Review of Banished From The Hero's Party, I Decided To Live A Quiet Life In The Countryside

This was so fundamentally horrible that I just couldn't resist writing a review to recommend people not to watch it. I usually just write reviews for novels as far more time is dedicated to read through a novel and you truly get to get immersed in everything the story has to offer compared to the short-lived and often disappointing format of anime adaptations. This is... really, it's almost infuriatingly bad, yet you're left feeling more melancholic about how this garbage had resources wasted on it instead. The music is crap. The setting is badly executed. The characters can't make you give a single f*ck, not evenone of them. The story is just childish at best and the animation feels both low budget and low skill.

We have the protagonist, the dude lacking both will and motivation, who spends every day preaching how abandoning responsibility is great and clearly having no idea of his own worth, not even telling his "hero" sister that he was leaving because the most idiotic in the party chased him away. Now he just spends his time in some godforsaken land where he aims to be an apothecary and live every day the same.

Then we have the big boobs that somehow found him there and forcibly moved in with no warning. This girl loves him and they quickly start flirting, kissing, hugging and whatever. We get some tiny snippets of backstory every now and then. Overall, she's also a boring character we have no incentive to like and that doesn't act human in the least.

Go on and we have various villagers who are only there to be hurt, healed and be friendly. Not a single one of them has even half decent character development, they might as well be villager A and B.

Villains in this story are either instantly finished off or easily screw themselves over, none of them appear particularly evil or interesting. Even demons are either soulless shells or morons that just seem to be yet another stupid human.

His sister, the hero, and the entire hero party are also cardboard cutouts. The foolish half-evil but mainly stupid sage who apparently want to get into the hero's pants or something, some emotionless add-on heroes and then the hero herself, the emotionless brocon who can't do what she wants because the oh-so horrible blessing dictates she be a hero without feelings, completely unappealing.

There's nothing happening in this story. Nothing. Just some forced events. It's painfully slow, every episode seems to be filler, nothing interesting happens and worst of all, none of the characters have anything resembling a soul, it's not funny in any way nor does it even have a real story. We don't get any build up, imagine suddenly starting an anime at the end of a story and just showing some filler episodes of the after-story.

We're supposed to care about the characters with just some words. Life sucks for this guy because he doesn't have a good blessing, this girl is awesome because she likes the protagonist and has big boobs, this hero is pitiful because her blessing actually secretly sucks. He's done so much to deserve this now slow life. Nah, sorry, it doesn't work like that. If you don't show us gradually why we should like them and build their characters up by the actions they take, no one is going to care about them. This is a story of side characters that aren't explained properly, it's just shoved down our throat.

Adding insult to injury, these characters are basically unlikable from the get go. They don't show much in the way of emotion, not a single one of them. All of them are painfully robotic in everything they do. The animation makes a great job of emphasizing their soullessness by being horribly bland, there's no real change in expressions, people are just static dolls, even supposedly emotional scenes are ruined by crap skills. They don't even properly animate a lot of stuff, like just making fluctuating brightness values for almost static candles, not showing movements, instead just the end position, cutting out most parts and for things like lightning, they just phase in and out 1-2 frames of yellow light at high value rapidly, it also does stuff like just moving around a static hand on a static map, not even changing lighting or perspective slightly. Everyone moves like some damn sloths at best. Truly, the animation serves to make this already bland show a disaster piece of shit, I didn't realize just how shit things could get if BOTH story and animation was this bad.

Can only believe this was written as some escapist fantasy by yet another overworked japanese dude or just someone jumping on the bandwagon of that cliché. The blessings are just a shoutout to people's talents and fates to usually just be a cog in society and the protagonist is simply a burned out dude who has given up on life and is now avoiding reality. Not sure about the studio, but if this is their usual quality, they should shut down or boot most of the staff and hire people that actually know what they're doing and doesn't do everything they can to cut down on everything that makes an anime an anime, that is, animation.

Not recommended, ever. This isn't a 7/10 show, this is a 5/10 show by skewed myanimelist rating standards, 2/10 or 3/10 at most by normal standards.