Review of Record of Grancrest War

I actually dropped this one and had to go back to it. Superficial shit---- Art: 7 It's not bad. Just look at it. It's very pretty most of the time. Sound: 7 Decent and on the pleasant side.And... done.

The meat----

A good summary of this show? Generic fantasy land and it's hero fighting generic fantasy darkness villains.

Characters: 4

This show has a ton of characters and the ratio is high even for its episode count. The problem with them is, some just fulfill tropes. Others are bland and stereotypical for their role. As for the main characters, they often can be judged as simple and that's about it. Theo for example, is effectively your typical goodie-two-shoe hero. This is fine if everyone else made up for it... but not quite. You get your typical brutish warlords, your typical magical girl mages, and amongst them, a few expies (of Fate/Zero's Irisviel and Fate/Stay Night's Rider Medusa namely) and not a whole lot of depth.

Most characters do not have a past, Theo and Siluca themselves have only a few flashbacks but not a wholly impactful past to the story. Growth-wise, Theo's power levels grow, but as his maturity started out at (near) perfect levels, that never went anywhere (it had nowhere to go). This takes away the bond that you would normally develop with characters that you watch for 24 episodes. To give a contrasting example, Sheryl Nome and Ranka Lee grew leaps and bounds as far as maturity and personality growth was concerned in Macross F.

Granted, the characters were at least not cringe to watch, but there was seriously only powerlevel based growth which is very dissatisfyng.

Story: 5

The level of drama in each event or story arc in this show is abysmal. The level of hype that could have been generated could have been much higher. For something that takes place in a fantasy world, one way to get the audience to bond with the world and thus build hype for world events is to let us see the lives of the residents in that world and its rules. They have told us what we need to know in terms of how the super powers and magic works. What they rarely, if ever did was bond us to the very world and its existences itself. The best done part was the liberations by appealing to the IRL audience's love of life, liberty and right to pursue happiness. Yet everything else was just cliche good vs evil in the land. The Irisviel expy's fate was very obvious from several episodes before it actually happened, for instance. Yet, we dont see her enough to really bond to her to feel the emotions that the characters on the screen seem to feel because she rarely got screentime before the scene in question.

Adding on to the problem of hype is the way that they build it up with various tricks in the story. There is a certain lack of reactions possible when the reactions generated by various trick deeds of the characters are highly contrived. From the naked speech scene, to the short teatime talk between Theo and his friend that got one of them to turn a complete 180 from what they've been doing up until that point, it is very difficult to suspend disbelief and immerse into the reactions that follow when the ideas were very contrived. It makes each of those feats look effortless when in truth they could've been built up to be a lot more dramatic, and thus generate a lot more hype.

Enjoyment: 6
It's still a pleasant watch but there are many parts that are lacking in the way it should have been done.