Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero

Honestly I've been wanting to share my thoughts on this show for a while now, but every time I say anything even remotely critical on crunchyroll, I get at least 5 downvotes, hopefully I will be able to present my honest thoughts and opinions here without too much backlash. For this review I think it's best for me to simply walk you all through my memorable experiences whilst watching this show and present my thoughts regarding my fairly low score. To begin, I think it's safe to say that this show started strong, it had an engaging plot and initially subverted my personal expectations in a veryinteresting way. The fact that the main character, who is supposed to be a hero, is simply shunned and disliked by almost every individual he encounters, was very interesting and that paired with the fact that he seemingly possessed significantly less experience in the world than the other heroes was also very interesting. The name (at least the English translation), 'The Rise of the Shield Hero' certainly seemed to ring true by the end of episode 1 and, as a lover of fantasy in general, I was excited for the coming episodes.

The show all-in-all was adequately enjoyable for me from episodes 1-4, simply because the main character was learning his place in the world, making friends and experiencing significant hardships. It is in episode 5 with the introduction of 'Filo' that my interest in this show truly began to waver. This character is quite simply ridiculous. I mean, it is a giant bird that can turn into an 11 year old girl, who is also really good at fighting for some reason and I believe at one point wanted to 'mate' with the shield hero. I mean what? I get that it's anime and crazy occurrences like this happen all the time, but for me personally this character took all suspension and seriousness out of the show for me. For example when Naofumi uses the 'rage shield' despite that being a fairly exciting moment, every time I saw the giant bird making loud 'attack' noises I was completely draw out the world and reminded that I was watching a guy with a shield being followed by an entourage of young girls (Raphtalia aged, but she was introduced as a young girl). I'll briefly move on from Filo as I could honestly describe my distaste for this character for the remainder of this review and instead move onto Melty. Melty as a character is not actually that bad, my main issue is that she just seemed to help confirm a fact to me, that slowly became more apparent to me with every scene involving Filo. That fact being, whoever the author of this show is, has clearly written this as some sort of fantasy for themselves. Consider Raphtalia, I think it's safe to say she falls in love with the shield hero. What about Filo? Well she said in one episode she wanted 'master' to be her 'mate'. Then consider Melty. She initially didn't have all that much interest in the mc, but as time went on, she blushed whenever he showed any sort of attention to her. This, taken with the fact that both Raphtalia and Filo possess a 'slave seal' that forces them to do whatever the mc wants, honestly just really made me reflect on what I was watching.

The whole story with the 'pope' was also ridiculous. I'm not going to discuss that whole disappointing mess in full, but I specifically remember a scene that actually made me laugh out loud. It was the scene in which the pope was fighting the 4 heroes in that, I guess pit? And he used magic to, I guess put himself into the mirrors of the strange church he made, he then span around the mirrors laughing and waving his weapon. It looked so stupid I couldn't help but laugh.

I have many other issues with this show, but perhaps I am simply not the target audience, I mean I remember at one point a guy summoned a giant dinosaur, that then had a fight with a giant bird, but the bird also turned out to be a small girl like filo, perhaps this show was simply never aimed at me?

I would like to quickly add that I have no issues with female characters of any kind, my main issue is that every single member of the mc's 'party' is either A a young girl, B an animal/human cross that was once his slave, or in some cases it's both. Also, after watching the final episode of the series, it appears that the mc will now be joined by another, you guessed it, girl! But this time with green hair, instead of purple, blonde or brown. Yet again, no issue with the gender, my issues lie with how unvaried and predictable it is, which seems to be a theme throughout the show.

There were of course some redeeming moments and I did genuine enjoy some parts of the show , for example, the early adventures with Raphtalia, the first moment with the rage shield (it started getting a little old later on), the first introduction of glass (and the iron maiden shield) and many other small moments that I think are unnecessary to go into.

All in all I would describe this show with one word, a word that kept coming to mind every time I finished an episode, 'terrible'. Despite some of the redeeming moments, the overarching story and some major characters caused it to suffer too much and I personally would not recommend this show to anyone. I think it's unfair to give it a score lower than 5, as for me any show under 5 would have to be almost unwatchable, but I ultimately elected for 6, just simply because of those interesting earlier episodes.

Thank you for all reading, if you agree or disagree with me I would love to here your thoughts.