Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero

What had a promising start ended with a whimper. Shield Hero's pacing by the middle and end of the show was atrocious and painfully slow. Characters would literally have full-blown monologues and conversations in between moves (both big and small), and instead of feeling like I was watching an /animation/I felt like I was watching a game with turn-based combat. I swear one of the major fights in the show had the antagonist repeat the same line of dialogue 6+ times across two episodes and the show only killed him off when it realized the episode's runtime was coming to an end. The plot just progresseswithout any meaningful worldbuilding or character arcs despite it trying to go for a grounded approach to its storytelling. Which is all made worse with slow, cringey "generic anime style" dialogue that doesn't respect the watcher's time or intelligence.

On the technical side of things: the animation is serviceable even with the corner-cutting tricks they do like generally having narrow framing or simple back-and-forth with talking heads, or some nitpicks I have with some scenes like the weird post-processing dimming they do for certain "flashy"/bright fight moves. It doesn't excel in this department and it doesn't fail it either, but the poor parts stick out like a sore thumb. Same goes for the audio.

Shield Hero had its moments with all of the above but they come too few and far between. This show isn't even worth finishing. Watch Mushoku Tensei instead