Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero

I followed this series back when it was a webnove, and after reading it I knew it would be made in to an anime one day. this was LONG before SAO was anime or isekai was the norm. When it finally was announced I was excited "finally it's getting what it deserves." and then I watched it and hated almost every other episode. Anytime the anime was a 1 to 1 it was good any time it wasn't it was padding and was a dumpster fire. Episode 4, 18, 19, 20 and 21 are great examples of this. Episode 4 is based off of onepage of a manga and 2 paragraphs of the web novel. 18 - 21 are based off of 4 action chapters aka nothing happens for 4 chapters and skimming gives the same results.

I don't understand why they did 25 episodes when the first arc which ends in the return of the queen would have fit nicely into a 16 episode season. As you can tell from them doing this the original writing gets drag.

Then there is the main character in the original writing after false accusation against him his personality does a massive shift. He cares little of people, their options, their wants, or their needs. in essence he looses all empathy becoming a more by the numbers or book personality. Everything has positives and negatives, and the actions he takes are for them to be in his favor. It just so happens that those actions are viewed as benevolent while he only views them as transactional. This creates a character that is brooding, dark humor, thick headed, but calculated and able to apply his knowledge well.

The lack of empathy is completely removed from the main protagonist after episode 4. As a result he just becomes a thick headed standard anime protagonist that happens to be perfect in every way. There is part that comes up later in the original writing where he regains his former personality at the beginning of the story. happy go lucky and naive. it's going to be amazing to watch and see nothing change in his personality.

The art is bland and it's obvious that there was no budget for it and the CG while interesting in some scenes was more jarring as the show went on ether do a lack of time or budget.

While the Japanses dub is okay, the English was terrible. Besides Jamieson Price, and Erica Mendez everyone else has done nothing in this industry, and it shows in the voice work. Erhard voice being the most Egregious, I was expecting them to ripe off Patrick Seitz's voice style as Andrew Mills in SAO what we got instead is so bad I can't describe it.

I can't recommend this anime as it is I hope it gets better treatment in the second season but I wouldn't expect it to. This anime got the Mc Donald's treatment and since it did well there is no reason for them to try harder next time.