As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World

With so many reincarnated as a noble style shows coming out every season, it’s always nice to get one that does things differently. Instead of focusing on the usual OP MC fighting demon king army trope, Kantei skill focuses on nation building through the recruitment of talented individuals whom society has discarded. As someone who loves politics and public policy, I found this to be a very refreshing watch and it ended up being one of my favourite shows of the season. The main selling points for me with this series are the characters who are all very well written due to them being the focusof the story as well as the political intrigue. Ars forsees his family domain and nation falling due to political unrest caused by ill qualified leaders, a message that hits a little too close to home these days. So in this life, he’s determined to surround himself with the most qualified people regardless of background, gender or status using his appraisal skill which lets him see everyone’s potential. Of course what we end up learning throughout the series is that the brightest people are often found in the darkest of situations. Ars’ inclusive meritocratic philosophy earns him a lot of recognition and success at a young age, propelling him into the national spotlight. Really enjoyed seeing he and the other characters navigate the increasing fame while continuing to recruit other capable people in the midst of a potential civil war. Even if you’re not a massive political fan, I think the characters are more than enough to draw you in. It’s such a cool diverse cast who couldn’t be more different, yet they’re all bound by the fact Ars believed in them when no one else did. It’s kind of like a new spin on the found family trope. There’s also no forced romance or harems, just straight up character development, world building and political manoeuvring which is a breath of fresh air in the fantasy genre. In fact, the only real fan service in the show is Charlotte’s design.(which I love) but this is a really solid story. Feels mature, competent and focused and there’s plenty of emotional story beats that got me teary eyed. I’m a big underdog fan and all these characters have had to overcome so much adversity to get where they are. Even if you can’t relate to the fantastical elements of the story, there’s a lot of life lessons you can take from this. Chiefly, don’t let your current circumstances deter you from achieving greatness. Now my one big complaint and probably what stopped me from giving a 10 is the fact that Ars despite being a reincarnated grown man from Japan, acts like a child far too often. He gets flustered over things that a grown man shouldn’t, acts scared to talk to people etc. It just logically doesn’t make sense considering he would’ve had to have done all that stuff in his previous life. If it’s an isekai, it defeats the purpose if the person doesn’t use any knowledge or experience from his previous life.. that said, it didn’t hamper my enjoyment too much, but it’s definitely a head scratcher. This show had no reason looking as good as it does from a production standpoint. The art style is so bright and colourful. I found it extremely pleasing to look at it, character designs have to be some of the best this season. The action animation is surprisingly really good too. One of the fights from the first two episodes is actually in my top fights of the season. It’s a very well put together show. Kantei Skill’s a must watch for anyone who likes nation building, politics or just wants to see a mature fantasy story that doesn’t treat you like you’re a 14 year old boy looking for a power fantasy. It was a joy to watch every week and I’ll miss it a lot. Kantei skill gets 9, out of 10.

“As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World”(aka Kanseiskill), I guess short titles are out of fashion, is what happens when You play pokemon with black jack and whoo… I mean… with people. This show at first glance has a unique twist on the isekai genre in the form that our MC isn’t a walking apocalypse capable of one-shotting entire battalions of enemies. I say “at the first glance” because despite the fact he has no combat skills he is absolutely capable of one-shotting entire battalions, just not in the “normal” way. I’ll get to that. Before we start Iwould like to explain something. I will be talking about “plot” and “story”. Many people use those terms interchangeably. I’m not one of those people, so to make sure everyone is on the same page… I use the definitions for “plot” and “story” as Lisa Cron describes them: “What happens in the story is the PLOT, the surface events.” “STORY is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result”. I’ll start with this. I really like the story. It’s not very original but is solid. It’s a story about a young (reincarnated) boy who steps up to succeed his father in the time of turmoil, despite his very young age. It’s not exactly a coming of age story but it is close. So why did I give it just 5? Well… everything else in this show is pretty much bottom tier. From writing to logic, characters and worldbuilding. Everything is just so subpar. Let me explain. The premise itself is pretty interesting. A normal, hard working man dies of a heart attack, probably from overworking, another point for karoshi. Instead of the great beyond or the blessed annihilation he is reborn in another world. Of course, because we can’t have anything original, it’s a fantasy world. In this season it’s a bit more on the low fantasy side of things but don’t worry, there is still magic just not as prevalent as in some other isekais. He also has a special skill, he is able to appraise (I bet You’re shocked, nothing, especially not the title, could prepare You for such a twist) people to find out their… stats. Yes. Stats. Like in a video game. Another game logic bullshit. How original. Still… It appears that only he has such a game related bullshit skill so that’s a small blessing I guess. You don’t get bombarded by RPG crap from every corner. Because he’s the heir to a noble family he intends to use this OP skill to gather the most powerful people to serve him (Do You see why I said he still is able to one-shot everything? Yeah… he gets OP minions that are 100% loyal to him and have no intention to betray him in any way, shape or form). So far, so cliche but it’s not total travesty and I would even say it’s interesting. For 12 episodes we see Ars - our MC, grow both figuratively and literally, from a kid to a teenager who has responsibilities thrusted upon him. Good thing for his band of diamonds in the rough. Shame they don’t stay in the rough longer, it would make for a far better story and plot. This is my main complaint about the show: It mixes pretty solid, sometimes even very good story beats with a really shitty plot. If I had to give numbers I would say it’s a 7/10 story held back by 3/10 plot. The first episode (don’t worry I wont be talking about each episode but I need to talk about the first two in a spoiler free way) is actually good. We start from a pretty shitty (for our MC, for the viewer it’s pretty solid) place, yes his father commands a small army but as we later find out it’s not all burritos and strippers. There is a war coming and his troops lack mages and most of them are solid, but not great, as soldiers. We even get a scene where the MC sees that one of the soldiers is terribly miscast as a melee fighter but has pretty high skills in archery. Being a 3 year old child he uses his baby charm to manipulate the soldier to try a bow. It of course goes awesome and the soldier becomes an archer. That is actually a pretty solid scene. We get to see how his appraisal skill works and what kind of stats he actually sees. The thing I’m a bit iffy about is that some stats have numerical values and others just plain old letters (from D to S). Also there is something really badly explained. One of the stats he sees is called “prowess” and appears to be related to combat and has numerical value. But… he also sees proficiencies in things like archer, infantry, navy etc. and those use letters as their value. It’s never explained how those two stats interact with each other. Can someone with high prowess but D in archery be a skilled archer? Can someone with very little in prowess but with S in infantry be a killing machine with a sword? It’s never explained and bugged me every time it was mentioned. Back to our scene with the soldier. Apart from showing us how the skill works it also is used as a way to show the soldiers that Ars is capable of “sensing” someone's talents. I can actually appreciate the show don’t tell approach. The soldiers aren’t told by someone that this 3 year old kid has a knack for telling people's skills. They are shown that. He is even questioned about the incident by his father. It’s a nice piece of setting things up for later. So in the first episode we get a goal for our MC, setting up his reputation for later and in the second half we see how normal people see him and even get the first OP follower - Rietz (an ultimate non-magic weapon in a form of a teenage ex mercenary)for the protagonist and his faction. All in all it’s a solid first episode. If I had to change anything I think I would make the father be more reluctant to test out the teenager that his son brought to join his faction, after all the father seems to be at least a bit racist towards him and I would like that aspect be more explored. The second episode is both my favourite and ,unfortunately, the episode that heralds the fall of good plot writing. Don’t worry, the story is still there and even has some good moments but plot wise… It’s all downhill from here. Ars visits a nearby city and witnesses the social disparity between the poor and the rest of the denizens. It gives him some much needed perspective on the world and that perspective is even more reassured at the end of the episode. The second thing he learns is that finding people who would actually be useful in his endeavour is hard. Extremely hard. He is able to find a girl with S rank magic skill but she refuses to work with him. I loved that. It gives him something he wants - the girl to join his faction, and a very solid obstacle for achieving that goal - she’s taking care of some young kids on the street. I was actually hoping that making her join would be an arc in of itself. Something to show both her character and his devotion to his goal. Something to make him work for an amazing reward. Yeah… no. That would mean the writers have skill and intellect to actually create something meaningful and we can’t have that in an isekai. He actually recruits her in the next episode after Rietz solos an entire slave organisation and Ars gives a half assed, feel good monologue that is absolutely misplaced in this scene (by the way, slavery seems to be legal, because of course it is). It is there just to show what a good egg Ars is. And just like that he gets an OP mage on his team. Does anyone still harbour illusions that this show will give him any kind of challenge? Back to the mage - Charlotte. Why did she decide to go with them? Because of the save? That’s not exactly a good reason when You are responsible for four very young kids. Both she and those kids are orphans, beggars who live on the street. There were no scenes indicating that those kids are competent enough to be left without a babysitter. Yes, she asks Ars to send her pay to those kids but, send where? The orphanage that we see in a later episode didn’t exist yet. It’s stated that Ars was the one who built it. You don’t build things just like that, there was some time when those kids were left alone to their own devices and with the slavers in town I have a hard time believing they weren’t sold by the time the orphanage was fully functioning. Of course the kids were fine because the world revolves around Ars and his decisions and we can’t have him make a bad one. Even as a goddamn 3 year old child. No. Because he's the MC of an isekai he must be the embodiment of perfect decision making from the get go. Now You understand why I say that the writing goes downhill after this. Now, for the main problem. The goddamn repetitiveness of the process that’s shown when he recruits someone. It’s the same 3 out of 4 times. He meets someone who has OP AF stats. He wants them to serve him. They start iffy and usually have a reason why they don’t want to. It sounds solid and I would agree but the solutions to those problems are almost all banal and cheap. Plus they rarely solve the main problem, they just mask it with a bandaid but it seems that's enough for people to change their minds. Well… that and a metric shit ton of plot conveniences topped with the fact that 4 out of 5 of his closest allies are far beneath his social status. The only person that is his equal is his fiance but I wouldn’t call her a full fledged member of his coterie. All others are either beggars or just simple people. Why? If it is some kind of effed up social commentary that people below a certain status can be amazing it misses the mark completely because it’s classist in the opposite direction. Apart from his father and maybe 3 more characters, everyone that has a noble status is portrayed as mediocre at best and total waste of space or cannon fodder at worst. Why? Nobles have far more opportunities to train, learn and gain skills. Why would only the poor have OP skill levels? My guess is, recruiting someone who is closer in status to Ars would require a writer who actually knows about logic and has enough imagination to make it believable. My second gripe with the show is Ars himself. I know I praised some scenes with him and the fact he has a goal. The problem? He has zero plan to achieve it. His idea of creating his naive-ville is to just recruit people with amazing skills. That’s it. I’m not even talking about a long term plan. He doesn't even have a short term one. About half way through the series he becomes the lord of his domain and… changes absolutely nothing. No new edicts, no attempts at social changes, no economic revolutions (something that maybe a little he would know about from his past life). Nothing. He just goes through the motions. When he’s presented with an obstacle he asks his coterie what to do and does that they say with little thought. I get it, it shows that his followers are competent and have skills and insight that he lacks but for fucks sake. He was shown to study hard everything about this world. He should at least present them with his own plan. He is supposed to be a leader, he has to show initiative. Nope. He always acts like a naive moron. He has no personality whatsoever. All he is is kind, and the worst kind of kind. The kind that can do nothing wrong and for whom the world bends over backwards. In all 12 episodes he made zero bad decisions. Every decision he made was ultimately a good one. Even if they were stupid as fuck like assaulting a slavers shop with just one man. Because that man was Rietz it all turned out dandy but the plan itself was idiotic. Without Rietz he would have nothing to “convince” the slaver to “sell” Charlotte. And that brings me to his coterie. They are absurd. Each and everyone of them is a god-like creature in their expertise. Rietz is basically unrivalled in melee combat to the point where he can just solo an entire slave organisation. Charlotte, despite never using magic, can create an amazing explosion on her very first try. Rosell is intelligent and has knowledge about almost anything. He even taught himself to read. Apart from some artificial crap they all go through when they meet Ars they also have little to no character and are embodiments of perfection. Why? Why the fuck would anyone think that’s a good idea. A character at the end of their journey that is OP AF is a solid choice. Once we see all his hard work. His being OP is a reward for his suffering, hard work and all the tears, blood and sweat that he sheds. Main thing. AT THE END OF HIS JOURNEY (not life mind You). Charlotte, Rietz and Rosell had some inconveniences but we did not see them work for anything they have. They are all just naturals at what they do. Why not show Charlotte struggling to control her magic? Make her hurt someone, preferably Ars or his father. Let her have a crisis about that and show her struggling with her inner thoughts and feelings. Let her fall and show us how she gets up. She doesn’t have to do it alone. Let Ars help her, but make her do most of the work. Why not have Ars injured after being assaulted when Rietz is away fighting? Let Rietz have his own crisis and show how he wants to be punished for something that’s not his fault. Let me see how he deals with the fact that he can’t always protect everyone and maybe has a different approach to serving and protecting Ars. Risell is a kid. A kid who goes to war and sees things that he shouldn’t Give him PTSD. No. What we get are 3 fully functioning powerful adults in teenage and kid forms. It’s all so… boring. There are no stakes at all. Why would I care about a show that has no stakes? Like I said. I like the story. A story about a young boy who wants to create something (even if it’s naive) and has to step up in times of turmoil is a solid idea. Hell… the moment when his father shows him how inadequate he is to go to war and command his forces is amazing. It breaks Ars mentally. It proves the point in the most painful way possible. It changes the way our MC sees himself and it’s awesome. It’s a brutal wakeup call, something that he really needed. This is the moment when plot serves the story and it’s damn good. If the whole show had this kind of relation between story and plot it would be amazing. Unfortunately what we got is a story that is mostly separated from the plot. A lot of things use the “And then this happened” and not the “And because of that, this happened” way of telling its plot and story. There is also no good reason for this to be an isekai. Ars previous life never comes up and changes nothing. Despite being an adult trapped in a kid's body he acts like a kid almost all the time. To be fair I can see why someone would like this show. It’s a bit different at least on the surface to be considered a breath of fresh air in the stale isekai genre. It uses a lot of cheap tricks to invoice emotions in scenes that don’t really deserve them but a lot of people don’t have a problem with those kinds of tricks. I do. At the end of the day I stick to what I wrote earlier: It's a 7/10 story held back by a 3/10 plot.

Welcome to another episode of: Why the HELL is this isekai? Let me preface by saying it's a fantastic series, but let's talk about what's the main point of an Isekai anime. It's to utilize the knowledge from our world in a more permeative setting, thus bringing unlikely scenarios like pitching a dragon against a rocket launcher. If we take out the first minute of the first episode, this anime has ZERO isekai elements attached to it and becomes a relatively decent low fantasy story. Recently the concept of Isekai has been reduced to either: 1. Gain some bullshit OP ability that nobody else in the world have. 2."Wow everything works just like a video game!" with the more stupid ones even having the HUDs and skill points. 3. They just want to have isekai in the title, nothing the MC does differs from people of this world. This series falls victim to all three to some extend. First, instead of having a good backstory or world building, MC's bullshit (but not really OP) high fantasy power is granted when he got isekai-ed into a low fantasy world. Then the power manifests in a way that can only be applied to video game logics, with different class and skills accompanying a numeric value and rank to each one. And finally he does absolutely nothing special with his previous life's knowledge, except for some obscure references inside of his own head. I usually rate shows very generously, so as long as they don't bore me to death they earn a passing grade. That being said the show is an easy 8/10 with great visuals, story, and character design. But I'm inclined to give it a 7 or even 6 due to the massive wasted potential, the literal clickbait title, and the lazy attempt at giving the MC special power with the excuse of Isekai. As a true Isekai connoisseur who would watch any isekai no matter how trash they are, this is both a surprising delight at how good it is and a disappointment at the fact that THIS SHIT IS NOT ISEKAI.

I debated over giving this "Mixed" or "Not Recommended", but the fact that I basically was letting the last episode play through on secondary monitor while browsing the internet (I don't do that with good anime) to just "get it over with", made me re-think a lot about how I felt about this anime. I will give this 5/10, mostly because I think it has some good parts, so you should watch it and make up your own mind, but still "Not Recommend" it to balance it out, cause I can. And now, the extended edition of the review: ----------------- -----------------The MC has gotten worse as the anime progressed. It's almost like the writer was planning to make the MC "grow" into a man with all of the drama about him learning how to fight, take responsibility and adjust mentally to the reality of war and death, but suddenly was told to turn MC into just a regular anime kid who does nothing but yell and overacts to every situation till the end. Maybe that was the plan from the start, and if that's the case, this has to be the dumbest writing decision since someone shat out the script to Moonrise and "The Unaware Atelier Meister". This show went from me looking forward to the MC growing strong, to me hating him for being a brat that just cries and whines constantly even at most casual situations (like, being chased by his own allies for fun). That and this is just a generic harem anime at this point where the writer is getting off on "stronger women" lording their talents over men. You can tell the moment that happens, when characters start becoming way too unrealistic in what they can accomplish. For example, Mireille (a character introduced at like end of the fucking season) is the most pointless late addition to the team that just does what everyone else does, but drunk. But really, let's talk more about the MC. ------------------ ARS..E THE MC ------------------ Side-characters can be meh, but what really makes or breaks these Isekai shows is the MC. Ars (aptly named) doesn't use his ONE fucking talent properly, and uses it less and less the longer the show goes on. Are you telling me, the kid who set out to make his lands strong, didn't bother hiring most of the talented people from the empire, like the "smith" or "engineer" we can clearly see HIM see, during his talent hunt? Imagine having the ability to just see everyone's talent, and then you spend the next few years just hiring like 10 people to be either no-named soldiers or your "strategists" (read=better fighters with average strategies), while ignoring every other talent, like an amazing smith, engineer, chemist, etc. Even his "strategists" didn't tell him to actually look for talented people like those to prepare for incoming war. Over the years, they do nothing but go to fucking wars which the MC obviously is too cucked to take part in, so he just stays at home and never uses his ability to look for more talent to even reinforce his fucking 10 ppl army. I think at the end of the show they had like 30-40 people "army" and yeah, it's THAT stupid. Keep in mind, the MC has one talent. ONE. FUCKING. TALENT. Really, he's an idiot at basic strategy, godawful at fighting, cannot give even basic inspiring speech to his troops, cannot inspire others through his heroic deeds, and the one talent he does possess, he doesn't even use it most of the time. In-fact, I think the writer and director actually forgot he had that skill as the show went on, because I'm pretty sure he doesn't even use this skill in the last few episodes even once. To make it worse, the writer at one point makes it look like the MC will grow up, and become a man, only to turn him into a raging, whining little kid the more the show progresses. The older the MC got (he was like 12 by the time the show ended), the more childish he mentally became. MC went from someone who could have had an interesting growth to an ultimate cuck who cries and screams constantly at everything. There are kids who are forced to grow up in the real world because of garbage parents, an awful society they were born in, forced to survive and take care of their siblings through wars and poverty. Hell, even the MC's first "retainer" is one of those kids. The fact that MC just gets more and more "bratty first world teen" than learning from the people he hires, is just awful writing on a whole new level. I mean, that fucking first retainer even tells the MC that he can't help poor people at one point, the writing is that stupid. Anyway, I was going to rate this show 7/10, but half-way through, the show became too stupid and cookie cutter anime trash to be anything more than 5/10. Still giving it 5 for what it could've been. What a waste.