During my holiday break, I’ve caught up with some of the new Winter Anime that have been dropping this year. One of those anime is called Record of Grancrest War (Grancrest Senki).
As usual, here’s a quick summary of the anime before I run down my thoughts on it:
Atlatan, a land ruled by chaos. Fearing disaster brought about by chaos, the people lived protected by “Lords;” those with the power of “Crests,” used to suppress the chaos. However, the Lords decided to abandon the concept of protecting the people and turn against each other, stealing each other’s Crests to gain dominion over one another. Among these people are Siluca, a lone mage who despises the Lords, and Theo, a vagrant knight training to someday liberate his homeland. Enticed by Theo’s ideals, Siluca’s coercive tactics have the two forming a contract and together, reform a war-torn land
I’ll be honest, I felt completely lost on what was happening during the first episode. All I could gather at the time was that demons run amok in the world and two nations are at war. We get introduced to Siluca pretty early on. She tries to prevent a demon from surfacing but failed in her attempt. Which causes the unification of both nations to fall apart. Shortly after we are also introduced to Irvin who seems to be one of the main supports in the show. Right after that, while Siluca was been attacked, Theo shows up outta nowhere and save the day.
Here, is where I felt the pacing was a bit fast in my opinion. This man Theo went from random adventurer to Knight then Lord in a span of 5 minutes. The next episode he becomes Baron and conquers a continent. Meanwhile, not much is explained in about the crest or the powers that are in the world.
I knew that the crest was going to be an important part of this anime but they never explained it clearly which left me in the shadow. Now this man owns a plot of land and has to fend off attacking lords. I was also confused as to how Theo just took orders from Siluca without hesitation. I mean they just literally met, how you gonna take orders from a random mage like that? On the other hand, Siluca has gotten my interest, I’m more curious now as to what her end goal is going to be. The combat, animation and action though is pretty dope so far so that’s what’s been keeping me interested.
The characters and their abilities are awesome to say the least, especially Aishela and Irvin. Seeing those two fight on the battlefield almost makes up for the pacing of the anime. I dunno, I’m a sucka for war battles and 1v1 fights in anime. Give me a good fight scene and I could forgive “almost” anything.
I will say that it’s getting better to some degree which has led to me continuing to watch it. Especially the brutal violence in the fights, there’s definitely no shortage of those in this anime. I also like the whole conquest aspect and starting up a kingdom in this anime, it could easily work as a game one day if this anime gets popular enough. (Funny enough, after I completed this blog, they announced a game for the PS4 and Mobile)
Overall, it’s not a bad anime, little bit too fast paced for my liking but once you get past that, it’s pretty cool anime to pass the time with.
