Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero

I binged the entire show in just a day and I found it very enjoyable in a popcorn kind of way. If you ever feel like you just want to watch something that's easy to swallow but still stimulating enough to be entertaining, this is it. Let us start with the bad side. The story is... okay, but the genre itself has so much built-in stupidity in it. It takes place in a fantasy world that is also fictional. It is high medieval but also an MMO with a GUI built into everyone's retinas. It is real life where people suffer and die but it's alsoa game where you get good boy points when you do fetch quests. It's a world where creatures literally grow older and wiser in days just because they get exp and level up. While this doesn't make it any less entertaining, it does ultimately mean that you are restricted in what kind of emotions the show can pull off. You can't be angry or sad or happy beyond a certain limit. Some character dies tragically for example? In real life it is crushing because there might be literally nothing that you could have done about that as the victim. But in a game world, if you can become essentially unkillable by common violence just by grinding trash mobs for a couple of weeks, getting killed by anything except some interdimentional hyper monster is effectively just your own fault for being lazy. And that means that the script has pretty much kneecapped itself before it even begins. Don't do MULTIPLE LAYERS of separation from reality.

That said, I'd still call it very well written in all other ways. It's just.... nice. Pleasant. The characters that are meant to be relatable are relatable. People generally act like you would expect them to act in such a world. It has interesting worldbuilding and it's especially well paced, every episode has tons going on. The one season itself could have been 3 or 4 seasons in lesser hands. And even after 25 eps, you still want more. It really is a grand adventure.

What comes to the technical execution, I would call it very competent. Only once for literally a second I got the feeling that a far away character had been drawn on top of a poorly animated 3D muppet. Otherwise everything looks beautiful, if not especially original. At one point the fur collar of the MC ruffles in the wind and I just thought... "That's nice... nice.", like the police officers from South Park. The red haired princess has an absolutely epic amount of emotion in all of her actions. Give the guy who's responsible for that a damn promotion. The emotional power she emits in every scene she's in is so strong that you barely notice that every other major character spends most of their screentime in the classic head-on portrait, 1/2 profile or full profile where only the mouth moves over 3 repeated frames lol. Ironically the main characters are the boringest looking and most simply drawn people in the show. Intentional to economize animation cost? The fictional GUI thing looks really great. Why do the studios absolutely knock it out of the park with this thing that seems so ancillary I will never know, noticed the same thing with Slime. In the past writing in such things wouldn't have even been readable, it would have just been squiggles and random words that don't even form sentences. Sound design and music are pretty great. I was never bothered by anything soundling out of place. Especially the first opening theme is pretty banging, though also funny because it's a Japanese college band rap thing.

All in all, I would recomment this show to everyone. All ages and sexes and regardless of preferences. It's like eating satsumas. You might not feel like eating a satsuma right now, but nobody hates satsumas, right?