Review of The Rising of the Shield Hero

I need to preface this review with a few short facts about myself and about how I found this series to make my biases clear. First of all, I am not a fan of Isekai. It might be an ignorant thing to say, but to me Isekai is a genre where some loser kid goes to some fantasy land and is usually nearly immediately overpowered as hell. It serves as a power fantasy for kids who were bullied or whatever. It tends to be needlessly edgy and also tends to throw an absurd amount of anime gril puss-puss at the protagonist who usually has little-to-no personalityand is blatantly an unlikable loser. It's a self-insert story for people who feel disenfranchised with life. That's fine, but it's not for everyone and it's certainly not for me.

Secondly, I found this series due to the massive amount of outrage culture perpetrators who were absolutely flipping their shit online about it being offensive and misogynistic for casting a female antagonist early in the series. This amused me greatly, as censorship warriors can sit on it and spin.

Now to move onto actually reviewing this season of anime. There will be light spoilers for the first few episodes, but if you are reading about the series there is an extremely high chance you've already heard about them, particularly with the constant flame-wars on social networks like Twitter over the controversial topics they cover.

I feel like this series started fairly strong and then petered out quickly. Naofumi Iwatani was just some guy, not an abject loser or a hyper-nerd as main characters often are in Isekai anime. Just a college guy who (slightly more than) occasionally indulged in some of the more "nerdy" hobbies like reading fantasy novels or playing similar. I could relate a little better to this than other Isekai protagonists I've seen in the past.

We begin with our main character accidentally stumbling into this fantasy world and learning that they, in fact, summoned him to serve a purpose for the kingdom. He is tasked with fighting off waves of powerful monsters that will attack the kingdom in the coming months. The summoned heroes are immediately given parties and a sizeable funding, setting them up to rather rapidly become overpowered compared to other inhabitants of the world.

However this is all turned on it's head when a female adventurer who joins Naofumi's party falsely accuses him of sexual assault after drugging him and pilfering his funds. This is where things got interesting. It's not a common plot element, a false rape accusation and it's a rather touchy and controversial topic in it's own right.... From here Naofumi, hereon referred to as "The Shield Hero" or just "Shield Hero" for short, barely escapes with his life. He is ostracised and left party-less and poor, quite a predicament for the defence-focused Shield Class he has been forced into.

Long story short The Shield Hero works extremely hard to make even the most basic of advancements in this hostile world where he is truly an underdog, before he is approached by a slave merchant offering to sell him slaves to form a party with. Shield Hero ends up purchasing himself a slave girl, something that the people look down upon him further for, despite slavery being semi-commonplace in this world. Heroes are expected to be better than the common populous.

From this development, the series explores an interesting moral dilemma as Shield Hero treats his slave better than himself. He feeds her well, equips her well and overall treats her well. However he does continue to force her to fight on his behalf. This raises a good deal of questions on the morality of his actions. Is it justified because it's all he can do or he's pretty much S.O.L.? Can one argue his use of slavery is ethical as he rescued an abused slave and improved her life drastically. But one can equally argue that slavery is abhorrent and should never be tolerated.

Unfortunately after the first few episodes things begin to go downhill. Any musings about the morality of Shield Hero's actions are quickly abandoned. Far too quickly the series comes to the conclusion that the ends justify his means. And not only that but Shield Hero all-too rapidly becomes vastly overpowered and obtains a second female for his party, heavily hinting at this becoming another one of THOSE tacky harem series down the line. More and more it becomes a generic Isekai.

Moving on to the art... Well I personally like the style and I think what is drawn, is drawn consistently well. However it all falls apart with the addition of truly HORRENDOUS CGI that completely destroy otherwise well animated fight scenes and boss designs. Like most CGI in weekly anime, it's extremely clunky, poorly rendered and just all-around terrible. Only big budget anime films have ever pulled CGI off well (see Dragon Ball Super: Broly for an example) and even then it's rare. The fight choreography is quite enjoyable too, with some of the boss fights being truly reminiscent of classic JRPGs. The soundtrack also is rather good, doing a good job of capturing the mood and conveying appropriate emotions with rather enjoyable Openings and Endings, something I am personally endlessly picky about.

Shield Hero started as a series with a whole world of potential to be one of the best anime I'd ever watched, but rapidly dismissed that potential in order to take the easy route. I still enjoyed the experience of this anime, but I cannot give it a higher score than an Eight and even then I feel like I'm pushing it a little on the personal bias of heavily enjoying the first half and enjoying the flame-wars surrounding it.