Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero

Somehow I managed to make it through the entirety of this badly written wish-fulfillment fantasy dreck. It actually starts off solidly as an underdog story—finally, an isekai with a main who isn't lavished with praise and treated like the "chosen one," but is seen as human garbage—the four heroes are a part of the religious practices of the world, and the shield hero is depicted in a villainous manner, the equivalent of a devil, so it's embedded in the culture before he even arrives on the scene that he will be despised. The king disrespects him, the one party member he gets at the startis a spoiled princess who falsely accuses him of rape in a plot to steal what little he has. The other heroes now hate him, and everyone else hates him. They also point and laugh at him because he has a shield instead of a weapon. "HAHAHAHA! WHAT A LOSER!" (It's actually very OP and takes away any real strategizing for the most part.) There's a huge amount of promise for a compelling show here.

The main has to hustle to build himself up from nothing while the other heroes are given great equipment, money, party members, and status. This terrible predicament initially leads to him being deeply untrusting and having a number of shortcomings and becoming a miserable drunk who lives in the forest and eats berries and mushrooms. It's a difficult rise to the top. It would seem like he's a character with good potential at first, but he quickly reveals himself to be just as one-dimensional as every other character.

He actually becomes a solid merchant, and his slave-turned-party member Raphtalia makes me think of Spice and Wolf, but the economic aspect is much simpler here, and instead of the exoticness of a WOLF GIRL for your fetish—"IT'S NOT BESTIALITY, MOM!"—content, or the other—ahem—more respectable choice of a CAT GIRL, this is a freaking RACCOON GIRL. How do you expect her to be the waifu when she's going to be rummaging through trash cans at 2 AM? Also, she starts off looking like she's 7, then she's 12, then she's 18... or something? She's gonna be an old granny before the series even ends at this rate. The relationship between them is probably more believable than any other in the series, seeing as both have a lot in common as outcasts. Do they have chemistry? It's pretty much...

Raphtalia: Oh, I'm not someone who deserves to be by Naofumi-sama's side UNGHHHH. I luvs u UwU I want to do slave role play with u tee hee.

Naofumi: *Sigh.* What kind of wish-fulfillment is this? I asked for a CAT GIRL!

Then there's a little girl the main hatches out of an egg (in retrospect, this is really weird and creepy XD), and she's like a BIRD or CHICKEN GIRL or something, and I was just wishing he'd put her back in the egg and find a new party member instead. Dumb and embarrassing comic relief character. Although the series probably gets noticeably bad before this point, this is where I felt the gut punch.

A harem forms around the main, and these two girls constantly bicker with each other about how they will marry him. Yeah, the little girl is basically the "I want to marry daddy when I grow up!" meme, only she wants to lay eggs for him instead.

The other princess (named Melty, lol) also falls for him. Pretty sure the queen is going to hit on him soon enough. The main hilariously keeps on this like "noble and selfless air," and acts like he doesn't notice the affection they shower on him, and he's like "Yeah, I'm gonna head back to my world after all of this hero nonsense is over, so I don't have a rabid RACCOON GIRL dumpster diving and bringing banana peels into the house and waking me up every night, and I'll no longer feel bad about eating chicken every time I lock eyes with the CHICKEN GIRL. Can't even eat eggs anymore thinking there will be a CHICKEN GIRL inside."

Motoyasu, the spear hero, has the most development as an antagonist. But the other two heroes are at least presented as smarter and more honorable, vouching for the shield hero when he's obviously wronged. But by the end, they all are portrayed as equally pathetic, dishonorable, and useless and are minor characters, even though increasing their importance would make for better conflict and might balance out the shield hero—or return his underdog status. Another ridiculous aspect of their sour relationship is during a segment when they're fighting a powerful enemy who is gathering magic in protracted SPIRIT BOMB DBZ-fashion to unleash a devastating attack upon them; they pick this time to bicker, which is pretty annoying, and I don't see how any characters could be this stupid outside of anime, but this isn't supposed to be comedy anime fodder, like Konosuba.

The characters are uniformly goody-two-shoes... with maybe some kind of shyness to overcome or something like that. Or they're stupid and worthless... or they're consistently irredeemable cads like the girl who cried rape or the petty, stupid, and gluttonous king who always has that ruddy drunk-face—they generally don't have any specific reasons to do what they do. Then there are some side characters to puff up the main's ego a bit: a staple for the wish-fulfillment genre. Let's also not forget our exposition dumpers.

The problem with the series is that it's more about satisfying weird fetishes and wish-fulfillment with semi-flashy visuals, and the characters and writing have no real depth. The author basically sets up the most satisfying revenge fantasy for the main to enact on the king and the bad princess, and he cops out real hard—just changing their name like they belong to him and are his corrupted Tamagotchis or something—*Insert tedious humor here where the characters always call them by their old name, then correct to using the degrading names.* Might have been interesting to take a darker turn.

The best part about this series is obviously Naofumi's struggle and underdog status, so as a writer you would have to do some serious juggling to maintain that interest. At first, his shield seems weak, adding to the underdog nature, but pretty quickly he realizes how overpowered it is. He loses the underdog status after about half the series, becoming the most powerful character, and then we're left with another boring isekai. It's the equivalent of a logger cleanly cutting through a tree with his chainsaw, hitting a nail hammered into the trunk by some treehugger loon, then the chainsaw blade explodes and rips the poor guy's face off, and he dies—the dreadful season 2 is the hell that follows. I begrudgingly tried 3 episodes of that, but it was more tripe than trope.