Review of Record of Grancrest War

tl;dr: A story of military fantasy strategy and politics that feels like it has a tremendous potential but is paced too fast to really capitalize on any of it. Grancrest Senki is a fantasy anime centered around strategy and conquest. Various character’s are vying for the position of continent conquering emperor. There’s a clear main character, Theo, who has his own allies and ultimately his own faction, but the anime spends just as much time developing the other factions and the character’s involved in them as well. Unfortunately, that means that it fails to develop anyone or anything properly. The anime is simply too fast pacedand adapts too much in too short a time. The anime is never completely broken in that it’s never particularly confusing and it’s easy enough to follow along with the plot. The problem is that it’s too fast paced for most anything to matter.

The world is interesting in a number of ways. It’s very systematic, with there essentially being classes, levels that increase upon defeating enemies, organized hierarchies and power structures, etc. The various factions, nations, alliances, and such within that frame work create what feels like a pretty well fleshed out and interesting world. Unfortunately, the world building is tremendously lacking. It never really feels like the anime gives you a good view of the entire world. It basically only explains what it needs to when it’s necessary. The world has lots of different cultures, which is interesting to a degree, but because it goes so quickly through all of them they feel kind of disjointed and it is hard to see how they all fit together simultaneously, especially in terms of technology. The anime is also heavily centered around politics, strategy, etc. so the world’s situation is incredibly important and plays a part in a lot of major plot points. The history and systems of the world itself are also eventually very important. However, because the world is never properly fleshed out, any major twist in that regards feels like it came completely out of left field. Honestly, the only way to tell if something is a twist or not is based on whether the main character’s are surprised by it, because as a viewer most every event that happens is pretty much rooted in elements that are completely new and unfamiliar making everything surprising, and in effect nothing surprising. And also, because the plot is moving so fast, there’s really no time for prior events to sink in before the plot has changed to focusing on something else entirely. And even with the really fast pacing, it was clear that they didn’t have enough time to adapt the story, and thus you end up with weird stuff like a character who is defeated, joins the protagonist, and then dies fighting for the protagonist, completely off screen and that you only know about through pretty random mini infodump like statements from various character’s. The plot also deals with some themes that actually have a good amount of depth and complexity to them, or rather I should say it touches on them, because though they are pretty important to the plot, it goes through them so fast it barely even considers them and thus it’s all ultimately pretty superficial. The ending felt especially bad at that, and to be honest I’m not satisfied with how it just glossed over things to force the ending to seem like a completely happy ending.

Character’s face the same issues. The main characters, Theo and Siluca, had character arcs and relationship development that was decent, but still barely within the threshold of being considered good. Everyone and everything else falls below that threshold. There were numerous problems all around. For one, there were too many character’s and it didn’t develop any of them enough. There were some character’s that seemed pretty cool in the limited time they were allotted that I would have loved to see more of, but that just wasn’t to be. For example, I would really have loved to see more of Petr the worker ant and any possible relationship development with Aishela, as well as any development of Aishela building up to that sudden event where she suddenly mattered a lot. There were also a lot of characters that it felt not being developed enough actively made them seem a lot worse. A lot of characters to put it frankly act really stupid at times. There’s usually some attempt at conveying to the viewer why they made such decisions, with these decisions ultimately stemming from emotion one way or another. However, the personalities of these character’s aren’t fleshed out well enough for the viewer to really understand the character’s thought process, and thus these moments simply don’t land and often seem pretty out of character. The biggest example of this I think is Marianne, who despite actually having some really amazing aspects to her at times, simply seems like a bitch who had no clue what she actually wanted or what she was doing for most of the show, and her romance with Alexis and everything surrounding was just a complete mess. In hindsight after everything is over, it wasn’t as terrible as it felt when it was happening and Marianne isn’t that bad of a character, but how it was conveyed was god awful, especially considering how much of the limited time the show had was spent on it. Deaths also don’t land with anywhere near the amount of emotional impact they should have had. Overall, the only character’s stories that I’d say I’m even remotely satisfied with are Theo and Siluca, with everyone else being tremendously lacking.

The art and animation on this is decent most of the time, but it randomly really takes a major dive at times. And not just during unimportant scenes either. A lot of the major battles look terrible. The design work overall I’d have to say is pretty good though. The OP and EDs were all decent enough both in terms of visuals and audio, but weren’t particularly memorable. The soundtrack is mostly similar in that it fits well enough and is decent enough but without being particularly memorable, though there were some tracks that were pretty major exceptions to that in that they’re amazingly epic and quite memorable, mainly the main theme and variants of it.