English Dub Review: Beast Tamer (Meeting of Fate)

Overview:

Rein is a Beast Tamer, capable of commanding animals and monsters to do his bidding, serving in a party of heroes to defeat the Demon Lord. Despite his incredible skill, his fellow heroes think nothing of him and barrage him with verbal abuse before ultimately abandoning him and taking all his possessions. Now unemployed, he’s forced to take odd jobs at the adventurers guild slaying chump monsters like goblins. Fortunately, he finds something that would cheer up any man in his situation, a friendly catgirl named Kanade, who agrees to be tamed by him.

Our Take:

Let me get things started by saying that Beast Tamer is not a bad show. It is however a show I am entirely indifferent towards. There’s nothing here that’s offensively bad, the animation is inoffensive and the voice acting is acceptable aside from an overabundance of cat puns, but there’s nothing that’s particularly captivating or original about it either. Though not an Isekai anime, it has a lot of the same traits. A generic fantasy world, a nice guy protagonist with no real flaws or strong personality traits, and based on the opening and ending animations, the show will degenerate into him gaining a harem.

I also don’t think this first episode does a good enough job of justifying its premise. It’s hammered in multiple times by multiple separate characters that beast tamers are horribly incompetent at everything and are useless when it comes to all but the simplest tasks, but even considering that Rein has abnormally strong beast-taming abilities, I struggle to see why this is the case. Rein’s uselessness in battle is told and not shown, nor are we shown just how strong the heroes that claim him to be useless are. Perhaps if the show had opened with a big fight scene of all of the heroes fighting to save a town, only to have Rein ruin things, and the other heroes dismiss him afterward, I think that would have done a much better job of setting things up. 

One very distinct question I had that the show never addressed is “Why doesn’t Rein command animals to fight for him”? He can command bears, and that alone should be enough to make him a good fighter. It’s not like he’s a pacifist who doesn’t want harm to come to nature, it’s just something that is never brought up. It feels like this whole thing of treating Rein like he’s useless is contrived, or at the very least could do with more justification. Doubly so with the fact that his first meeting with Kanade is seeing her cornered by a giant tiger monster, and he never attempts to control it. This should be the exact sort of situation he excels at. At least let him try.

I’m harsh because I want this show to morph into something better. There’s at least something to build on here. Rein’s abilities are shown to have myriad uses, and I could easily see him using them to solve all manner of situations. Despite this, my thoughts on this show’s future are, for lack of a better term, pessimistic. If my predictions about the show’s future are correct, it’ll probably settle into Rein using his harem to solve everything at some point, resulting in a show that while not bad or unwatchable, is bland and unremarkable in any real way, relying on cute monstergirls for all of its appeal. The monstergirls are cute, but they’re not a core you can build a show around