Category: Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu

“Oh, you guys are fighting a lot, so you must be very close to each other”. …Well… so it turned out to be this series to drop this bomb. I guess it had it coming and all, but seriously: was it really necessary to reduce the chemistry between Ferris and Raina to a stupid cliche like that?

I have more problems with the creators actually using such a cheesy line than with Raina and Ferris themselves though. I mean, that line sucks because it suggests that a girl seemingly hates you is actually secretly in love with you. Sure, with enough development you can make this work, but there are too many tsunderes who only reaffirm how incredibly shallow their personalities are.

With Ferris and Raina this is different, though: none of them really are tsunderes; they’re just acting and they both know it. From the first minute they met, they have been constantly trying to playfully piss each other off. They simply grew into two good friends… and yeah. If romance develops from that it’s going to be a bit annoying, but at least plausible.

Anyway, the rest of this episode continued to develop Miran as a bit of a villain. Nothing really special, though the fight scene was pretty nice. It’s just a bit of a shame that the character-designs are rather generic here (either that, or I just don’t like Zecxs’ style of character-designs…), but it’s nothing major. This was a building up episode after all.
Rating: (Enjoyable)

The mood-whiplashes in this series… I’m really beginning to like them. This show moves from light-hearted and outright silly comedy to serious politics, it’s already busy with character-development and in the meantime continues building its world, along with its characters. I love that when characters are introduced, they immediately tell their basic background.

The humour may not be as good as the humour of Occult Academy, but it still has its moments in which it’s really hilarious. The bickering between Raina and Ferris is of course one thing, but the two of them also toy with fantasy cliches surprisingly often (like in this episode where Ferris was able to enter a library because she was a cute girl). Ferris’ sister however may have been a bit too much, as a lot of her airtime consisted just out of screaming and yelling, rather than witty remarks.

This series also likes to play with things that aren’t as they seem. The blue haired guy in this episode for example. He was most definitely evil, but yet he didn’t end up as an enemy, and instead he ended up offering his services as a killer. Shion on his turn seemed like a righteous ruler so far, however that line from him at the end was quite a cliff-hanger. It just shows already how he’s changing as a ruler, and is willing to order this guy to kill his father, in order to make sure his services are genuine, in order to accomplish his ambitions.
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Okay, so it was indeed impossible for this series to live up to the previous episode, and this episode indeed wasn’t as good as the previous one. Still, it completed the introduction of this series, sending Raina on the quest that we saw him at in the first episode, filling in some of the main gaps and questions we had (as in Shion becoming king).

But seriously, this show really likes its mood swings. The banter between Raina and Ferris is just silly. They make use of every moment to snare at each other. The contrast with the otherwise serious story has some interesting effects though. The way in which Lucile is basically using Shion from the shadows is definitely no laughing matter. On one hand, this Lucile guy is being set up as the villain, and yet Ferris still is loyal to him after the decapitation of the previous episode.

I was also surprised at how well the creators handled Raina’s time in jail. The conversations he had with his guard were quite interesting to watch. The way that the two became friends was quite charming, and they actually gave a character to this guard. Two entire years passed throughout this episode and you could see that the two of them got along with each other.

Kiefer Knolles (seriously, these people have weird names; just look at MAL: Ferris Eris, Iris Eris, Klom Claugh), I also really like how she just didn’t sit on a rock for two years, waiting for Raina to get released. And instead, she found her own way of dealing with having all her classmates massacred.
Rating: * (Good)

Wait… what the hell? How did this series suddenly become so awesome? I mean… just… wow. This episode was unbelievable. It was so completely different from the previous two episodes, it stopped with playing these silly games and actually put forth a genuinely good and emotional episode. I don’t get it! The staff for this series is crap; how… why… when?

I don’t know what’s going on anymore. This… just is one of those episode you have to see to believe. The previous two episodes were all pretty light-hearted in their build-up. This episode promised to be exactly the same as the previous one: we go on some small adventure along with the lead character and his side character friends, while we get to know the setting a bit more. Seriously, I really believed that those guys would be major unimportant side characters throughout this series.

But what took the cake was how the creators portrayed Raina, unleashing his inner powers. I mean… wow. They did just about everything right there. The budget here may not be the best of the season, but damn, was it well used! It really was an excellent portrayal of his inner struggles of keeping such a power locked inside of him, and yet it didn’t drag on like you see with most other people who unleash their hidden powers.

And holy crap, this episode also turned the romance into something good. In the previous episode it was a bit forced, but damn, that romantic tension here really added even more to this episode. With a series that started off so silly, the creators surely squeezed a heap of drama out of its premise in this episode.

When I started blogging this show, I wasn’t expecting anything. You know, perhaps in its second half it could turn into a nice action series of some sort. This episode however… that was about the last thing I could have expected. And it’s not like this can just be attributed to the fact that the creators finally have some good source material: it really was the direction here that gave the scenario its extra edge. This really came from people who spent a lot of time thinking of making this episode as awesome as possible.

I’m definitely extremely interested in this series right now. This could just have been a one-shot episode of awesomeness. It could still derail in the rest of its airtime, but damn, this was just unbelievable. I’m seriously interested about the rest of this series now. But still, it’s episodes like these why I love anime: those series that you have no expectations of that suddenly turn out to deliver so well.
Rating: *** (Awesome)

As for the series I’m not going to blog:
– Ookami has some nice ideas. Just too bad that it doesn’t know how to use them, is pretty bad at building up and has a terrible narrator.
– Amagami may have a pretty good staff, but even they couldn’t do something about the utterly dull scenario and lead character.

As for Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu… yeah. It’s definitely a wild-card for my blogging schedule this season, and if it would have aired in any other season, I would never have considered to cover it. This summer season however… I wouldn’t call it dry, like with the previous Winter Season. There are quite a few excellent titles with Shiki, Nurarihyon no Mago, High School of the Dead and Occult Gakuin, along with promising sequels as Kuroshitsuji II and Sengoku Basara II. Apart from that though… there really isn’t anything else. The rest, while having charms here and there, is just doomed for mediocrity.

Out of that ‘rest’, the one that stands out the most is Denyuuden. As much as I fear the staff (it has the director of the first season of Sengoku Basara, Regios, Rental Magica, Mamoru-ku n ni Megami ni Shukufuku wo, Yume da Maya Kidan and the Chrono Trigger OVA, while the series composition guy only worked on Chocolate Underground, Dogs, Bullets and Carnage, Final Fantasy Unlimited and Kurogane no Linebarrels… what kind of a resume is that?!), I’m willing to offer them a chance to impress me.

Denyuuden (as I’ll call this thing for now) stands out with its tongue-in-cheek lead characters, and this episode showed that it’s also interested in building towards a serious story. I’m interested in how the two are going to mesh. This show sucks for having such a focus on teenagers in such a fantasy setting (with the strongest magician like what? sixteen years old?), but this episode spent a lot of time on what it should have been doing: building up, introducing the setting, showing a bit of back-story, things like that. The characters are quite likable due to this tongue-in-cheek execution, and they’ve got enough chemistry. That should be alright for now, though do note that I WILL DROP THIS SERIES as soon as it starts dragging or falling apart.

The worst part of this episode was that it tended to try a little too hard with the dramatic scenes. The part in which that girl whose name I can’t remember cry up to Raina could have been done more subtle, while the bullies in that flashback scene… were just too much.
Rating: (Enjoyable)