The Eminence in Shadow
Short Synopsis: A delinquent with delusions of being a hero faces off against his ultimate four wheeled foe – his consolation prize is catgirls.
Amun: This first episode will be Eminence in Shadow’s best. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good. There was a real chance for something unique here, but alas – cat girls won the day. I guess the premise is a bit different – I don’t remember any delusional delinquent isekai off the top of my head. I do think it’s pretty hilarious that no matter how great a martial artist he was, truck-chan wins in the end (should have been a ninja, I guess). Using a side character as the fake-main in episode 1 is starting to become standard practice, but Eminence just used it as fan-service. This seems like a furry power fantasy show from here on out – so if that’s your thing, then banzai, I guess? I’m personally out.
Potential: 1%
Lenlo: You know, I kind of had a little bit of hope for this show at first. I thought it was doing something clever! Rather than being a generic isekai show, it would instead being about a delusional incel who thinks he has been isekai’d, shown through the lens of his fellow classmates around him so we can see just how insane and maladjusted he is. All the while giving us the classic silly setups and action sequences expected from Light Novel Isekai garbage. But as the show progressed it fell more and more into that classic power fantasy trap. Until right at the end it just… dove headfirst into it. It was quite the disappointment to be honest. And it’s not like the show was very good before that either, it was so boring it reminded me to pay my taxes the day they were due (today). But now it’s lost anything to possibly make it unique, and thus, also my interest.
Potential: 5%
Legend of Mana: The Teardrop Crystal
Short Synopsis: A curly-haired hero decides to help an unfriendly traveler in locating his royal companion.
Wooper: My opinion on this premiere is of virtually no importance, since its parent game is not among the small handful of JRPGs I’ve played, but here it is anyway: The Teardrop Crystal takes a decent stab at creating a living fantasy world, but puts far less effort into writing an interesting cast. On the plus side, the art direction is mostly successful at masking the use of CG background elements, covering furniture with dotted lines to simulate wood grain and choosing convincing textures for greenery during exterior scenes. By contrast, there are moments when the show makes its 3D usage obvious, such as the trees that whip by during moments of high-intensity travel, or the map that springs to life after the main characters lay their hands on a mysterious jade artifact. These moments lean into the series’ fantastical roots in a natural way, so no problems there. My issue lies with the cast, especially the main character Shiloh – he’s the selfless, upstanding, helpful sort who passes his days waiting for something to occupy his attention, which is about as boring as fantasy writing gets. Just as you’re forced to accept a video game’s playable character as your POV because they’re the one you control, we’re forced to see The Teardrop Crystal’s world through his eyes because he’s the character who’s on screen the longest, and for no other reason. RPG fans aren’t likely to think twice about this kind of setup, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I can’t really recommend the show on its own merits.
Potential: 20%
Lenlo: Wooper already gave a good technical look at the series, so I’m going to give a more emotional one. One where I talk about how I couldn’t look away from the lead’s poorly drawn, sticker-lick abs that didn’t fit at all. Or how ridiculous his design is at all. Or how much this first episode felt like a dull JRPG cutscene intro, complete with shoddy PS2 CG and slow, dare I say glacial, pacing. I ended up checking the timestamp every minute or so thinking “We’re almost done right?”, but it never was. I don’t care that this actually is a JRPG adaptation, that’s irrelevant. I just wanted it to be a good JRPG.
Potential: 0%
Bocchi the Rock!
Short Synopsis: A chronically shy high schooler is invited to join an amateur band as a substitute guitarist.
Wooper: This premiere exceeded my expectations by a sizable margin, mostly due to the array of tricks it used in forming its main character’s personality and worldview. Hitori is shy, awkward and friendless, which is a combination of traits possessed by dozens (if not hundreds) of other anime characters, but very few of those anime have taken such a multi-stylistic approach in depicting such a character. From its very first scene, where Bocchi the Rock drains the color from its childhood flashback to signal Hitori’s lack of zeal for life, the show experiments with different ways of illustrating its protagonist’s isolation: narrating her lonely middle school years in song, fencing her off from a happy family during a scene at a playground, using warped camera angles to put as much (or as little) distance as possible between her and her peers, responding to a humiliating moment by rolling the credits midway through the episode, and putting her in claustrophobic spaces like closets, trash cans, or (as in the eventual concert scene) a cardboard box. Hitori’s constant monologuing during the episode infuses these moments with humor, but the script pays respect to her anxiety as well, striking a nice balance of tones that had me rooting for her success. Some of the photographic backgrounds weren’t integrated as well as others, and a few strained line deliveries took me out of the zone while watching, but on the whole I found this episode to be varied, fun and even a bit therapeutic.
Potential: 70%
Mario: Bocchi the Rock is endearing. Granted, a shy, introverted lead is amongst my least favorite character types in anime, but I suppose it’s more due to the way anime tends to exaggerate these traits and offers nothing else in terms of their personality. Here in this episode, we really come to know Hitori and thus can get behind her shyness and her need for attention and acceptance from the peers. As a cherry on top, the show knows how to instill these insecurities while both making it light-hearted enough and never looks down on their characters. I love her self-written song about how she still has no friends despite her effort of learning guitar. I find it relatable the way she finds consolation in the online world instead of the real world. And I enjoy the way she gets dragged into live performing – half-exciting for the opportunity and half-scared if she messes it up. It helps that other band members play a great contrast to Hitori, and so far it helps that the music is pleasant enough. I cannot wait for more. Truly a pleasant “diamond in the rough” for me.
Potential: 55%
From even a mile away, I could tell that a Legend of Mana adaptation would be a terrible idea and was only done in order to promote that remaster that came out last year. The main story of the game is a jumble of story quests that form a vague series of arcs that’s a terrible fit for an overarching 12-episode series. Very evident that the main focus was the gameplay above all else.
Bochi is pretty ok. The band thing feels generic, but the main pulls the show so far. This show is a child of Hitoribocchi, Yuru Yuri and Watamote. I dont think it has a lot of potential but I can see the studio is trying. There are many good camera angles and animesque scenes – for example everything that involved the box towards the end. The show has good timing and MC good voice acting and her thought lines are snappy but somehow reek of a failure, just like it should be for this type of character. I think this is good enough to be a pleasant show, unless they put the band thing down viewer’s throats – most of these shows do end up following a story along the lines of ‘we need to win a competition’ and abandon anything of value in the process of a buildup with subsequent pointless climax that. This show would be much better off just meandering like in this episode. The good thing is also that I have nothing bad to say about it so far, which, for me at this point, is a miracle in and of itself. I like the animation style, I like the character designs (doesn’t feel modern and retains a soul), I like the somewhat silly but also funny and very endearing atmosphere (reminiscent of plenty old and good shows like Takkyu no Musume or Yuru Yuri). It is simply good.
Having read the manga, Eminence in Shadow is actually one of the better isekai out there. Yes, it’s a power fantasy, and yes, the MC is surrounded by an army of beautiful women who fawn over him. But what makes Eminence in Shadow fun is that its MC is … pretty much insane: his goal is to be an “eminence in shadow”, fighting evil in the darkness, and because of that goal he acts completely unlike typical isekai protagonists. He doesn’t care about saving the world, or revenge, or surrounding himself with pretty girls: the only thing he cares about is playing the role of a dark hero, and he merely sees the people around him as supporting actors in a play. So when he fights a villain, he doesn’t worry about whether he can defeat them, or whether his friends are in danger: instead, he worries about how he can defeat him in the most flashy way, and which oneliner would make him look good. And he similarly views his “commoner role” with the utmost seriousness, coming up with new martial arts just so he can act out his various “mob” fantasies. In other words, although it’s a power fantasy – actually, one source of humor is how, similarly to Overlord, the MC’s plans never fail in spite of their utter randomness, to the point where it seems like the world is designed to play along with the MC’s fantasies – it doesn’t take itself seriously at all and is more focused on comedy than intense fights or harem shenanigans.
That being said, precisely because the story walks such a tight line between reveling in typical isekai tropes and parodying them (and the MC between being being refreshingly unhinged and annoyingly overbearing), it’s quite difficult to adapt, and I’m not confident the anime will do well in that respect (the trailers mostly seem to emphasize how “cool” and fawned over the MC is, which is not what I’m here for – and the production values seem mediocre as well). But the first episode was actually quite decent (with an anime original backstory for the MC that set the right tone), so maybe it’ll surpass my expectations. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I’ll at least give it three episodes to win me over.