finished.
While partially due to bad writing, a big part of why the comedy never works is the show tries to use reaction shots to sell the humor. But they’re always under-animated or not expressive enough, which makes most attempts comedy the show attempts feel awkward rather than funny. This is especially true when they’re to write comedy that comes from a dragon whose mouth doesn’t move.
It’s the big battle that comes up next that really cements in the viewer’s brain how appallingly bad the art style is. Mainly because this scene actually does have big wide shots, which unfortunately only serve to drive home how little effort was put into making the various elements of the art design feel at home together.
Overall, there are 4 different clashing aspects to the art design:
The main characters, that is to say anyone that is humanoid, are 2-dimensional. They are drawn in a very cutesey way with very bright colors and often lots of pastel colors used on clothing.
The backgrounds and locations appear to be mostly painted, and are rarely stylized. They are very plain and appear to be deliberately drawn so that they don’t stick out.
The monsters are 3d-animated cgi and look robotic and unpolished. Their movement is extremely stiff, and I don’t recall them using many colors other than black or brown for most monsters. Cg weapons tend to always be gray and sometimes black, and also look unpolished and rough.
The visual special effects range from really terrible-looking cg effects to rather lame 2d effects. They stick out like a sore thumb against the painted backgrounds. Most special effects are unpolished and tend to look like the animator or editor whatever just pasted it into the frame and then just forgot to clean it up afterwards. This is also due to clashing artstyles, as the special effects are animated in a way that don’t look like they would be produced by the object that’s producing them. This is especially true of muzzle flashes from MC’s gun, lightning spells, and any spark effect.
These 4 elements are shoddily thrown together in battle scenes, and jesus are they an eyesore to bear witness to. You could have a 2d muzzle flash coming from an unpolished 3d-modeled gun, or a 2d-drawn bunny girl holding a cgi hammer generating a hand drawn dust cloud, or a drawn character throwing a cgi grenade that generates a drawn blinding flash, etc.
Sometimes the cg looks okay, like the hammer the bunny girl uses. But it looks fake when she holds it because they don’t touch the hammer up to look flatter to match the flat look the hand drawn character has, so it still looks bad. This is what I’m talking about. The show looks like a visual clusterfuck because nothing was done to make any aspects of the art design look at home together.
The other part of why the art direction doesn’t work is due to color choices:
The characters usually have very bright color palettes. Even the blacks of Hajime’s coat are pretty bright for the color.
The backgrounds and locations have a more neutral color palette that rarely strays into shades that are very bright. They occasionally use darker shades but only in caves or at night.
The monsters and weapons are always colored very dark, which was likely done deliberately to hide how hideous and unpolished the 3d models are.
Okay now imagine that clusterfuck of visual styles and color choices all coming together in one fight scene. No effort whatsoever was put into making the characters look like they belong in the locations that are presented, nor was any effort put into making the backgrounds and locations look like they come from the same show as the characters.
So basically no parts of the art direction work well together and each part looks out of place among the rest of the art. Nothing looks like they really belong together or feel real, and it makes it really hard to pay attention to what’s happening when literally everything is distracting me with how fake it looks.
That’s it for the 2 biggest problem areas. All that’s left is the writing and sound.
#3: Writing (Storytelling, Characters, Plot Specifics)
So for starters, the game doesn't make sense. At level 8, all his stats are over 100. Then he kills 3 monsters and he's up to level 12. Now his stats are: 200, 300, 200, 400, 350, 350. What do these stats cap at? He'd go over 1,000 in every stat by level 30. Why are the numbers so arbitrarily high? Doesn't it make sense to operate in single and double digits instead? Why would the programmers do their stats like that? Also why would the digits at level 8 be rounded but not 2? Why not just start at 0 if you’re only going to increase each stat by 2 after the first level?
The stats never stop being confusing until they completely forget about them later in the show. Here’s each instance of them showing Hajime’s stats:
level 1- 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10
level 2- 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12
level 8- 100, 300, 100, 200, 300, 300
level 12- 200, 300, 200, 400, 350, 350
level 17- 300, 400, 300, 450, 400, 400
level 76- 1980, 2090, 2070, 2450, 1780, 1780
So at level 76 they're moving in intervals of 10, but at 17 they were intervals of 50. Like what???
Even the different in stats between levels doesn’t make sense:
The difference in stats between levels 2 and 8 is a total of 1288 (6 levels)
The difference in stats between levels 8 and 12 is a total of 500 (4 levels)
The difference in stats between levels 12 and 17 is a total of 450 (5 levels)
This would mean that between levels 2 and 8 (levels 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8) you get 214.66 skill points per level. But you get 125 skill points per level between 9-12. And then you get 90 per level between 12 and 17? I thought the number of skill points you get per level was supposed to be increasing. How the fuck does that make sense? So basically you move in increments of single digits to start, go up in intervals of 50 through at least 17, and then down to increments of 10 at level 76. What the fuck?
I guess if you wanna dig into the bigger writing problems, a good place to start is the characters. They’re all fucking terrible. The main character is so grossly overpowered he actually exceeds Kirito, and he’s probably the single edgiest main character I’ve ever seen. We’re talking about a guy who stops his own arm from bleeding out after his arm gets chopped off by sheer power of will. He also likes to yell dumb shit like "I'm going to kill you and eat you!", because apparently someone on the writing staff let their 5-year old write some of the dialogue.
The rest of the cast consists of female characters that represent different sexual appeals. Yue is for those who are into lolis. Shea is for those who appreciate the bustier figure, and also people who like bunny girls. Tio is for those who are into perverted girls, as well as sadists. Myu is 4 years old. If she appeals to a fetish, I don’t even want to think about it.
All of these girls are in some way attracted to the protagonist, because it’s a harem. Obviously. But it stoops to the level of trash like Smartphone, having them all at one point outright claim they want to have the MC’s babies. Is this where we are now with anime? The only remaining step left here is for Hajime to turn to the camera and say “You want to be me. I’m a badass. All these chicks want to fuck me. You want to be me.”
Oh wait, did I mention he doesn’t even want to fuck them? Whenever Shea or Tio flirt with Hajime, he gets annoyed. He acts like they have cooties. Why doesn’t he want to fuck the bunny girl? I'd fuck that bunny girl and use her ears as handlebars as I railed her. Who wouldn't? Nothing in this show makes any sense. Why make a bunny girl character that's clearly only there for sex appeal, and then have the power fantasy male lead pretend she's disgusting? That makes no fucking sense.
Speaking of male lead, lets get back to how overpowered he is. He can make literally anything he could ever need and the show still can’t manage to set up the shit he uses properly. Like you made it to where he can make anything. Then why the fuck are you not setting things up that are going to be used later? Are the writers seriously that lazy? You should not be resorting to asspulls when your main character can literally make anything. Want some examples?
In episode 3, Hajime gains resistance to plant parasites by eating unrelated monsters. No clue how that works.
The Miledi fight is won by a device I’ve never seen before, so there’s another asspull.
This isn’t Hajime, but Tio claims a man used mind control magic to usurp freedom from her. I have no idea what that even means and it isn’t brought up again.
In episode 11, the writers make up an ability called Sense Presence. This allows you to detect everyone that’s nearby. He uses this ability to find a person in the sewers. He’s in a village surrounded by people. It’s probably catching tons of people. Why would he focus on some guy in the sewers?
This also means he can sense people through walls and floors. So its impossible to sneak up on Hajime. Our main character can make anything he wants at any time and cannot be surprised or caught off guard. There isn’t any tension here. Nothing is a threat to this guy and its impossible for him to get hurt.
Then I guess there’s the lore. It starts being introduced in episode 5 with some shit about a Holy Church and "godly beings", which comes right the fuck out of nowhere. It comes back in episode 8 with some more nonsense about mavericks and overcoming trials to get superpowers, which I guess is the show's attempt to pretend any of these events make any sort of sense. Why is this shit here? You skipped over the entirety of a story arc plus Shea’s development with Hajime but this dumb fucking shit needed to stay in? What was the editor on????
#4: Sound (Sound Design, Music, Sound Effects)
Arifureta embodies all the traits of a true 1/10 anime, and that includes terrible music and sound. The music is terrible across the board, but the battle theme in particular is just shit. You can hear like some drums and a crappy trumpet? What the fuck is that??? There’s a saxophone but it's mixed so far into the background I can't make out the structure of it. The rest of the score is pretty bland and forgettable, but amazingly its also placed poorly! Here’s some examples!
There’s the first scene of episode 9, where Hajime is using a power the writers made up to scout the mountain. Watch the episode yourself and you will notice this song is not only a fucking pain to listen to, but it does not fit the current scene in the slightest. That level of incompetence regarding the score and use of it is usually impossible to achieve, as either the music will usually be okay or the music will be placed decently. Here it is neither. The music is awful and the editor has no idea what he’s doing with it.
4:45 into episode 11 you have a totally random insert song pushed into the middle of a random scene, which is immediately distracting and ruins the scene. 16:17 in the same episode it happens again.
Finally, the sound design and effects are shit too.
Generally the sound design is pretty mediocre rather than bad, but there are occasions where its actually so bad you’ll notice it’ll manage to distract you from the hideous visuals. For example, 11:17 into episode 11, the sound mixing they do on the stomach grumbling sound is just turned way up in the mix to I guess make it clear? But neither Hajime nor bunny girl react to this so…I assume it was the girl? Apparently, that’s how you do sound design. Just make the important sound really loud and that’s good enough. Why is it turned up louder than anything else in the mix if the character don’t react to it? That implies visually that it wasn’t audible! You absolute fuckheads!
For an example of bad sound: Check the cat creatures in episode 12. I swear they sound just like the dad crying in the “best cry ever” video that went viral like a decade ago.
Conclusion
I think Arifureta is an imteresting case study because this is an isekai anime has been pretty widely rejected by the anime community on MAL, AL, etc. So if you want to see what it takes for mainstream anime fans, who rarely tend to care about art design or story structure, to turn on a series; Arifureta appears to be the series that crosses the line of what people consider to be an acceptable anime to be.
As for the score; other series I give low scores to almost always have some redeeming aspect in the music, art, artstyle, you know something. Like Alicization has decent music despite being horrible, and Highschool of the Dead actually is pretty solid visually despite how fucking annoying it is. And sometimes terribad shows are entertaining and I’ll gives them points for that. Cipher and Dark Cat avoided gettings 1s for this exact reason. But Arifureta has no redeeming qualities. Literally name anything and its done wrong. The story is stupid when it actually makes sense (and half the time it doesn’t), the pacing is way too fucking fast for the first half and way too fucking slow for the second half, entire story arcs are skipped over within a single fucking episode, character motivations are not always clearly established, basic continuity is often broken, establishing shots are rarely used so half the time you have no idea how characters got to locations or where they even are, the main character is a cringey overpowered power fantasy and they constantly make up powers for him to have, the female characters have no depth and only exist to appeal to specific sex appeals, the background art is bland and uninspired, the characters are all poorly designed as well as poorly drawn and animated, the animation in general is stiff corner cutting is very visible in every episode, the special effects are downright pathetic, the sound effects are all terrible, the monster cg is some of the worst cgi work I’ve ever seen as well as constantly sticking out against the 2d drawn people, the music is fucking awful and is never placed correctly, the attempts at humor are fucking pathetic and pander to the lowest common denominator of brain dead isekai fans, the premise is isekai which is beyond oversaturated at the moment, and the entire thing is either boring or annoying.
There is nothing redeeming here. Literally everything is awful. I would only recommend this if you hate yourself AND you want to learn more about art design and pacing. Otherwise, stay away. 1/10
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