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

With the flood of fantasy anime that have been coming out lately, you really need to make yourself stand out if you want to be remembered among some of the more unmemorable titles. Banished from the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside isn't an MMO based one per say, but it makes you feel like you're watching one. I sense that this is the initial appeal, as it will allow you more freedom to get away from MMO slow start. The problem is that this series really has a difficult time keeping up the momentum aftera decent start to their tale.

Story: Banished from the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside tells of an adventurer, Gideon Ragnason, who is part of the "Heroes Party". They're basically an MMO group where everyone has very defined roles and the 'Hero' is his own sister, Ruti, with the goal of defeating the Demon Lord. Everyone in this world is blessing with a Divine Blessing, which is basically everyone's special ability or something that defines their job. Gideon is defined as a D-Rank adventure, which means he's not the greatest party member in terms of physical skills. When the rest of his party ups their rank above his, one of the members, Ares, deems Gideon unfit to be in the party. This causes Gideon to abruptly leave the party, create a new name for himself known as Red, and open an apothecary in a small village known as Zoltan.

The series itself makes you feel like you're watching an MMO because they do so many things that many MMOs usually add in - special abilities, announcing spell casts, naming each Divine Blessing, etc. Like I said in the intro, this is actually just a fantasy anime that has multiple MMO themes included. It's weird, but really, it's just a different world than we're used to seeing. That in itself isn't bad. All major characters have interesting Divine Blessings. When Red finally starts to settle into his new life as an apothecary owner, Rit, who once travelled with the Heroes Party, seeks out Red and they start to live together in a new life.

The start of the story is actually a ton of fun. Red's new adventurer in this, seemingly, quiet town takes some interesting turns and his willingness to help others makes you realize he's a fantastic character. The story takes on a romantic aspect when Rit enters the picture and their goal seems to be going for a really wholesome romance story. The minor hiccup in all this is that romance is very hit or miss. Some nail that goal while other moments feel really awkward. Late into the story, Ruti's party starts to get involved with Red and Rit's little story, but I was horribly underwhelmed by it. There are a lot of aspects that feel like they're missing important points and the writing in general feels really sloppy. For example, does everyone's weapon have to magically break in the final bunch of action scenes? The ending is fine so the decent start and poor third quarter balance off each other. (6/10)

Characters: I really liked Red. He's really smart and, a fantastic character to teach us through the story. He has his own talents that aren't really combat driven, and these characters can thrive, when done well. Rit has more combat experience behind her character, but I feel like they could have shown more about her backstory. I did find it odd that they didn't really do anything special with her offensive abilities though. Ruti, as said earlier, is the Hero, which allows her to gain immense power, but is unfortunately void of many human emotions as a drawback. Due to this, she comes as having a bland character, but her condition does improve as the story carries on.

Side characters mostly consist of either the heroes party, or villages that interact with Red. The villagers are all fairly close to each other and it creates a village mostly free of conflict on its own. This really does link to why the start does so well, but the story starts to fall apart at the back half because the Heroes Party gets to Zoltan, and everything just becomes a mess. (6/10)

Art: I wasn't the biggest fan of the animation style here. The romantic parts actually look decent, but the animation starts to fail during the action scenes, most noticeably during spell casts, which almost never look good. It just doesn't feel like this was given the amount of care that many other series were, especially when you consider this to be a fantasy anime. (5/10)

Sound: The other aspect of presentation - sound - wasn't anything special either. The OST wasn't noticeable and the OP and ED play out too similarly. I wasn't the biggest fan of the VO cast either. Aaron Campbell (Red) was probably the best of the bunch, but Dani Chambers (Rit), Brandon McInnis (Ares) and even Tia Ballard (Ruti) didn't feel like they had everything in it for this one. They all had very awkward moments and the lack of polish kind of matched the questionable art. (6/10)

OVerall Enjoyment: Banished from the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside was pretty mediocre from top to bottom. It had a very promising start to it, but not only did they halt momentum, but the story just had way too many holes in it. Presentation didn't help it's cause, as there were too many random blips present. There were decent moments throughout the runtime, but there weren't enough highs to even off the lows. (6/10)