English Dub Review: Wise Man’s Grandchild “A Pioneering New Hero”

Overpowered teenagers make great soldiers.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

With Schtrom having been repelled and seemingly killed, things return to normal (Well as normal as they can be) in Shin’s magical high school fantasy isekai life. What’s on the agenda today? Swords! Shin’s figure out some new sword idea and he needs blacksmiths to help him make it. At first, they’re apprehensive, but once he reveals who he is they’re more than happy to help out. Fancy that.

Following this, Shin takes Sicily on a “not-date”, where he decides to buy her expensive accessories. Not for any particular reason, but because he felt like buying her a gift. Naturally, this makes Sicily think that Shin wants to take her out on a date, but Shin is just being Shin.

After, Shin is summoned to the royal palace so he may receive a commendation from the king that acknowledges him as a hero for his efforts against the demonoids. Afterward, he and his classmates begin another session of their magical study group where Shin educates his friends on how to be better mages. He tries to teach them barrier magic as a way to focus on harnessing their energies. Eventually, his grandpa shows up and demonstrates a teleportation portal spell he was able to figure out because of Shin’s help. Later on, Shin brings all his friends a big bag of shiny new accessories for them all to enjoy.

Elsewhere, in the Blusfia Empire, Schtrom recovers from his injuries and is met with a woman who tends to his recovery. Together, it seems they’re working at some conspiracy.

Our Take:

Honest to God, I don’t know what people see in this show. I’ve dismissed as just another bit of isekai nonsense since episode one, yet it seems to have amassed some kind of following. To me, it doesn’t fit into any genre, doesn’t accomplish any storytelling of note, and doesn’t appeal to anything except the basest of human instincts to wish to see ourselves as greater than we are. In a word: vanity. Is this comedy? Is this adventure? Is this representative of the human experience of struggle and achievement in any way, shape or form? Are these characters even characters? Are these characters even human? No. No to all of it.

It doesn’t feel like we have a plot here so much as just a sequence of loosely related events. I don’t understand Shin’s motivation, and I barely even remember the names of his classmates that form one of the largest and least interesting casts I’ve ever seen. There still has yet to be a single interesting conflict produced to add any kind of life into this sham of a series.

Shin is barely even a person, and there’s still nothing about his past life as a young man in modern Tokyo that has anything to do with this story. In fact, as time goes on, I’m becoming convinced that that particular plot point is only there to qualify this garbage as an “isekai.” Without that, I suppose we’d have to consider it to be just another fantasy show. But with that, people can slap the “Isekai” sticker onto and wait for fans of this ridiculous genre to flock to it.

This is the result of the isekai genre becoming as popular as it is. This is the result of wish fulfillment and petty, pointless feel-goodery taking precedence over actual storytelling. The fact that this show has become so popular only reinforces the idea that studios can get away with pushing this stuff out because people will eat it up and buy body pillows with the show’s female characters plastered all over them.

If I sound bitter, it’s only because for every one of these shows made, another, the better idea gets passed up on. Passed up on not because it wouldn’t be a good show, but because it isn’t “marketable”, because people might not “get it.” So the fluffy, easy to sell crap based off of a mildly successful light novel series gets two seasons, and the teams of artists who dedicated their lives to this craft get corralled into making it, because bills are bills, and everyone needs to put food on the table.

So yeah, it’s a bad show.