English Dub Season Review: Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells Season One

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Touka (Tom Aglio) always faded into the background at school, and when he’s summoned to another world with his classmates, that still doesn’t change!  They all acquire top-rank skills, except Touka, who’s deemed a failure and cast to ancient ruins by the goddess Vicius (Mikaela Krantz).  Turns out, his low-rank skills may not be so useless after all.  Now, he seeks revenge against the goddess, and his true nature is revealed.

Our Take:

Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells is an anime adaptation of a light novel series written by Kaoru Shinozaki and illustrated by KWKM.  It is directed by Michio Fukuda, who also directed Tesla Note, and Yasuhiro Nakanishi wrote the script.  It is produced by Seven Arcs, which is known for producing other anime adaptations like Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Dog Days, Blue Period, and Chained Soldier, with cooperation from SynergySP.  Kana Hashidate handled the character designs, and Tatsuhiko Saiki composed the music.  The opening theme song, “Hazure”, is performed by Chogakusei, and Hakubi performed the ending theme, “Pray”.

Normally, when you get isekai’d to another world, you’d be granted a chance to be that world’s hero with plenty of miraculous power in tow.  Regardless of whether you’re a winner or loser in the real world, there’s a greater chance of being the hero of your own story in a fantasy realm.  Unfortunately, this latest addition to the expanding isekai catalog shows that that’s not always the case, particularly its protagonist, who’s always been treated like an outsider, even in an isekai world.  But, on the bright side, he’s got low-level skills that can kill everything in his path, so at least that element is still intact.

Failure Frame is another fantasy isekai anime that centers on a protagonist whose “useless” abilities make them a force of nature.  In this case, that protagonist is Touka Mimori, a self-proclaimed “background character” in class 2C with a troubling past.  He and his classmates are summoned to another world by the goddess Vicius, who gives them exceptional abilities to protect the realm, except Touka, who is granted E-rank skills.  As a result, Vicius banishes Touka to the Ruins of Disposal, and the classmates abandon him.  However, it turns out that Touka’s low-level status ailments have a higher success rate.  As a result, he vows to use his abilities to exact revenge against Vicius.  With the help of a former knight captain, Seras Ashrain (Dani Chambers), and an intelligent slime named Piggymaru (Bryn Apprill), Touka travels across the realm to the Land of Golden-Eyed Monsters while hiding his true identity from anyone.   

Regarding my experience with fantasy isekai anime, I didn’t find many shows that consist of interesting protagonists besides the typical OP skills and their harem teams.  While some of them were watchable, they struggled to make the heroes stand out from the isekai crowd regarding their charisma and arcs.  However, Failure Frame just happened to be the one that attempted to make its “hero” invigorating amid its usual genre tropes.  Most isekai anime have protagonists that go from normal humans to powerful heroes once they’re transported to another world.  Failure Frame does follow a similar recipe, but it’s more focused on an outsider who decides to unleash his cruelty and exact revenge against those who treat him like crap instead of using his powers to perform good deeds.  So, in a way, it’s more like an anti-hero underdog story about a nobody striving to make himself known by killing a not-so-friendly angel.

Would I call it a groundbreaking approach to the isekai formula?  No.  However, it does serve as a respectable and even heartbreaking change of pace for the genre’s protagonist or, in this case, the “anti-hero”.  No joke; I was already rooting for Touka to grow stronger at the beginning of the series when I saw him being abused by his awful parents as a child.  Along with the similar treatment he got from his classmates, except Ayaka Sogou (Celeste Perez) and Kobato Kashima (Nia Celeste), it’s enough to realize that Touka deserves a happy ending.  Of course, that doesn’t make Touka a full-fledged villain due to his sense of mercy and generosity towards his allies, which is enough to make his manipulative personality more likable than it should be.  

This is largely due to his voice actor, Tom Aglio, who did a great job representing Touka’s two distinct personalities, timid and cunning, through his vocal performance.  The rest of the voice cast was also respectable in their roles, including Dani Chambers as the devoted Seras and Monica Rial as Eve Speed.  Eve is a leopard-woman warrior who assists the protagonist on his quest after Touka saves her and her sister Lisbeth (Jalitza Delgado) from the Duke in the season’s second half.  I would also credit the series for its equally compelling subplot involving the 2C classmates, notably Ayaka Sogou, a class representative who vows to protect the weaker students out of guilt for not saving Touka, and Kashima, whose cowardice makes her unreliable against the monsters.

As for the show’s animation, it’s once again proven that Seven Arcs has a clear understanding of making a straightforward isekai anime look stunning in its settings and character designs.  It’s also another anime that combines 2D animation with CGI, with the latter being for specific action scenes and the realm’s nightmarish monsters.  It bears repeating that CGI in anime doesn’t always provide the best results, especially when combined with traditional animation, with some delivering the uncanny valley that’s more off-putting than others.  However, there have been a few that wound up being tolerable despite a few out-of-place moments, with Failure Frame being one of them.  While most of the CGI effects felt unnecessary and appeared rough sometimes, some were effective enough to enhance the show’s action scenes, including Seras’s swordsman skills.

Overall, Failure Frame gained enough experience in its genre and narrative elements to avoid being cast out as an outsider.  It may not be innovative in its formulaic tropes, but its protagonist’s arc and themes of revenge and trust are diverting enough to make it one of the more watchable additions to the isekai genre.  I’ve seen plenty of recent isekai anime that struggled to do something interesting to keep me engaged in their tropes, including My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered.  So, it was nice to see that Failure Frame convinced me that the genre isn’t entirely worn out as long as the execution of its plots is serviceable.  As of now, there’s no word on whether we’ll get a second season of Failure Frame, but I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Touka’s revenge quest if it does get renewed.