Seirei Gensouki - Spirit Chronicles

Title:Seirei Gensouki - Spirit Chronicles
精霊幻想記
Overall:Unevaluated
Keywords: , , , ,
Notables: Animation - TMS Entertainment
MATSUOKA Yoshitsugu
One day Rio, an impoverished waif in the slums of the capital city of the Kingdom of Beltram, vaguely realizes that he is the reincarnation of someone named Haruto who died in a nasty collision of a bus with a train. He has confusing partial memories of his past life in a place known as Japan. As if this weren't mind-blowing enough, he soon finds himself entangled in a plot to kidnap a Princess. His good deeds and remarkable potential as a magician earn him a place at the Beltram magical academy.

12 episodes
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Unevaluated Stretch [series:4340#628]
(Three episodes watched):

After Haruto makes a vow to protect 'Mii-chan' even if it kills him, I had guessed that what was going to happen was that we'd get a story of a guy who winds up as a good ghost and protects a girl in modern day Japan, and that seemed kind of novel and interesting. But it quickly became clear that what we would actually get was another isekai story. While not radically original, I did get the impression that maybe this show was making slightly more effort than most to tell an intriguing and unusual tale, and as a result I was left feeling curious about where this rags-to-riches story would go. I wish a little more had been done to make this plausible and realistic, because in some ways it remained predictable and unsurprising, but oh well. At least for once this show acknowledges that even in sword and sorcery worlds, slums and poverty would likely exist. Not surprisingly, Rio happens to be 'overflowing with quite a large quantity of magical power'--that is pretty much a basic requirement for main characters in isekai anime (I wish somebody would make one about a character who has little or no magical ability but manages to tough it out). Surely Mii-chan will turn up in this alternate reality just like Haruto/Rio has; I found myself guessing which one of the numerous female characters who we are introduced to might actually be her (probably the pink-haired girl), and I was curious how that would be handled. I was doubtful that this would be worth watching to the end, but it could happen and I decided to watch episode two.

For the most part episode two was pretty predictable: despite the condescension of his arrogant noble classmates, Rio advances steadily through his hard work (and memories of himself as a college student and traditional swordsmanship trainee in Japan). And the way Rio makes use of the things he learned in his previous life is interesting. He has been reincarnated rather than just transferred to an RPG-like isekai world, after all. But episode three quickly deflated whatever hopes I still held for this show. I had actually been looking forward to it, but when it finally arrived it was so simplistic and unoriginal that I decided to drop this series altogether. Rio does nothing to fend off the the contempt of his 2D classmates, even though he seems to have some sort of amazing power--not magic, but 'spirit' power, whatever that is. How he acquired these abilities is beyond me; I don't recall any mention of them previously. It occurred to me that even main character Rio is largely a stranger; his personality seems to consist entirely of the argument that he must be the good guy since everyone else is rich and arrogant. It was very black and white without any shades of gray; Rio and a few close associates are good, everyone else is bad. Neither Mii-chan nor the prospect of a cat-eared assassin coming after him (he'll obviously persuade her to join his side) was anywhere near adequate to make me want to continue watching this show. Basically, the message I got was that this show isn't very good and seeing as it is getting worse it is unlikely to get better.

Last updated Wednesday, September 22 2021. Created Thursday, July 08 2021.

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