The 🔥Roasting🔥 of The Shield Hero

are you tired of lowbrow low effort gimmick isakai whose protags can 1v1 frieza by the end of the prologue do you yearn for a waifu who doesn't need plunging cleavage and an exposed midriff to pull your eye away from the gaping void where her personality should be but who can still totally pull that off one time in the beach episode because i mean you can't you can't not have a beach episode come on well look no further than three years ago because that's when rising of the shield hero arrived to prove that isakai anime doesn't need any of that crap to be wildly popular and move a bunch of merch or to be like a pretty okay tv show more or less uh okay i'm pretty sure i see some stuff glinting behind some backs out in the crowd so i think i better qualify that statement and fast if you're not aware god i envy you shield hero is one of those anime that starts a lot of arguments some folks champion it as one of the premier examples of what isakai can be when it rises above base pandering while others deride it as a prime example of the worst kind of pandering the genre has to offer it's been called both the best and the worst anime of 2019 and having just watched it to make this video the only conclusion i can reach on that is that both sides of that were just saying it to make the other one mad because it's not that good i mean it is really not the show's idea of organically setting up the solution to a future problem involves the protagonist randomly stumbling upon an empty box next to a clearly printed warning sign about how extremely dangerous the cursed seed it used to contain is in a random dungeon hallway that he just happens to have to go through to get to a cave full of magic crystals that a dressmaker needs to create a transforming costume for his shape-shifting chocobo daughter there is a whole mess of deus in this machina but even with some mighty glaring writing flaws and a couple of questionable plot points it's also nowhere near that bad all right let's just get the elephant in the room out of the way right away the thing that the shield hero now fumi iwatani needs to rise up from whilst the spear sword and bow heroes he was isokite alongside receive endless praise no matter how badly they [ __ ] up is that the first person who joined his party turned out to be a backstabbing mean girl who stole all his [ __ ] and falsely accused him of something very very demonetizable turning him into the biggest pariah in the entire kingdom that it is still his job to save from a magic apocalypse so now he's got to figure out how to do all that and clear his good name using only a non-lethal weapon with no money this is all things considered a pretty effective dramatic hook with which to start a story it forces the hero to sweat for every inch of progress he makes in stark contrast to the free ride your average isakai give their protagonists while surrounding him with three rivals who do get that luxury premium isakai experience just to rub it in plus it instantly paints the villainess of the piece as one of the most fun to hateably heinous personalities in anime history and it does so without fetishizing the taboo subject matter that it's leveraging for that drama which if you're wondering why i'd bring that up as a positive point in its favor you clearly do not watch much isakai on the other hand in real life which i make anime videos to avoid so i'll try to keep this brief the widespread statistical misconception that false accusations of that nature are a common occurrence can make it extremely needlessly difficult for actual victims of that demonetizable thing to come forward about what happened to them and when fans of shield hero start drawing comparisons between real human beings going through stuff like that and the purposefully one-dimensional villain of this fantasy cartoon even if they're just joking people who subscribe to that toxic false narrative can and will take it as a validation of their worldview and behavior just like they do the show itself which is obviously a problem but i don't really think it's fair or all that helpful to blame that problem entirely on the anime itself or to ignore all the other aspects of it that might be genuinely good or hilariously stupid because there's a lot of those we can and should acknowledge that certain narrative elements in shield hero have the potential to do real harm to real people when projected onto reality while also acknowledging that they do serve a useful effective function in the context of the fiction which never claims to represent reality and mainly aims to entertain also we should acknowledge that multimel remark is one of the most entertaining villains in anything ever no [ __ ] has ever been more that [ __ ] than this [ __ ] and the outrageous first impression that this admittedly somewhat distasteful plot device creates is just one tiny part of that it barely even matters past episode four and it's not even the worst thing she does to now fumi a couple arcs from now she's gonna frame our boy for murder and kidnapping with magic crystal ball deep fakes don't you want to move on from this uncomfortable topic so we can joke about the magic deep fakes i sure do so for the sake of this being a funny and light-hearted video about chocobo races and regina george tormenting the peasantry and trying to assassinate her crown princess emoto let's just agree to move past that one admittedly huge elephant and talk about all the other non-controversial parts of this show okay okay obviously now fumi's in a pretty bad position by the end of that pilot episode he was already having trouble recruiting adventurers to his party even before he was branded as a criminal and lost all the cash he could have used to hire mercenaries which is a pretty dire situation for a support maine to be in even without an impending magical apocalypse to worry about in order to solve that problem he ultimately makes the tough decision to buy himself a low-priced child slave named raftalia and train her to fi oh right there were two elephants [ __ ] [Music] so okay yes technically speaking one could say that the protagonist of this anime owns other sentient beings and participates in unconscionable atrocities but that's ignoring two important contextual facts one other people were really mean to him first and two everyone else is doing it i mean no one now fuming knows specifically besides his dealer but lots of other isakai protagonists also own people you'd be surprised and probably a bit horrified by just how common this trope is for a variety of cultural reasons that someone else should examine in a different video from this one please and given that this lazy and insensitive shortcut for establishing a dark fantasy setting and uh setting up harems is a genre trope you can't really put all the blame on this one anime for doing it besides now fumi only resorts to slavery in a moment of supreme desperation which kind of puts him in the same shoes as raftalia or it would if she owned shoes or anything including herself but they both probably would have died if he hadn't bought her it is just that kind of world and you know if you step back and look at how raphtalia and later filo or sentient transforming fighting monsters who evolve as they get stronger thanks to their loving bond with their master it's really not that different from digimon so it's kind of like they just have a different word for digimon in this setting and that word is slave no that didn't help look it's not like he actually defends you can't be saying you think it's okay to enslave others do you even hear yourself slavery's legal in this crazy place and she's been a great help to me but we're heroes in this world we shouldn't behave that way here and you know it you have a right to your opinion and i disagree okay so he does literally make a verbal argument in defense of his participation in and to an extent the existence of the slave trade and he's willing to throw hands over it but but he also works to make the world better for downtrodden demi humans in a lot of other ways so in the big picture if you look at it in a certain light now fumi's really fighting against slavery just in a way that lets him keep owning and using and profiting from his slaves and also every time his reputation improves that directly helps the business of the one slave trader who's effectively his campaign donor it's called incrementalism people get with the program plus you can't forget now fumi's a really nice guy to his slaves i mean he barely treats them like slaves at all except when he makes them work and takes all the money they're more like his daughters really and you know the kids work on bob's burgers so that's okay the guy feeds him he clothes them he dotes on him like crazy head pats and everything and he trains them to fight giving them the strength they need to survive and thrive in the kind of harsh world that would enslave them to begin with they really have more of a found family dynamic going on than anything built more on mutual respect than the threat of excruciating pain through a magic shock collar titty tattoo if they ever disobey him though admittedly that is also part of it but raphtalia chooses to get her shock collar titty tattoo put back on after that idiot spear hero emancipated her like a jerk would do as a sign of her loyalty to naophumi because as she herself points out he never abuses his power over her he only ever used the slave crest on her for her own good like when she was hesitating in the face of mortal danger that he put her in without warning her and also this one time later when his chocobo daughter is annoying him by hiding somewhere he uses it to find her like a car alarm in a crowded parking lot yeah okay maybe now fumi does a teensy scooch of child abuse on top of the smidge of slavery but if you can ignore that and also the nagging question of if you should ignore it his relationship with raphtalia and filo is incredibly sweet and wholesome it probably sounds like i'm being facetious but i really do mean that though sorry i forgot to mention there is a third smaller elephant no master now for me we can't kiss being pregnant i'm sure he'll pet me and brush my hair and become my mate forever become your mate mating needs marriage luckily no one is better at ignoring that elephant than now fumi himself who has no romantic interest in his slave daughters whatsoever not even after raphtalia grows boobs though that is literally the first thing he notices about her when he finally realizes she's grown up at least if you believe the cameraman but later when she asks him what he thinks of her sexy bikini in the beach episode which is there because you gotta have a beach episode you can't not have a beach episode he only thinks about how easy it will be to swim in he has raised these girls since they were little kids even if that was just a couple months ago due to how demi humans work and he has absolutely no intentions of grooming them okay he does physically groom filo's feathers but that's actually different now admittedly having a protagonist perpetually deny the advances of every female in the cast is a sneaky trick that many anime which don't want to be labeled as harems use to sort of have their cake and [ __ ] it too but we don't know for sure that that's what this one's doing and until such a time as i personally see now fumi usagi dropped that particular ball which i'm hoping is deep enough in the light novel that the anime never gets to it we can fold ourselves up in a warm cocoon of denial and pretend like it's just sweetness and lightning but instead of cooking they stab monsters hell the animators even explicitly encourage that kind of denial by capping the season off with the two of them hugging but from a camera angle that kinda makes it look like a kiss maybe so the nature of their relationship is ultimately left up to your personal interpretation kind of like inception or should i say incestion no no i should not have i'm very sorry i'm also sorry if i've given you the impression with all this roasting that i don't like these characters because their dynamic really is the best part of the entire show raphtalia and philo are in love with now fumi but they're not obsessed with them they both have their own stuff going on as characters which he helps them with but has nothing to do with how much they want to smooch him and if you're thinking that's not anything special that's just competent writing you should watch more isakai no wait you shouldn't but if you did you would not say that sort of thing so flippantly and you know what else even when not judged by isekai standards raphtalia and philo have pretty good story arcs raftalia has a lot of complicated trauma in her past a childhood cruelly torn away by the waves and then evil humans that's left her with a strong desire to not just rebuild what she lost but to build it up bigger and better into a bright future for all of her people demi-humans worship the shield heroes of the past as saviors while the human supremacist church of the three paints them as the literal devil so becoming now fumi's apostle essentially is a lifelong dream come true for raphtalia and represents a kind of hope that her people haven't known for literally eons filo's of just a spoiled baby at first justifiably since she just hatched like last tuesday but her bright naive outlook does create inroads where the cynical now fumi is more liable to burn bridges and the first person who joins their party you know of her own free will is the nice little sister princess whom filo is the first person to befriend her name is melty mel remark which you might think would get confusing but don't you worry the show has a fix for that which i'll tell you about later philo also happens to be a chosen one the destined successor to the chocobo queen which is why she's such a chonker of a chocobo and why she can turn into a real girl sometimes but jeff they're called falols i know now the reason philo gets to be queen of the choco bows is related to buffs that she receives from now fumi raising her but the trials she needs to overcome to ascend the throne are hers to face alone which i quite enjoy because her character design animates beautifully and she's the best part of pretty much any action scene she's in also i think it's real funny how the feather crown she's granted turns into an ajo gay in her human form oh ah pro tip if you're gonna google what aho gay means make sure you don't get it mixed up with ahegao raphtali and philo are strong well-developed characters and rough as the implications are their feelings for now fumi do make sense at least to a brain on anime because he's genuinely no lie a pretty stand-up guy except for the one atrocity he refuses to stand by when the weaker abused or neglected by the powerful his priority with both filo and raftalia isn't just being nice to them so they'll be useful for him but actually preparing them to be self-sufficient when the waves are over and he finally goes home which unlike most isekai protags he actually wants to do now fumi has a healthy relationship with his family and with his otaku hobbies which he enjoys without letting them get in the way of his life and while he doesn't really want to be a hero he does manage to represent a fairly admirable heroic ideal again minus the thing while the other three heroes are busy showboating abusing their authority over the common man and competing for glory in battle now fumi focuses on protecting the weak and raising them up so they can eventually protect and provide for themselves and each other he truly is a support hero working on the ground level to support local communities and encourage people to be self-reliant instead of blindly trusting individuals with authority and power whom the show almost always paints as either incompetent fools or self-serving monsters the one exception being the queen whose above average ruling ability is stretched so thin she can't even keep her own useless husband on his leash the show has a kind of collectivist outlook that heroes and leaders are only effective when they see themselves as servants of their people instead of trying to lord over them and that's reflected in how most of the regular folk now fumi meets on his journey are honest and friendly and generally pretty good at what they do they pitch this anime to you as a grim dark revenge fantasy but that's maybe 10 of the experience at most if you actually look at most of naofumi's interactions with other people it's really got more of a people are basically decent if you give them a chance vibe with the notable caveat that the other three heroes do not count as people coming up next on mbtv it's part two with heroes like these who needs villains right after this quick commercial break hey you with the giant chicken my grandmama is sick in bed from getting owned too many times in online video games i need to get her this energy concoction before her eight o'clock fortnight sesh or she will surely die sounds like there's no time to lose citizen hop aboard oh this poor fool bought an inferior energy formula lacking in antioxidants and focus aminos if i give his grandma this she'll surely just get owned all over again luckily i can use a powerful magic incantation to transform it into the superior g fuel here goes abraca promo code basement for 30 off an order of any size at gfuel.com ah yeah grandma still got it winner winner giant chicken dinner wow that stuff really works it sure does [Music] when now fumey first picks up the dusty old light novel that transports him to raphtalia's world its prologue promises a story with four heroes of equal import and stature who all have their own essential part to play in the epic tale to come this is complete or [ __ ] the only thing these guys are here to do is be wrong so it seems more impressive when naofumi is always right to their credit the sword bow and spear heroes are at least differently stupid and incompetent from one another for reasons that are actually fairly interesting when you dig into them while each of the heroes was transported to this fantasyland from tokyo japan they all came from different tokyos in three different parallel worlds where this fantasyland is the setting of three different popular video games motoyasu the spear hero knows it as a world of warcraft-esque mmo that he and his popular hot friends bonded through in high school and college to itsuki the bow hero it's an epic single-player rpg that he spent many a night escaping into and for ren the sword hero it's the futuristic full dive vr mmo in which he honed and proved his elite skills as the deadliest blade dancer in all the land pretty much his whole character is just one giant kirito subtweet each hero's relationship with the strange new world around them is shaped some might say skewed by the medium that introduced them to it motoyasu was primarily invested in his version of the game as a social experience and mechanical challenge so he's only really interested in having fun with his new adventurer friends and claiming the sort of easy adulation that theme park mmos hand out like candy everyone who's not in his party is basically just an npc to him so he doesn't really put much thought in before say breaking the seal on an ancient cursed seed and trading it to some starving farmers for a drop of clout wren who first found this world through a vr experience that was basically indistinguishable from actually being there is completely desensitized to all the magic and miracles around him and even more incapable of seeing the world and its inhabitants as real than the spear hero as such his motivation hasn't really changed at all he just wants to be the strongest guy the king of the gamers and he goes around seeking out the strongest possible enemies and murdering them to accomplish that without even considering that maybe the dragons he's slaying might have feelings perhaps feeling strong enough to create a curse that would resurrect them as vengeance seeking zombies he also hasn't fully clued into the fact that there are things in real worlds that vr mmos don't simulate like germs and even when they probably won't turn into zombies it's not a good idea to just leave corpses lying around itsuki who got attached to this world and presumably even some characters from it in an immersive single-player context is a little more inclined to see it as a real place but he's convinced himself that it's his special destiny to be the main character of that real place he's gonna be a hero nay a revolutionary and fix all of this society's problems but he's still got that gamer mindset where the solution to every problem is kill the bad guy and call it a day so he doesn't follow through on any of the liberations he attempts and generally ends up making things worse for the people he's trying to help by not having played a video game based on this world now fumi's at a sizeable disadvantage when it comes to power gaming the system and min maxing his build but that also means he's not coming in with any flawed preconceptions about how stuff's supposed to work and because he first found this world through the most immersive medium of all literature he's fully ready to accept it as its own reality that exists independent of him in a way the others aren't which leaves him as the odd man out to clean up after all their idiocy this is legitimately interesting commentary on how different forms of media can shape our perceptions of the stories they tell and it gives shield hero a lot of material to build some really strong character arcs out of once each hero recognizes and begins to learn from their failings or it would if now fumi wasn't the main character and the only one who's allowed to do that ever the best the rest ever get is learning to stay out of his way oh he lectures them on their mistakes boy does he lecture them brings their fuck-ups up every chance he gets to the point that it would seem petty if they ever actually listened but they don't not even when they're almost murdered because of their complacency and shown incontrovertible evidence that everything they thought about him and this world are wrong they're [ __ ] idiots at the start of the anime they're [ __ ] idiots at the end of the anime and they're even bigger [ __ ] idiots in the second season which is kind of a problem because now fumi and raphaelia have basically run out of character arc at this point and the season could really use literally anything that remotely resembles forward progression to distract us from how interminably boring the bootleg re-zero white whale plotline is but we'll get to that in hottest trash the way the show keeps adamantly refusing to surrender naofumi's very special boy status and give its other so-called heroes an ounce of real growth is easily its most glaring narrative shortcoming and probably the thing that will tear the entire story apart if they can't fix it i can't even enjoy the kirito slander i'm so annoyed by it because with a bit of work i think they could be really fun characters there's a bit in a war council scene where they get into a heated argument about what the optimal character build strats in this world are that any gamer will find hilarious and there could be way more endearing interactions like that between them if they weren't so darn busy being completely [ __ ] useless and stupid and wrong and if that weren't bad enough moto yasu's also something of a uh how to put this without getting demonetized discord mod a girl is adorable as you shouldn't have to wield a sword allow me to protect you from now on he is definitely no question the most shittest of the three heroes by a sizeable margin but at the end of the day that's just the same margin you'd find between sloppy diarrhea and a corny turd still the lesser turds do at least have the presence of mind to question princess malty's lies about now fumi kidnapping her sister in the magic deep fake arc after they directly witness her trying to murder said sister and steal her claim to the throne under the pretext of saving her from brainwashing which now fumi predicted multi would do and say and then she responded nuh uh no way i would never do and say that exactly 30 seconds before she started doing and saying it and they were there the whole time and saw all that happen and that doesn't make them suspicious enough to you know intervene with the extremely obvious assassination attempt but they do look into some stuff about the church of the three heroes with the help of some priests from the church of the three heroes who immediately lead them into a trap involving a magic orbital laser but they survived that trap and then arrived just in the nick of time when the church has now fumi and moto yasu trapped down in a giant pit and is about to kill them allowing them to flank the pope and negate the advantage of his op superweapon through sheer number oh no never mind they immediately jumped down into the pit and put it back on now fumi to save them all but still they almost did something there [Music] now you might be wondering why the church of the three heroes would attack its own jesus's jesui in addition to the so-called shield devil and there are two reasons for that the first is that the heroes are such obvious clowns that not even blind zealots who worship the ground they walk on can ignore it anymore and the second is that now fumi is so op relative to the others that it's starting to contradict their scripture and causing people to question the church so all the heroes have gotta go and the pope plans to use a magic multi-weapon with all their weapon powers fueled by the faith of his followers to fend off the waves without them also he's gonna murder the entire royal family and take control of the kingdom which comes as something of a shock to his co-conspirator malty who thought that she was using him as part of her plan to take from her smarter more capable younger sister the crown that would have been her birthright if only she wasn't a sadistic self-obsessed pathological liar who likes to hurt other people for fun or if she was just a little bit better at hiding it but who really needs subtlety when your daddy's perfect little angel who can do no wrong and the tallest handsome popular boy around is too dumb to realize you're using him isakai animes are no stranger to pure evil villains but the idea of injecting this particular mean girl's model of pure evil into that setting is pure brilliance not only do we get to avoid doing the typical cliche demon king thing again but by intruding on the audience's escapist safe space with the kind of petty high school bullying they're probably here to avoid multi is able to draw insane heat from that audience with incredible ease she can also do so much more damage in this setting than she would in her natural habitat because here her popularity translates to real institutional power and enough social capital to quite possibly literally get away with murder the only thing stopping her is that straight-up murder would be way too straightforward and effective of an evil plan let's talk about them magic deep fakes after the second wave of calamity brings with it a mysterious kimono-clad beauty wielding dual war fans who beats the ever-loving tar out of all three cardinal heroes at the same time and then now fumi by himself it becomes clear that they all need to get a whole lot stronger however princess malty and the king have barred naofumi from upgrading his class at the church through a royal decree so now his whole party is stuck at the level cap until they can leave the country yes that is what passes for machiavellian politics in this world when they do finally go to leave princess melty the nice one follows them out to beg naofumi to try to make up with her father but it's a trap before he can even consider the offer the guards she brought with her start trying to chop her head off which now fumi deflects of course before raphtalia and filo go in and non-lethally dispatch the attackers then they take the princess with them on their journey to keep her safe but what they failed to realize is there was a guy at the back recording everything on a crystal ball and then he takes that to the church whose editor mages add blood splatter effects and draw frowny faces on him and raphtalia and then they make copies of that to spread across the land turning our heroes into wanted criminals this is a truly brilliant plan that can only be foiled by literally anybody who knows that it's possible to do that to a crystal ball recording anyone who sees that recording and then bumps into one of the dozen or so soldiers who was supposedly murdered in it or any one of those soldiers either growing a conscience or getting cold feet and coming forward about the conspiracy and of course by melty opening her mouth and saying the words hi i'm okay i was not kidnapped actually thank you but malty and the pope already have an ingenious contingency plan that covers all those scenarios all they need to do is claim the shield hero has a special brainwashing shield that makes people say and believe whatever he wants them to that way anyone who defends him is actually a victim of his evil and if you listen to him and think he's making some good points actually that just means he's getting to you a truly galaxy brain scheme that could only ever be foiled by literally anyone asking a moderately intelligent question about how she knows that or if she can prove it so in this show it's foolproof at least until the queen gets back unfortunately for her that does eventually happen though because of course she could not find anyone who was both stupid enough to fall for her trick and smart enough to beat naofumi in a fight and with his name finally cleared the pope dead and the queen committed to clearing out corruption in her country at any personal cost he's presented with the chance to take the ultimate revenge on the evil princess and her doting dumbass of a dad but realizing at the last second that revenge is bad he instead chooses to take the high road and by high road i mean so i've got a better idea from now on the king's name is trash and the first princess will be called [ __ ] old cray will henceforth be known as trash malty will be called [ __ ] what really gets me about this scene isn't just how absurdly proud now fumi seems to be of himself for coming up with the same prank we all pulled on our pokemon rivals at age six but how enthusiastically everyone else goes along with it multi's mom doesn't just immediately agree with him she goes out of her way to make it worse for her daughter by the way malty often uses the alternate name mine when she's adventuring how about that yeah guess [ __ ] needs an adventurer name how about [ __ ] and while you or i may find this speech to be a little on the cringy side to the people of this world it is so inspiring and impressive that by the end of it literally everyone in the entire coliseum is not just ready but eager to abandon the only religion they've ever known and start worshiping a guy they literally thought was the devil a few hours ago all because he has the kindness and grace to spare his enemy's life and then legally change her name to a slur also she's the spearhero's slave now because slave magic also works as a lie detector and due process hasn't been invented yet now admittedly a lot of that does kind of sound like something you'd read in the manifesto as do a lot of the words that a certain kind of shield hero fan has written about this character on the internet since the show aired i think it's fair to concede that there may indeed be some problemistic dare i say misogynatic aspects to the portrayal of the character known as princess [ __ ] [ __ ] but at the same time she is an incredibly fun gleefully wicked villain who makes every scene she's in 10 times more entertaining simply by being there and i don't want to let some incels inability to separate fiction from reality stop me from enjoying her zany antics and commensurate comeuppance just as much as i enjoy watching regina george get hit by a bus in this basement we stan great heel work also it is worth noting that any elements of sexism there are kinda sorta but not really balanced out in a very girl bossy way by the ultimate moral of this arc which is that the matriarchal society of this kingdom actually works way better than now fumi thought but yeah leave the men in charge for just five goddamn minutes and look what happens i think it's also made a little easier to swallow by the fact that now fumi never intentionally escalates things with [ __ ] or trash in accordance with the bugs bunny principle they're always the ones messing with him mostly unprovoked and he mostly just turns their own schemes against them the only kind of revenge that he ever actively pursues for himself is the best kind living well i mean who's even got the time to plot an elaborate vengeance when they're busy running an adventuring hustle and a traveling merchant side hustle that's right it's the rising of the gig hero [Music] with a natural-born knack for item crafting and an equipment granted gift for scrounging up rare materials now fumi quickly finds that there are more ways for a hero to make a living than simply slaying monsters after he saves a small village from the evil bully princess by winning a wacky chocobo race against the spear hero said village rewards him with a covered wagon which when you combine it with the large farm animal he just won from the slave market egg gotcha plus the sassy brunette animal girl he was already traveling with allows him to pull off a surprisingly decent spice and wolf closet cosplay the series doesn't really have the world building or economic logic chops to make a spice and wool for ascendant bookworm style story work is anything more than a setup for this week's generic monster fight but as setups for monster fights and other rpg shenanigans go having to go to a place to deliver goods or find materials does feel a little bit more natural and believable than your average isokai's and then they decided to go where the plot was happening next it also lends shield hero a mild pastoral fantasy flavor that you don't find in many isakai these days especially combat driven ones and on top of that the anime is able to add some free variety to naofumi's character progression by alternating his quest rewards between equipment that gives him a combat advantage and tools that give him an economic one progression in general is something i think this series handles exceptionally well especially compared to other isekai instead of growing op overnight naofumi builds his skills and abilities along a very gradual curve in a way that satisfies the same parts of my brain as a really well-paced rpg he's always at most one step ahead of or one step behind every challenge he faces and just as it does with the rewards the plot mixes up that positioning relative to his foes from fight to fight so the power fantasy never gets monotonous or feels like he's just steamrolling everything he faces with no effort people with low media literacy stats might even take issue with me calling this a power fantasy at all since now fumi suffers so much and struggles against his opponents and even loses some of his fights but those folks are making the same mistake that most shitty isakai writers do in assuming that power fantasies are just about creating a dude the audience can wear like pants and then giving him all the [ __ ] and super powers but if that's all your story does and you never bother to remind your audience what adversity and challenge feel like then the thrill of victory is quickly lost through sheer repetition and the power fantasy loses its luster fast if you don't believe me just ask yourself what makes you feel more powerful as a gamer hitting a clearly telegraphed weak point on a zelda boss the prerequisite number of times to beat it or finally murdering a fat guy and a lanky guy in a small room in a fromsoft game now now fumi does have the ability to cheat that game and himself with his curse series wrath shield which sends him into a dangerous berserker state with hard-hitting special attacks but the harder-hitting drawbacks of those powers and the serious character flaws they symbolize do make it feel like he's legitimately taking an l when he has to resort to them even if it's extremely predictable that he will every time he's losing and he kind of spams them toward the end still with the waves of calamity both creating a time pressure to force the heroes to progress and serving as regular yardsticks by which we can measure that progress shield hero has the satisfying rhythm of a good leveling system down to a skinner boxy science which makes this a very easily consumable popcorn anime you're never gonna find yourself dying to know what happens next but at the end of most episodes you will feel like yeah i could get one more level before i log off by the way the reason you stop feeling that the second you move on to the second season is they decided to skip an entire training arc from the light novel that introduced several important characters and new abilities which compounded with the delay between seasons is basically like trying to pick up a jrpg save file where you left off three years ago only to discover that you actually played it for two hours while completely blasted last new year's eve and now you have a new party member you don't remember and you don't really know what you're supposed to be doing no matter how fun a game is that's gonna take you out of the flow but that said the fake game systems that govern this world do seem pretty darn fun it feels like the author was trying to envision their ideal final fantasy medieval like the classics but with action combat and fun modern diversions like chocobo racing plus a crafting system that ties into a modified job system for transforming magic weapons that lets you transfer and combine skills between those weapons and on top of that you can combine skills and spells with your party members like double and triple text from chrono trigger i would not want to be the game designer who has to actually implement and balance all that but when you're just making a game system up for a story all you need is to make it fun for your audience to think about and between how now fumi bends these systems to his advantage and the various equipment and skills that his party acquires along the way to each big encounter there's just an insane amount of information underlying every action scene and keeping track of it all is so engaging from the perspective of a viewer that you hardly even notice how pretty much every fight is just dudes yelling the same special attack names over and over again at a big monster until it dies like a filler episode of digimon turns out when you got video game references and kevin penkin music on your side you don't have to bother with stuff like fight choreography or strategy or having characters whose whole thing is their weapons actually use those weapons to hit things instead of firing off easy to animate magic effects shield hero's action is bad actually except sometimes when phelo's on screen i'm sorry not even the epic sax in okami can convince me otherwise although yeah that that sure is a jam good [ __ ] kevin thank you the most narratively significant battle in the entire first season is just the heroes and the anime pope no relation yelling at each other in and out of a big hole in the ground for two full episodes interrupted by occasional flashbacks to power of friendship moments and times now fumi was right and everyone else was wrong aside from that they just trade increasingly super super attacks back and forth over and over until the queen does the surprise attack that randon itsuki should have done like half a [ __ ] hour ago and makes an opening for now fumi's superst super attack which does have a cost severely damaging his body and leaving him with a huge stat debuff that goes away before the next big fight the end now fumi does have to pull out around two semi-clever tricks per battle when dueling other heroes one-on-one since they're usually on relatively even footing and can even deal with his berserker abilities sometimes but those tricks are never quite clever enough to actually win him the day instead every single one of those duels gets interrupted out of left field with some anticlimactic [ __ ] at the last second before a winner can be declared every single one the best animated and most fair fight in the entire show by a wide margin is between a giant chicken and a demon t-rex who both just kinda show up because the writers had no idea how else they were gonna wrap up raphtalia's random out of nowhere backstory dump arc and for a show with four different kiritos in it that's pretty embarrassing and it only gets sadder after the last minute twist that there's actually way more kiritos out there than we thought see after the ongoing issue where people kept mixing up princesses melty and multi finally gets resolved there's still a whole arc's worth of episodes left in the show in which the squad goes to a chain of islands where a double exp event is happening no really that's the canonical reason well that and you gotta have a beach episode you can't make an anime and then not put a beach episode in it like come on and they team up with a lady magician and this cool older scythe-wielding dude to grind up their levels now that they're finally past the class upgrade cap the pair seems oddly powerful for regular adventurers and the mage uses strange incantations no one's ever heard before when the next wave unexpectedly hits in the middle of the ocean which they really should have seen coming if you think about it we learn why turns out the guy with the scythe whose name is lark berg sickle is also a legendary hero from another world i mean another other world which apparently lies on the other side of the rifts that appear in the sky during each wave of calamity lark has been chosen to wield one of the seven mythical vassal weapons of his world and hunt down the heroes of this one so that his own might be spared from the wave of calamities destruction he doesn't relish in the task though and he's a man of honor who sees now fumi as a friend and equal so he challenges him to a fair and square one-on-one duel that gets interrupted before they can finish it by some climactic [ __ ] for once that being the return of the dark and mysterious kimono-clad war fan hero glass who blew the other three heroes away in the last wave and very nearly beat naofumi himself before their duel was interrupted at the last second by some anticlimactic [ __ ] she's a dangerous foe and far more ruthless than the scythe hero so now fumi draws her away from his friends to finally finish their duel and then it gets interrupted at the last second by a barrel of anticlimactic [ __ ] getting dropped on her head by a clumsy moe thing but you know what even as badly as that fight let me down i gotta admit that multiverse twist did get me hyped right at the end the concept of two generic isakai worlds going to war is something i've genuinely never seen before and with that schrodinger's cat out of the bag and the princess out of the way i was for the first time genuinely excited to see what this series would do with everything it had just set up fight the same [ __ ] turtle for five [ __ ] weeks straight wasn't the answer i expected but we can get to that on the hottest trash of spring coming up hopefully in a couple weeks but no promises i got a lot of unpacking left to do as for what i thought of season one on the whole it's pretty okay tv the world building's a little on the boring and generic side outside the video game stuff the action left me with constant blue balls the plot's a meandering mess and it kind of lightly endorses the single most evil institution ever dreamed up by man but the background art looks pretty the music is transcendent the main characters have actual arcs there's hardly any incest in it yet and it's got chocobo races if you're looking for a show that will whisk you off to a fantastical world and introduce you to a host of fascinating characters and creative concepts watch re zero or mushoku tensei or escaflone or sunnyboy or heck digimon but if you just want to feel some medium intensity final fantasy hangout vibes and you don't have the brain power or time to actually play one of those then shield hero will serve you pretty okay with a side of kirito slander it may taste like trash but it's trash that goes down smooth and hits a spot you kind of don't want to admit it hits because you know people will judge you for that and it's hard to entirely blame them in other words rising of the shield hero is the bud light of anime i wonder what the g fuel of anime would be i'm jeff though professional gamer hero rising up from my mother's basement did i actually just say that out loud i'm gonna go you

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 954,268

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, Anime Analysis, tate no yuusha, rising of the shield hero, shield hero, shield hero roast, anime roast, naofumi, raphtalia, malty trial, malty, filo, motoyasu, ren, itsuki, kevin penkin, shield hero season 2, crunchyroll collection, shield hero explained, anime analysis, isekai, isekai anime, anime controversy, shield hero controversy, tate no yuusha no nariagari, bow hero, spear hero, sword hero, roasting of the shield hero

Id: mI1GhinyFzg

Length: 48min 52sec (2932 seconds)

Published: Wed May 25 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/The_Greek_Meat]

Season 2 has been a miss imo

[u/DaRey3]

It’s cuz it went from revenge porn to typical isekai

[u/nosorrynoyes]

I think people will be more upset on this not being a roast as it's just a moderate harsh review.

[u/MABfan11]

almost felt like he was too kind to it at times

[u/[deleted]]

Been an awful adaptation. Just did a podcast episode on it Monday