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Hachi-nan tte, Sore wa Nai deshou! Or in English, The 8th Son? Are You Kidding Me? Is yet another entry in an endless stream of cliché Isekai anime that have come out of the woodworks ever since Sword Art Online became popular. Hachi-nan tte, Sore wa Nai deshou! Is considered bottom of the barrel in terms of Isekai, but in all honesty, it wasn’t that bad. It certainly wasn’t good, but neither was it as terrible as the numerous negative reviews here make it out to be. At worst, it was solidly mediocre and likely would have received plenty of fans had it not been ... marred by the Isekai taint. I originally began reading the manga before the anime adaptation was announced and thought more or less the same of it then, but I have to admit that the adaptation does a fantastic job of bringing the story to life in a way that the manga never did for me.

Animation/Art: 7/10
While certainly not cream of the crop, The 8th Son had more than an acceptable quality of animation and art, with the obvious exception being the silly looking cgi monsters, but they were such a minor part of the series that it’s safe to ignore them.

Sound: 9/10
I certainly have no complaints about the ost or voice acting, but what stood out the most was the phenomenal opening song by Demon Kakka and ALI PROJECT. While the series itself flew under the radar, this song most definitely should not have.

Characters: 4/10
The 8th Son suffers from the same problem as every generic Isekai in that the protagonist is a blank slate designed as nothing more than a self-insert with no personality of his own, while every other character exists either to proclaim his greatness or serve as an incompetent foil to the same. His friends are the usual crop of always positive munchkins whose only difficulty in life is working hard enough for the protagonist to notice them. Everyone besides the protagonist and his party members is either a very Nice Guy™ who supports the protagonist through thick and thin, or a greedy, cowardly villain who plots against the protagonist for the sake of meanness and half-baked intrigue plots.

Story: 3/10
The story is also nothing new. The protagonist is overpowered and has no motivations to speak of, so he becomes an ‘adventurer’ and goes around killing monsters because the king tells him to. Magic is poorly defined and used as nothing more than a plot device, sometimes changing in the moment. Purification magic, used to purify undead and set their bodies and souls to rest, sometimes leaves their belongings behind. Sometimes their belongings are purified along with the body. Sometimes the belongings are purified into nothingness and still somehow retrievable later. The body is almost always destroyed during purification, unless that body happens to be a dragon, in which case the valuable bones stay behind (and float for some reason).

The protagonist also has a spell to supposedly read the layout of the land nearby and detect creatures within range, which he uses all of once. Even later when they’re in a dungeon with countless enemies that it would have been incredibly useful to know their location, it doesn’t come up. When he’s being spied on and clearly knows it, but just can’t seem to catch the location of the spy before they duck behind cover, he conveniently forgets that detection spell that he used earlier.

The protagonist’s sole personality trait being ‘overpowered’ also works against any moment of perceived tension. Even the most powerful enemies in the world, dragons, are defeated in a single blow. The protagonists don’t have enough power to defeat an enemy? Windelen posits the obvious answer, “we’ll just use more power.” And miraculously, that’s all it takes. Any situation that could be resolved with clear thought and rational decision making is instead forced toward a more dramatic conclusion because the protagonist acts more like the child whose body he possesses than the 35-year-old man he’s supposed to be.

I also have to address the building of his ‘harem.’ Unlike most ‘harem’ anime that aren’t also off the deep end of ecchi, The 8th Son actually has a literal harem, even if it’s only mentioned a few times and never really developed. As a twelve-year-old boy (read thirty-something-year-old man in a twelve-year-old’s body), circumstances lead to him being engaged to a twelve-year-old girl. Who is perfectly fine with him taking on his two female companions as concubines, which is something they want only because of how rich and powerful he is. They ask to be his concubines and without a second thought he says “ok,” and then officially has a harem of twelve-year-old girls. There is no sexual content in the series, either explicit or implied, but this is something that, while it would be a problem regardless, could have been made infinitely less creepy had this series not been an Isekai to begin with, but I’ll talk more about that issue later.

Style: 3/10
The style here is one of the two most glaring problems that I believe led to The 8th Son’s downfall. Rather than tell a consistent story from beginning to end, The 8th Son bounces from one plot point to the next, only covering the highlights of Wendelin’s life. We know he gets magic, trains it and, supposedly, must work to avoid a succession dispute, but a seven-year time-skip ensures we miss most of that. He then goes to school and, one would imagine, learns something there, but again, time-skips prevent us from seeing even a smidgeon of his school life or education. He then receives training from one of the greatest mages in the kingdom! Which also causes a time skip of 3 years. This time-skip in particular is frustrating because none of the characters have changed in the slightest over the past three years. Still looking and acting exactly the same after the passage of time.

Aside from the time-skips cutting out most of the story, the scenes also cut away during what seem to have been important moments, only for those moments to occur offscreen and typically never be brought up again. We get to watch the entire setup of Wendelin’s bride to be arriving and his house, intentionally while he is away, in order to ask his friends what they think of him… and then the scene cuts elsewhere. What did they say about him? What is she thinking this whole time? What was the outcome of this meeting? We’ll never know because, despite wasting minutes of precious screentime to set the scene up, it is neither finished nor even mentioned ever again. The hero’s daring fight against a horde of monsters? We can hear about it while it’s happening off screen. His party members’ emotional combat risking life and limb in the tournament to prove their worth? Offscreen. The protagonist’s extended battle through floors of a dungeon filled with enemies? I think you get the idea.

Isekai: 1/10
The second of the most notable problems in The 8th Son, and certainly the worst, is that it is Isekai. While hardly a negative in and of itself, the real issue is that, like many modern Isekai, it had absolutely no reason to be an Isekai. At no point in the twelve episodes did the fact that Wendelin Von Benno Baumeister was actually a reincarnated Japanese man named Shingo Ichinomiya demonstrate any relevance. The protagonist didn’t even consider the nature of his situation throughout the entire series aside from a single instance in the final episode wherein a sudden desire to “really accept this new world” was shoehorned in. You wouldn’t even have known he was reincarnated if he didn’t have that stereotypical love of Japanese food as his sole driving motivation. The entire series could have been dramatically improved if Wendelin had just been a normal boy from this fantasy world who happened to have a talent for magic. Instead, the author chose to use reincarnation to explain why Wendelin was so overpowered. Not that there was ever actually any explanation. The protagonist just fell asleep while eating dinner and then was in a fantasy world with more magic than the most powerful locals. No further explanation needed, apparently.

This is, by far, the most consistent problem with nearly every Isekai story that has caused the genre to be so reviled today. Practically every Isekai manga and anime today is just a mediocre story with Isekai tagged on it to try and match the trend. The successful Isekai are the ones that make full use of their protagonist’s origin to develop their character and advance the plot, such as Re:Zero, Mushoku Tensei, and Overlord. Anime like The 8th Son use the Isekai genre like a gimmick to get people interested and explain away the fact that the authors don’t know how to write an actual fantasy character and can pass off any inconsistencies as their supernatural origin.

Conclusion:
While this entire review may seem like I hate The 8th Son just as much as everyone else, even I started to question my position while writing this, I actually enjoyed it. It was poorly written but was well directed and had talented voice actors helping prop the series up. If it were longer and still this low quality, I believe my opinion would change, but as a short twelve-episode series, The 8th Son can hardly be considered a waste of time. Rather, The 8th Son is the epitome of mediocre Isekai anime that will allow audiences to enjoy all the mindless entertainment that generic Isekai have to offer, without suffering through the worst of the genre like In Another World With My Smartphone or Arifureta.