English Dub Season Review: She Professed Herself, Pupil of the Wise Man Season One

Based on the Japanese light novel series written by Hirotsugu Ryusen and illustrated by Fuzichoco. The series follows Sakimori Kagami, who has been playing the online video game Arch Earth Online for a long time as the character “Dunbalf Gundadore”, an old male sorcerer who is one of the game’s nine great sages. One day after adjusting his character, he is sucked into the game world, and finds himself inhabiting his character’s body, who after his adjustments looks like a young woman; he tries to convince the people of the game world that he is Dunbalf’s pupil while figuring out on how to turn himself back to normal and escape the game world…

On the technical side, the series was animated by Studio A-Cat and directed by Keitaro Motonaga, with Takamitsu Kōno overseeing the series’ scripts, Kumi Horii designing the characters, and Go Sakabe composing the series’ music and co-produced by Funimation. The opening theme song “Ready Set Go!!” was done by by Asaka, while the ending theme song is “Ambitious” was performed by Erabareshi.

In a nutshell, the overarching plot of the show revolves around Dunbalf, who takes on the name of Mira in her new form and explains her powerful abilities as being the pupil of Dunbalf, being tasked to hunt down the missing members of the Nine Wise Mages to ward off an impending threat to the kingdom. As far as adventure shows like this go, many of them don’t feel very linear or rarely continue into the next episode. Dunbalf/Mira as a character is predictably hyper-capable. but at least all her problems aren’t easily solvable by simply charging head-on and has to approach them with reasonable solutions, which is nicely done. I’m hoping the story has him/her taking the helm on trying to figure out her next steps of being directed around as the series goes on. The worldbuilding and plot are not that bad in concept, but in execution, you don’t feel the stakes or sense of urgency and completely nothing goes wrong or without an actual major antagonist making its proceedings feel bland as a result.

Overall, if you were expecting that the show would then explore the machinations of how a VRMMO suddenly came to life and the psychological impact of thirty years in a game world, you haven’t watched many Video game-themed isekai anime show’s over the past five years. While the show itself technically doesn’t fall into the category of a traditional isekai, it shares much of its tone, setting, and style of many isekai adaptations much in the same way Spirit Chronicles while a slightly darker story was also shamelessly guilty of. This was neither good nor bad enough to stand out or be remembered and will be destined to join the increasingly large pool of light novel adaptations that if they’re lucky, may or may not get a 2nd season…