Grimgar: Ashes and Illusions

The occasional RPG setting within an anime isn't some new, revolutionary trend. Popularized by the underwhelming Sword Art Online, they seem to be popping up a lot more frequently than before and that isn't something I'm particularly fond of. This is mostly due to the lack of originality that comes with these works. To a novice, this idea may seem spectacular on it's own, but at this point, the same thing has been done over and over again and not once did I consider one of them to be good. With that being said, I believe that this is quite close to the epitome ofwhat an anime should not be - from the embarrassingly awful execution to the completely obnoxious and meaningless characters. It honestly baffles me that some people see this title as average, yet alone good. From the legendary A-1 Pictures who've produced such magnificent works of art such as - Sword Art Online, The Asterisk War, The Perfect Insider, Fairy Tail, every single bad light novel adaptation and many more mind-boggling series for our entertainment over the years, comes the awe-inspiring Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash. So the story takes place in a videogame setting, a town called Grimgar and it follows our protagonists as they each individually grow as people, go through hardships together and face the cruel reality that 10 of them can't kill 1 retarded goblin. This is not an exaggeration, our protagonists are so weak that it takes them 5 minutes to kill a single goblin. However, I thought this was a very interesting approach, as it obviously differs from the usual Jesus-kun format. Sadly, this doesn't last for long. There was no big transition in between their entire party not being able to kill a single goblin to them doing full-on raids versus an entire castle full of goblins. It just sort of happened overnight, I don't know. While I did think it was a neat change, I see this argument used way too often. "Grimgar is special because its story is very realistic unlike the other RPG anime!" I think there is a fine line between realistic and different. A different approach doesn't mean the title is going to be good and this is what people tend to be missing. If it really wanted to be that realistic then it should have cut down a bit on stuff such as discussing a girl's breasts in front of her for 3 minutes straight. Here lies the thesis and basically anything the positive reviews ever say about this show. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually people started calling it a deconstruction of the RPG genre for this sole fact. The world of Grimgar itself is for the most part very uninteresting and leaves a lot to be desired. It is barely touched upon within the first 2 episodes in some hasty introduction to the basics and the rest of the series is action-driven and focuses more so on the characters. All we know is that there are normal townsfolk and these adventurers who have to fight off goblins in order to survive. We don't know anything about the town, we don't know anything about the goblins, etc. Basically we don't really know much of anything and it would of definitely been better if they tried to implement some sort of interesting lore and went more in detail since it just felt lazy on it's own. Not that I find RPG settings to be particularly interesting anyway but yeah, the worldbuilding was bad. Some people may tell you that this anime is simply not for you though, due to it's slow pacing which a shonen fanboy such as yourself cannot appreciate. As a fan of shows that take their time in properly developing it's world, themes and characters, I can safely say that Grimgar left me disappointed. It really did not have to be as slow as it was. It just felt like a mere blunder on the production staff's side, rather than a necessity for good development. So even if you do prefer slower paced stuff, I can't really guarantee you'll enjoy Grimgar. So instead of filling up the weaknesses of the show, they go ahead and introduce irrelevant plotpoints such as: none of the characters having their memories from the real world. I thought this was incredibly useless and stupid, what would knowing anything change? Was this implemented in here just so they could have an easy way out of dealing with character backstories? It is shown early on that none of their items from the real world are transported here to begin with, so why bother? Actually why even bother making the setting a game? Why not just some fantasy world? It's because A-1 knows the demographic it's appealing to far too well. Okay, gotta give credit where credit is due. The artstyle used in Grimgar is very original and nice, with a watercolor/painterly feel to it. This was definitely a breath of fresh air due to how bland I thought most of the art in these recent seasons looked like so a change of pace was much appreciated. The backgrounds look especially nice, as if you're looking at a painting of some sort. The animation is alright and it clearly excels when the girls' tits bounce. You can just see how much time and effort was put into those jiggles. Unlike the art and animation, the sound isn't anything spectacular. Sure, you've got some good songs thrown in there, but for every good song you have the same amount of poor utilization and engrish vocals. This is quite a problem as Grimgar tries rather hard to make you emotionally invested, and when such scenes came along, they mostly felt underwhelming due to the mediocre musical direction. For a series that takes itself seriously, I thought the voice acting was rather lackluster. None of the performances stand out and most are just borderline annoying. The only decent performances were Yume, Mary and Haruhiro (although this is probably my bias due to his role as Shichika in Katanagatari). All aboard the cringe train. This is no doubt the worst part about Grimgar, showing further how A-1 has no clue how to make decent or even half-decent characters. This luckily changes as the series progresses but I still felt like touching upon it - every character interaction between members of the opposite sex has sexual themes or implications in it which makes me wonder if the writer is out of his early teens yet. Adding on to this, it is very impressive when in the first scene of the series it is able to portray the females as useless and clumsy damsels in distress, unable to do anything on their own apart from scream and cry until their beta-male white knight companions come to the rescue. This makes for some of the cringiest scenes I have ever seen, like talking about Shihoru's breasts for a good 3-5 minutes. You could say that this is just taking the easy route since no matter how bad the actual series in question may be, it's bound to garner some sort of audience. However, I still feel as though it is a very big problem and is ultimately what a lot of modern anime suffer from. While I guess that it just knows what demographic it's appealing to and it's not so bad on it's own, it also means that we have to depend on the male cast to be good or get the proper development. Feel free to take a guess on how it's handled in Grimgar. Yes, not very good... A lot of people would argue this point because of how well developed they all become upon facing loss! No! The characters can grieve all they want but it won't make them more likable or realistic. Coping with sadness is a great characterization tool if utilized properly and on good characters, but despite these characters being borderline terrible, they barely develop! Most of the characters don't even have a personality that defines them to begin with, apart from Ranta. And, well.. Ranta is just Ranta. For example, one of the characters was only memorable for his death, nothing else. They didn't even bother to make us feel anything for the character, he was just a bland teenager who got killed off in order to "develop" everyone else. You aren't supposed to remember a character for their death, you're supposed to remember them by their life and their accomplishments BEFORE their death. The drama also felt awfully forced and doesn't work 90% of the time. " Hey guys, let's go to that place where most of Mary's party got brutally murdered which left her scarred for life :D :D :D Oh Mary why u mad bro?? " I giggled a couple of times when the goblins were screeching so I guess some enjoyment was to be had. Sadly it was all just nullified by Ranta and the female cast's cleavage. The pacing also played a key factor in this but it did get noticeably better as the series went along. Despite this, it is not an exaggeration to say that I was forcing myself through most of the show as in the end, Grimgar struck me as incredibly bland and boring. This is a series that had a lot of initial potential and sounded pretty good on paper but A-1 went the wrong way of doing it. Especially if the characters were handled properly, Grimgar could of been the highpoint of the RPG genre, covering stuff like how detrimental loss can be in some cases. Sadly, the script looks like something from an otaku's basement, the pacing and execution are incredibly poor and the characters are very bland, uninteresting and have no defining personality.

--The review contains spoilers-- The show of it's season that everybody likes despite it's pretty bad. We have a group of teens who gets into a world based on RPG ruleset and shortly after this, they forget their previous life... and that's all. We won't get to know who they are, why did they get there, what is that place anyways, why does it operates like a video game, what should they do there. They just live their everyday life, learning some new skills, killing the low level creatures for the loot which they use to cover their living expenses and equipment. There are some conflict, theylose a teammate, hire a new one who lost her team and slowly move on after their loss, but this doesn't start a real character improvement. It's trying, but doesn't goes anywhere. During their fights, because of this is a team, we might expect it'll be shown from a strategic point of view. They build up the tactics of their ambushes, comment how the teammates use their class' special skills to effectively operate as a team, but no. They just show their newly learnt skills without any deeper concept. We could think that after these they focus on giving the world some depth, who are these goblins and kobolds, are there any relation between them, what kind of society do they live in, why must they fight with them, why are they hostile by nature, by the way what kind of society do humanity live in this world. But no, we wont get to know anything about these either. The main issue with this show is NOT the slow pacing. The slow pacing can not be an excuse for the lack of world building and plot improvement. At the end there were some improvement in the representation of characters and the fight choreography, then, SLIGHT SPOILER, it ended with a terrible plot armor execution, END SPOILER. The art design is correct. The character design follows the typical A1 Pictures design. One of the main characters looks exactly like a brown haired Kirito. Not quite unique. The environment and backgrounds are a bit better. With this sketchy looking, hand drawn like appearance it's easily distinguishable from the other series of the studio. It's a matter of taste if you like it or not, I found it a bit self-serving, but a creative way to work with low budget, the main issue isn't this. The animation seems really cheap. The fight scenes are dull, there isn't any tension in them at all. It's nowhere near UBW or even SAO. Oh, and SAO, do you all remember the fight against the first boss with Asuna and Kirito? It was a good fight, they were working together, they looked like a team. I'm not an SAO fan, but that scene was alright in concept and visuality. Don't expect anything even remotely like that from Grimgar. To summarize, when I've seen the first promotional image, I knew I have to have low expectations. And thus fortunately or more like sadly I couldn't get disappointed. Not even pleasantly though. It sticks out downwards from average quality. Maybe the light novel was decent, I didn't read it, but there never were a moment when I felt the anime could be any better than a mediocre fantasy shounen. You won't lose anything if you skip it.

[Spoiler Free Review} Story (8): Hai to Gensou no Grimar tells the story of a group of people who all of the sudden see themselves in a completely strange and fantastic world, with no memories of where they come from, or who they where. The only thing they can do is try to survive by forming parties and hunt down monsters to gain enough money to get through the day. The anime shows the struggles of the group in this world. There is nothing really new to this kind of story, but what stands out is the way the story is told. Compared to the light novelor the manga the director chose to produce a more slow paced anime. This resulted in a lot of slice of life/drama aspects that got to be explored more deeply. And also helped to get to know the characters better, seeing some things that usually are not shown at all in this kind of anime. Art (8): The production was rushed and some times it gets pretty obvious. But overall the art is beautiful, the landscape looks a lot like paintings making it different and really stunning. The animation at the beginning was great, but as the anime progressed it started to show some flaws, but again, overall it is decent, and hopefully getting fixed in the blue-ray. Sound (8): Its enjoyable, I liked the soundtrack, it gets the job done. It is pretty good. Character (10): If the slow paced storytelling the director chose to follow helped something it was the character development. It is really great. You get to know the characters really well for a 12 episode anime. Character development is probably one of the strongest in the genre. Enjoyment (10): I rushed through this anime in about 2 or 3 days. It does not have cliff hangers but for me it made me want to watch the next episode just because it is good. Really enjoyed it. Hopefully looking forward to a second season hehehe

Mature version of any "rpg like shows" the done right. I'll keep this short but informaive as I can. Many misunderstand what the show is really about and what it's trying to be. They complain "just when will they get over with this and go start adventuring?!" and claim "nothing is happening bs!" what they didn't know is it's not aimed to be that. Grimgar is all about the group of people who have been thrown in a world they don't know, adapting their new environment bit by a bit. So as you can see, action is not the highlight of the show. It's how they adaptthe world and how they do it is what makes the conflict. And that's where the interestingness comes from. The idea of "adapting the world" seems so Log Horizon yet it's far from being exactly the same with Grimgar. the reason why is because Grimgar has a mature theme mixed with. it's realistic, more of portraying the struggle of being in that situation. the struggle of having no money to buy what you need, adjusting to the people you have no relation with and so on. Though I kind of Implying the series is somewhat of a "survival of the fittest", an opposite side existed. It has a slice of life vibe that gives you this country side feeling. The way it's done is just amazing! it doesn't feel like out of the place and I even find it pretty relaxing to watch and with the the calming music that plays along with the heartwarming backgrounds even make it more refreshing. How the characters respond to this SoL part is just amazing as well. You can totally see what they do when they are not in a hunt or that how they do their personal lives. through this, it helps them flesh out their character and make it complex the way that even if you try to remove the conflict of the story the existence of characters won't feel empty they would still have something in them. About the characters, many find them boring. I kind of agree that they don't have any interesting side but what makes up for it is their interaction and development(the strongest points of the series actually) and if I have to defend it more, my reason would be because they are not supposed to have an odd or a special personality. They're designed to be realistic. To make you relate to them. Which explains why their team spends so many time to get stronger. Because no normal teenagers would desparetly want to fight for death. which is what I realy like from the series. you can just clearly see their growth. Of how at first they can't kill a single goblin and becomes just like a murderer, the first time they face the act of killing they get nervous and tremble but the afterwards they loses their sense of guilt. Speaking of the character development greatness, it's just really top notch. It's realistic, way more believable than any shows does. It doesn't happen right away making a huge jump, it's carefully taking its time progressing their development to make sure it will look real and it doesn't completely change their character which some shows or books seems to always get wrong. Their development to their friend's death, is just so good! each of them shows different signs of reaction and develops differently according to how close they were to their friend. Which proves the uniqness of their character. It flows perfectly not missing any phases. From denial to mourning to acceptance and to learning and you can really see the changes of their actions, reactions, and interactions little by little as they repeat the same thing over and over(killing goblins). They start adjusting-- trying to adjust themselves more to each other.(Especially after Mary, the best girl, was introduced) their teamwork becomes better, they get stronger and their relationships gets tougher. It would just really surprise you that the boring characters you thought were actually complex. Just try to compare the whole character development of most of the show they always works the opposite always getting things wrong lmao. Overall, instead of cool fantasy action shit, what you're going to get in Grimgar is what I wrote above. It's aimed for those people who wants to see something different. Just a reminder though, the series is so slow which most has a problem with. But it's because it's inteded to be that. Slow pacing doesnt really mean bad it depends if the show needs it or not. Like here in Grimgar it's slow paced because the anime focuses at depicting the growth of a character which have to have long exploration. So if you're the guy who would choose to fall asleep when traveling by a plane instead of enjoying a beautiful view then this might not be for you but if you're that guy who would like to window watch to see that beautiful view you should probably try this.