Review of King's Raid: Successors of the Will

I usually don’t make early reviews of stuff that is still airing but seeing the poor reception this title gets I just wanted to do it, it also serves as a sort of follow up to my Dragon’s Dogma review. I will of course update this one once the show is over.

Note: There's an update at the end of the review

King’s Raid is a more than typical AJRPG with the most generic fantasy set up and characters archetypes and the gameplay is not really innovating, it’s easy to mix it with a hundred more similar games, I did it when I watched gameplay of it on YouTube, it does have beautiful artwork and great opening songs that’s for sure, and I liked how the game has its own version of the Google dinosaur so you can play it while you wait until it finishes its download.

I wish I could say I did but I don’t have enough space on my cellphone for that and thus I couldn’t even begin to play it after I heard the opening about 20 times so that’s it, this is the end of this.

Wait am I talking about the game here? No this is an anime review. Well I already mentioned the problems that videogames anime adaptations tend to have in my Dragon’s Dogma review thus I won’t repeat myself here and I’ll just point out which ones appear here.

The first and most noticeable thing which made people drop the show is how heavy it is on exposition. The first three episodes tell you a lot about the protagonist, the main girl, the setting, the lore, the background story, the conflict, the political struggles, the racism present in the show, the main objective of the dark elves and how they are treated by the humans.

Absolutely everything here is told instead of shown and it’s really boring to see people talk about these things, especially with the average or slightly above average visuals, King’s Raid is a weird case in this department as it looks like it is not doing anything wrong here yet at the same time is not doing anything right either. The character designs are beyond generic but there is not something really bad about them and there’s one good thing it has over the game and that’s how the female characters have more clothes here, especially Frey. Thanks, we don’t need fanservice to ruin the image of already bland characters.

The artwork does not look bad either, as there are no significant quality drops, but it also has a weird filter, it makes you think that someone set up the brigthness of your screen almost to the max when you are watching it. The backgrounds are also well done but they are as typical as they get. This is a problem I have with most fantasy anime these days but King’s Raid is just in another level, typical jrpg backgrounds as typical as they get, I can’t even say something particularly negative or positive about them. The motions are good when it comes to battles, which in turn have decent choreography but it’s hard to appreciate that when most of the time you see people standing and talking or sitting and talking and even when they do something, said action is shown with lots of still images. Is a weird case where a show is rarely animated but when it does, is well animated.

As for the special effects, well, for once I have to give it to a fantasy anime, it does not have crappy looking CGI attacks nor monsters, a rare thing nowadays, but they are not impressive either, in fact it is the second weakest visual aspect after the character designs.

The second issue of the show is how simple and generic is it, when I read people talking about it, the few who have positive things to say about the show are either people who like fantasy stories so much to the point of accepting every cliché within the genre without a problem, or people who played the game and keeps telling others about the potential it has, and the twist that are yet to come once the adaptation reaches the 9th out of 10 chapters of the game.

Yeah, I don’t think anyone besides Detective Conan, One Piece, Gintama or Pokemon fans can wait that long before the series “gets good” but whatever, this seems to be the main excuse for every show that comes out these days, it gets good once there’s only half the series left, or in its nth season, stuff like that.

Until that happens, if at all, all you are left with is the basic premise of an evil demon emperor which is going to revive in this world and bring doom with him so its time to go on a travel and get a macguffing in form of a holy sword to stop him and his whole army of typical monsters, which are referred as demons in here but they otherwise encapsulates about every monster you encounter in an rpg, from undeads to giant worm things which comes out from under the grounds.

And this premise just can’t avoid having a cast consisting of a noble knight destined to save the world, the kind female healer who is also his childhood friend and possible love interest, a cheerful female wizard who uses fire, wears a red dress (it’s not really a dress but w/e, I don’t know about clothes in english, or in general to be honest), a big purple hat, constantly jokes about the protagonist being and looking completely normal (which is true, but the same can be said about the whole cast), and is just clumsy and sometimes sets up stuff on fire by accident and she also wastes all the money of the party, do you like Aqua and Megumin from KonoSuba? Rejoice for they are combined into one here! If she had only a fraction of their memorability and funny quirks, sadly she doesn’t and is still the funniest character in the show.

There’s also a rogue like assassin but aside from his not really funny interactions with Cleo, the wizard, nothing else is known about this character.

There are some other characters but they don’t appear much, such as two female elves, one who doesn’t trust humans and a member of the party who defeated the demon lord 100 years before the beginning of the story, they are not bad but they appear for two episodes and are not seen again.

Ultimately the most interesting characters are the dark elves, as they plan to take over the kingdom by slowly taking over the royal army for all the discrimination they received in the past, as well as all the crap they get even in the present. This is also the most interesting part of the show, waiting for the moment they will strike…when and if that happens is still unknown. Sadly, this is filler according to the people that played the game, as they don’t appear there, too bad. With that said, whenever they are not angry and just talking among themselves, they have a very relaxed behaviour and typical personalities, the naive kid, the calm and mostly quiet girl, a whole bunch of those WHEN ARE WE GONNA KILL ALL OF THOSE HUMANS type of guys, and the leader, the one who plans and does all stuff and is usually calm until someone try to do something to one of his friends, that’s when he snaps and becomes enraged, nothing to see here either.

Besides the no surprises, there’s also the problem of how poorly writen everything is, a weak protagonist who can’t do anything sets up to kill the demons when a whole veteran squad got killed off, demons appear in the middle of the sacred forest of the elves when it’s supossed to to stop everyone that isn’t an elf, they kill a creature in the same episode it appears and I am supossed to feel sorry for this little creature. Look, I don’t know about you, but I can’t feel sorry for the death of someone I knew for about 10 minutes, even less if it’s a creature that only says one word. When this happens, the hero, up until now useless, goes berserk and kill this demon with ease, what happened there?

Also he is giving one third of the power of this holy sword shortly after that, being considered kind and worthy right after that, but I will recognize how that was pointed out in the show, as for the little creature, is a plant, thus he begins to grow again in the very next episode, so much for the drama. A thing I didn’t like here i show the protagonist got that sudden power up.

A sort of witch appears and almost kill the protagonist while his whole party just stand there, she also hints that the goddess of light or whatever is not what she seems to be but for now that remains unclear. Oh, and she’s also told about the connection of the protagonist and the former hero about 4 or 5 minutes after the party agreed to hide that fact, and no one pointed that out. Afterwards we see her with a one dimensional villain by the way.

And the leader of the dark elves, always telling the rest to don’t succumb to the racism they get on a daily basis when he almost killed a noble and blew eveything up, and this somehow didn’t have any repercussion of any kind. The theme of racism is also portrayed very poorly, very onesided in order to try and justify and victimize the dark elves. Although there are good humans that don’t treat them like shit, most of them act that way only because the dark elves are seemingly helping them fight the demons. The rest of the humans? The worst incompetent scum ot the world.

But the real issue here is how this began, which is shown on the third episode, I won’t spoil what that was but come on, a whole race being exiled because of something only one of them did? And it wasn’t even that big of a deal, is not believable and feels like too much, the only interesting thing in that is the possible connection to the shady sign of the goddess of light which can or not be revealed later in the story.

Side content from the game is also added here, in the form of relaxing moments and slice of life moments, usually ruined by minus encounters with minor enemies. This is supossed to give time to know more about the setting and the characters but the episodes are wasted on silly comedy than fleshing out the main cast. The minor characters who only appear for one episode don’t have anything interesting about them either. The backgrounds can be summed up as being traumatized because of being previously attacked by the demons or in the middle of a fight, common and expected within the setting, not atrocious but not interesting, these episodes just drag the plot and turn the tone very lighthearted for the supossed world crisis that is around the corner, an issue I have with this video game genre in general.

Well, at least the series is not an isekai with otaku pandering, fanservice or harem vibes, and the main party does travel to each important place instead of just teleporting themselves to them or flying towards them, that is something good I can say about it.

A typical series obviously has a typical soundtrack, the kind of which you listen in just about every fantasy work regardless of its medium, but to be fair these tend to be good and is the same case in here. The opening and ending songs are typical jrock/pop but I don’t have a problem with them, they are nothing special or amazing but I like how they lean more towards the rock side, especially the ending song which focuses on the dark elves.

Other than that, King’s Raid is not exactly atrocious, it’s just slow, boring, and has the type of bad writing you usually get in videogames but don’t pay too much attention to, if at all. Is just that, as I said with Dragon’s Dogma, it is easier to notice those things in a medium where plot and characters are the main focus and there’s no fancy looking gameplay to make up for it. At least the protagonist wasn’t kill and revived in the very same first episode or gets a new party member wherever he goes, as it happened in Granblue Fantasy and again, no isekai, no harem, no fapservice.

That aside, the series does not offer something which didn’t happen earlier in about thousand fantasy stories and is thus not worth watching. I rather rewatch The Lord of the Rings, or replay arcade videogames from the 90s such as Golden Axe, Dark Seal or Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara, the first one is obviously way better and the videogames are way more fun, the D&D game even has a better plot with better characters, believe or not, and you have to play with different characters in different runs, going to different places and fighting different monsters in order to get that, which adds to the replay value.

There’s also the fact that the Dragon Quest remake is airing at the same time and features a typical jrpg plot as well, but unlike this one, it has a huge fanbase behind to back it up. So it even has direct competition favored from the get go, because of its long line of videogames, anime, manga and Toriyama art style, such a bad timing.

Will I keep watching it? Yes, because is not an isekai and because I want to see if the dark elves and the possible twists make up for the rough start, after all Warhammer and Warcraft began as the most typical fantasy stuff and evolved into something much crazier later on, for better or worse.

Update: After eight episodes the series got better, but not by much. In terms of visuals, the odd brightness is still there but not as prominent, and the special effects get improved. The second cour has different opening and endings, and I’d say they are better than the first ones.

As for the story and characters, Kasel still goes to meet the different people that can remove the Holy Sword’s seals from him, someone attacks, he fights them and looses himself in the process, gets tired for days and is lectured about the way he fights, again, but this time there’s some time spent on his mentality and background, even if it’s nothing special.

There’s still side content that doesn’t matter much and episodes that feel pointless and drag the plot, plus not one but two recap episodes…in a two cour series. And the take over the kingdom subplot is pretty much forgotten.

Well at least Roy’s backstory is shown, even if it’s nothing special, and the whole thing with the dark elves gets a resolution, it felt rushed and lacked impact but it served in terms of fleshing out Riheet, by far the best character in the show.

Anyways the main story keeps being boring and the dark elves’ subplot is rushed, thus the only thing left to pay attention to is the backstory and lore, which is pretty cool, again, nothing mindblowing nor atypical, is the kind of stuff you have already seen in different fantasy stories, including Record of Lodoss War, but it’s serviceable. It has to do with different dieties at war, characters being corrupted by dark powers, the truth about the dark elves’ backstory, and all tied with what happened between the former King and the Demon Lord, thus connecting the two storylines from the beginning. The problem is, between the recaps, the pointless or repetitive episodes and the backstory, the actual main plot is reduced to just the final two episodes, where everyone arrives at the same time (despite the villains having the ability to teleport) and somehow before the main party to a final battle, which is short, doesn’t have much of a choreography, ends in a rather disappointing way and leads to a typical finale that has nothing to do with the supposedly mind blowing dark twist from the ninth chapter of the game.

Thus it’s another complete failure of a videogame adaptation that won’t even get a continuation since it was a big flop in terms of audience, I mean even the blu ray sells were cancelled before the series even reached its mid cour, that’s just…sad.






4/10