English Dub Season Review: Million Arthur Season One

I fart in your general direction!

In recent years, the adaptation of video games to other mediums has become a more streamlined process with more fruitful results, but it has by no means been perfected. This mainly comes from the issue that games often sell themselves by their interactivity, and removing that for a movie or show usually just ends up revealing how thin the storyline it goes with really is. This is especially so with mobile game adaptations, which is what brings us to Million Arthur, a mobile game given an anime and given a very confusing English release schedule.

The plot of Million Arthur is as follows: Throughout time and space, countless individuals have been gifted with special weapons called Excaliburs, granting them the title of Arthur. But this also causes distortions in time, so a select group of Arthurs are put together to travel through time to destroy ONE MILLION ARTHURS. Kinda like a weird anime take on a superhero group. They do this while also running into alien robot invaders and fighting Excaliburs that can be stuff like guns, swords, hammers, glasses, shears, fishing rods, glow sticks, scalpels, and so on. They also have assistants called fairies and then there are these things called Knights that are…

…well, as you can see it’s pretty convoluted, which makes sense considering it was penned by the author of A Certain Magical Index, Kazuma Kamachi, who has a pension for the overcomplicated. Which is why it’s also a pleasant surprise that this first season is usually pretty good at making me not care about the details. All the main Arthurs each have an easily defined personality that makes their dynamics with the rest of the team pretty easy to follow, so all the attention gets paid to what’s important: the characters. From the first few episodes, you can pretty quickly get a sense of each of their motives and how they’ll react around what. It’s fine if you want a super complex backstory and lore, but it doesn’t mean much if viewers can’t get attached to the characters living in that setting. It’s a pitfall I’ve seen happen before, so it’s nice that this, of all shows, didn’t.

But that also gives away just how thin the plot of each episode, as well as the series overall, really is. This is a bit of a double-edged sword, as having a low stakes plot can allow room for things being more playful and character focused, as opposed being a slave to how the plot is supposed to go. And yet that kind of lackadaisical approach tends to end up on the lazier side of storytelling, with the show often relying on gratuitous amounts of fanservice in order to fill out time or keep people’s attention. At its best, Million Arthur leans into its silliness and more fun side, but at its worst, it gets distractingly gross and self-indulgent. And it tends to switch between these two extremes on a dime at times.

Being the first of two seasons, it’s hard for me to say if the second half builds upon this and makes the viewing worth it, but these first ten episodes don’t do much to sell the show as much more than disposable empty calories. It’s definitely not anything to write home about even on its best day, and I don’t think it will be getting anyone interested in the games that wasn’t already. It definitely turned out to be more a fun time than I expected, but it’s not likely to hold your attention if you’re not forced to watch it.