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

That's what you get when you try to squish 4 ln volumes into 13 episodes. The slow parts — the slice-of-life, the romance and the character drama — were good, though messy sometimes. The problem lies within the "big plot". While being generic, it somehow still doesn't make sense. The twists are hard to follow and the hype/drama moments completely miss and come out laughable since it takes literally 2 minutes of screen time between a character making an epic entry to the scene and being dispatched. Some of the characters' motivations are an absolute mystery (either because it wasn't adapted or the original source wasmissing it in the first place), while the others' are not only primitive but also repeated over and over again.

The last arc's mess could be written off as a poor adaptation, but the whole drugs/politics bulshittery makes you really question the quality of the source material since it didn't have nearly as much moving parts and action scenes as the latter arcs while lasting approximately as many episodes and still being the same mess.

Overall it's disappointing on multiple levels at once: first, how much of a confusing mess everything beyond the slice-of-life bits is in this show; and second, how much better this anime could've been if the story (and by that I mean the original as well) only stuck to either the chill slice-of-life or the character drama instead of trying to implement everything at once with some kind of evil-plot epic saga on the side — it just seems redundant, especially with such poor execution.

Despite that, I must admit that I had a blast with first 5 episodes or so.