Review of The 8th Son? Are You Kidding Me?

The only way this could be worse is if it were morally repellent as well as bad. But bad it most definitely is. The plot is generic isekai, with a generic salaryman protagonist who is about to eat his dinner one evening suddenly finding himself a generic young noble (Wendelin, or Well) in a generic fantasy world, attending a wedding banquet for one of his new isekai brothers. The only way it could be more generic would be for the means of transport to be Truck-kun, but the transportation is never explained, or indeed investigated at all. Now the opening set-up actually appears fairly promising despite allthis, for a couple of reasons: firstly we are informed that the situation is politically sensitive, since if our protagonist starts displaying unusual abilities it could trigger a succession dispute within Well’s dirt-poor bottom-tier noble family (and the fact that this actually plays out at the end of the series is one of the few things we can give credit for), secondly we get a decently played-out sequence where he is trained up in the woods and hills by a mystery mage who obviously isn’t all he appears, with a bit of emotional pay-off at the end.

This takes us to the end of episode 2 and sadly i’ve all but run out of good things to say:

Well next attends a generic adventurer training school where he meets a generic party – 2 potential harem girls and one fall-guy. He doesn’t really talk to them though, or anyone else for that matter, so the relationships are totally devoid of significance. He’s powerful, he rescues them, they want to party with him; it really could not be more perfunctory or less interesting.

By this point the pacing is all off, and the supporting cast are impossible to care about, but it gets worse. Over the following episodes we are treated to a spectacularly disjointed pair of stakes-raising fights (over in seconds), spectacular wealth and nobility for Well, and an engagement to a new harem member – while the existing hangers-on (who he still has barely exchanged words with) do their very best to stay in the party. Which has not actually done anything as a party thus far.

We are now halfway through the series, and having given the MC everything on a plate, including a flat-packed adventuring party/harem, the writers were apparently asked what the hell they thought they were doing and we do get a bit of relationship building and a basic dungeon-dive episode. Sadly however by this point you’ll be mainly wondering whether the poor CG is worse than the animation, which is mostly of the ‘zoom-into/pan-across a still image’ or ‘still-image-apart-from-one-guy’s-mouth/robe-moving’ variety.

We do get another Harem girl, but she has no detectable personality other than 'hungry'. No, really.

The series rounds-off by resolving the lingering political issue around Well being the 8th son, which shows there was at least some direction, but it is all very by the numbers and the final confrontation is over in seconds (again), thanks to the power of love or something. At least you can watch something else now.

Overall then, we have bad art, bad pacing and terribly under-developed characters and relationships, interspersed with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them fight scenes that abort any tension or sense of threat you might feel coming up. At most you can say that perhaps half of the episodes are reasonably coherent and the OP has an appropriate feel to it, but that really isn’t enough to salvage the experience.