Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 12
Source: Light Novel
Episode Summary: Rio is an orphaned boy living in the slums, biding his time until he can find the means to avenge his murdered mother. One day after experiencing a fever, he begins to remember his former life as Haruto Amakawa, a 20-year-old college student in Japan who was killed in a tragic bus accident. Rio’s past and present lives begin to intermingle when, after an odd encounter with a group of women from the palace, Rio returns to find the group of bandits he was living with murdered. It’s at that point that his innate magical ability awakens, and he’s able to channel his former martial arts training to help rescue the kidnapping victim the bandits had recently brought home.
Rio’s ragged appearance and his proximity to the crime make him the prime subject once the victim, Princess Flora, is retrieved by her companions. After undergoing a round of physical torture, it’s only Flora herself who can manage to clear Rio’s name. This grants him an audience with the king for his heroism – but what might an orphan boy from the slums have to say to the country’s monarch?
Impressions: It’s become a real challenge to talk about isekai series without going off on a tangent about the prevalence of the genre and its many tropes we’re all now extremely familiar with. Everyone’s tired of being lectured about power fantasies by folks like me; I’m pretty sure most of what I’d typically write has turned into white noise for people who didn’t want to hear about it in the first place. To be fair, I’ve also kind of given up on complaining about those same genre trappings. At this point there’s enough variety in isekai anime that it would be impossible to make any blanket statements anyway.
With that said, as a fantasy story this has a few interesting things going for it. While the immediate setting feels very “Western-style fantasy” to me, with its walled city surrounding a palace (itself a visual cliché) and its magic and monarchy, this is an interesting case where it appears that Japanese people (or their fantasy equivalent) exist in-universe. A flashback partly focuses on Rio’s (and his mother’s) immigrant status, specifically the black hair that distinguishes them from the locals. It’s not clear yet whether this distinction brings with it any prejudice toward Rio’s race, but whether that turns out to be the case or not, it’s interesting to me that this doesn’t entirely fit what’s become a default in fantasy anime (and its source material) lately.
This story does, however, take advantage of the hardcore class distinctions between royalty and the common people to create drama, though I’m not necessarily sure I’d peg it as directly commenting on those things as of yet. Rio’s story about rescuing Flora isn’t entertained seriously until Flora herself corroborates it; in the meantime he gets brutally beaten by the royal guard who as it turns out were partly responsible for not preventing the kidnapping in the first place. Typical political stuff – blame the easy scapegoat rather than actually take responsibility – though it could easily be just a means to an end.
Overall this episode was “pretty okay.” I found myself interested in the general arc of the story, though once the ED animation began and I noticed the abundance of female characters, I started to wonder if the whole production would all just end up being an excuse for a harem.
Pros: I liked that Rio’s magic manifested as his being able to channel his former life’s skills in martial arts. It landed a little differently than just making him overpowered with seemingly little training; at least in this case there’s some continuity with actual skills he spent years attempting to perfect.
I also liked Celia, introduced as someone who seems to care less about class distinctions than others. During their first meeting she speaks to Rio politely rather than demanding answers from him by wielding her obvious class superiority like a cudgel.
Cons: The setup for this reminded me a little bit of Ascendance of a Bookworm although they’re not really that much alike. The similarity in my mind is that both protagonists seem to find some way of overcoming the stratified class of their new worlds by taking advantage of the knowledge they gained in their previous one. In Ascendance, however, that’s really the story; Main studies, struggles, and uses her knowledge to slowly climb the social ladder. Rio beats up one guy and also happens to have powerful magic on his side, and suddenly he’s standing in front of the king as a hero. For me, the struggle is the story rather than the end point, and so I’m finding that I’m not particularly interested in what happens to Rio (ostensibly entering the Royal Academy, judging by the title of episode 2).
Content Warnings: Violence, including violence involving blood and resulting in death. Classism. Physical torture.
Would I Watch More? – Eh, probably not. I found this episode mildly entertaining but not really compelling. I feel as though the protagonist managed to overcome the bulk of his challenges through luck and without a lot of struggle, and that’s not really what I’m looking for.