Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero

Shield Hero was one of the only animes that I've finished the WN and Manga, so I was originally ecstatic to learn about its adaption, hearing about all the promotions, and push for it to be watched. Knowing the source material, I knew it had "potential" in my opinion for it to become the best Isekai yet. It had wonderful characters and cute character interactions, that could make many tear up. Unfortunately, with its later rushed story, director's lack of understanding of the story, and lack of character development, part of it came out flat. The anime started out well with a nice one hour episode,explaining fairly well the situation in the story. It does a good job demonstrating the controversy the main character, Naofumi gets involved in, which is especially relevant in our modern era of political correctness.

What I did not like was how the character introductions were handled for the two most important supporting cast. These episodes were highly important to the WN or Manga, were focused on Naofumi and his relationships to his new companions. Due to Naofumi's hardships, he had problems trusting people and had no one to rely on, as almost everyone was against him. With his Shield being his only weapon, and having an attack of only "one," he ironically needed to depend on people and worked hard to use any advantage he had to make himself stronger.

This goes to another very important note that I did not mention really before, it is that in this fantasy world, it has an interface system, and you could do many things that were similar to virtual worlds in video games. Although extremely important in the source material, as Naofumi would study up on and use to his advantage in battle or even in general day to day life, this was barely touched upon. The director himself admitted he doesn't understand video games, and left all of that pretty much all to the art designers to add in interfaces. What that also means is that any sort of game mechanic for the world was rarely shown. Naofumi is a strategist who led people, and this took a lot away from both his character and the world building.

Instead of that, the director said he wanted to focus pretty much solely on the drama and character relations. I wish I could say it completely accomplished that. Except, such powerful and important arcs on the two main supporting characters, to make up for lack of episodes, much of their adventured instead was rushed into simple flashes and compilations. It showed the highlights of their relationships well, with my complaint really being that they could have followed through with it better, especially with more time. Now, considering that, it had some admittedly good episodes, with it beautifully drawing from Naofumi's struggles, and connecting it to his relationship between his two loyal companions.

It is from here that the shows start to decline because of its lack of attention to the details in worldbuilding and characters. The following first episodes were very good but without the background knowledge of the world, it does not connect you as well as it could to the characters. In an Isekai world, it is a whole new world with different cultures, especially with races like demi-humans. The show tries to remedy this by mentioning a few facts, but that does not compare to demonstrating a lot of these issues firsthand. Even some characters felt a little forced on the viewers to make them loved and seem extremely nice.

Finally what really holds Shield Hero back from standing out as a great Isekai is the last few arcs. With all my previous complaints from earlier episodes, which could have been partially overlooked, these episodes were multiplied by terrible pacing and confusing dialogue between characters. For some strange reason, some characters particularly were weirdly and uncharacteristically "much" nicer and more forgiving. The very last few episodes felt even more rushed and out of place, with I believe the intent to leave an opening for a new season. Which I am not exactly looking forward too, considering, much important content that was extremely relevant to the future plot of the source material was basically thrown out the window or poorly explained, so I have no idea how they will accomplish that.

Overall, the show is very good, and I would still say above average (7.5-8). Of course, I'm going to be one of those and recommend you read the Web Novel. But as for the anime itself, it started off strong, with a very unique take on the genre. This sadly slowly declines with following episodes due to its rushed story and lack of important world-building details; which although on the surface works nicely, it is questioned with some logic flaws and characterizations. With the show having some beautiful moments between some of the interactions of the main cast, it failed to have anything beyond the closeness of their relationship. Lastly, the ending episodes felt even more compact with a lot of earlier issues, except with worse pacing and confusing character actions, and failed to address a lot of key plot points for later in the series in a clear and concise manner. The show created some very lovable characters, and I wish we spent more time to get to know them better and their world better. Hopefully, if there is a continuation of this show, many of these flaws will be addressed and presented in a smoother manner.