When I started watching this series I had high hopes, sadly this anime doesn't come close to what I had hoped for, it contains far too many flaws in it's fantasy setup for my taste. Don't continue reading unless your fine with some spoilers!
The story starts out with the princess of a kingdom out and about, stumbling through ruines and going on crazy quests, the entire beginning of the story seems unstructured, for one the princess is naive in the extreme and acts totally unbefitting for a ruler, the main plot is built up in an amature fashion, the princess interest in ruins, which for some reason are randomely placed literally whenver convienient, furthermore it is unlogical for the pricess, the ruler of the kingdom to constantly be putting herself in danger, instead of actually ruling and having others do such tasks in her stead. Another surprise of the story is when you find out how masterful her fighting skills are for a normal teenage looking girl, who doesn't seem to have ever trained, the only hint is another non suitable warrior character, which the princess calls her master. What alos bothers me is that no background information is given, who are her parents, why are they not mentioned and what the fuck is she even doing in her kingdom?? I'm not surprised she has assasins after her (which miraculously all fail, since she's such an amazing fighter not even trained assasins can "harm" her). For me the story took an upward turn, when introduced to the main character( The shepherd) Who adds a little more direction and life to the story. Sadly that life is quickly extinguished, when you see his steriotypical naive nature, which even though far more interesting than all the other characters introduced, is made worthless rather fast as the story progresses it's "plot". Another unrealistic scene is the fight the main character has when his home is invaded my evil and all the seraphs split up for some reason to go fight it alone?- Which ends in a minor casualty and the main character without even being made a shephard yet smashes through walls and flies over a hundred meters, where earlier a seraph had to save him from a 60 meter fall.. What's more, later the lady of the lake proclaims that she cannot purify evil, only the shephard, which makes me wonder what use the seraphs are for than. To me it seems the story is made up on the go.
The animation is slightly above average, there are some scenes which are beautifully made, on the other hand the character animation makes it hard for me to take the characters seriously, for example when the princess loses all her friends (who were never properly introduced in the first place), it seemed more like a bad joke to me, an attempt to be serious. Furthermore the fighting scenes are mixed, some are made rather well and some make me wish they'd just skip the entire scene and cut the bullshit.
Recommendation:
I'd recommend this anime to people who are bored and have nothing else to watch, it may not be too great and there are loads of better anime out there, but it is still above average compared to a lot of other crap out there and certainly in the top 13 of this seasons releases. I strongly however doubt that this will become anyones favorite and if your tastes are similar to mine, you'll probably get bored with this anime rather quickly.
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