English Dub Review: Wise Man’s Grandchild “The Name of the Instigator”

The game is afoot.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Kurt has just been killed by Shin, following the recent demonization that left him a howling demonic force hell-bent on killing his former classmates. However, no one knows why Kurt became a demonoid or what sinister forces are at work behind his transformation. Shin reports what happened to the proper authorities, who set out to investigate the matter and figure out exactly what happened.

Shin, meanwhile, goes back to his happy academy life, where he makes cool swords and things for his magical study group. Two more get added to his crew which works in local businesses and can help Shin smith weapons for him and his friends. They go about town and have a swell, if not shallow and boring, time, while the security bureau forces look for the conductor of Kurt’s demise.

Their investigation leads them to ask Schtrom, who is working at the academy, about the incident, since Kurt studied under him. Schtrom feigns the worried professor and acts as if he doesn’t already know who it was that made Kurt into a demonoid. Eventually, the security officers ask Schtrom to come with them to advise them on the investigation, since he’s an expert on demonoids. This turns into a cunning twist, however, when the security officers surround Schtrom with soldiers and place him under arrest. As it turns out, the kingdom had a gag order on Kurt’s name, so there was no way for Schtrom to know who it was that became a demonoid without being involved with the incident.

Schtrom, realizing the jig is up, starts to attack the security forces with his magic, but Shin happens to be nearby at the time and takes Schtrom on face-to-face. Schtrom is quite powerful, but Shin is strong too and launches an insanely powerful magical attack at him that nearly blows up the whole building. When the dust settles, Schtrom is gone. The battle is over, but the fate of this demonic foe is uncertain.

Our Take:

I’ve found that a lot of fantasy anime, and in particular isekai, the relentless plague of a genre that is slowly consuming the world of anime, loves to have fantasy settings that aren’t actually fantasy. We get all the trappings of fantasy, with magic and cute villages and beautiful nature, but there’s a lack of all the realities of what makes a medieval world, well, medieval. Wise Man’s Grandchild has this going for it in spades, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on who you ask. The purpose of this setting, with its quaint coffee shops and it’s a modern-styled police force, is to just act as a dream world for the viewer to imprint themselves onto. It’s a hollow farce, painted in bright and shiny colors to try and get you to forget how vacant the story you’re watching is. That’s basically the entirety of what this show is so far.

All dramatics aside, however, there is more going on here than there has been in the last few episodes because we have an actual plot to keep things moving. It’s a plot interspersed with a lot of what I’m dubbing “Isekai bullshit”, that is to say, scenes of excessive mary sue characters living an oh-so-perfect life filled with nothing but fantasy fulfillment filler,  but it’s still there. There’s an investigation going on, and it’s at least mildly entertaining to watch depending on your investment in the story. There is a logical approach to the way the police force works here, which is somewhat compelling, but I think it would do better in a show about a fantasy police force instead of this awkward mess.

There’s way too little for a viewer to latch onto here, character-wise. Our boy Shin is such a mary sue it’s ridiculous, and his band of accessory characters has little to no development. We’re four episodes in and the core cast is numbering well over 10 people, with most of them just serving as one-note cutouts worshiping Shin. This isn’t much a story, and that’s because it doesn’t try to be. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the point of all this is just to be a mildly amusing time waster instead of an actual immersive story or funny comedy. I’m not even a little bit surprised, but as long as bad episodes of this show keep coming out, I’ll keep calling them as I see them.