Jan 20, 2025
At first this may just look like your standard power fantasy, and well in many ways it is, but it’s so so much more.
For me to score a show a 8, it must be memorable, very well polished and have few flaws, this is just that, while it has its flaws namely how from about episode 11 through to episode 14 there is far too much fan service for my taste it more than makes up for it with funny jokes and a simply superb concept and execution.
Its attention to detail is similarly notable for example in the scene where Cid, the weaker half of
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our main character, wiggles his hand free from between the clutches of rose one of his heroines, but her hands stay firmly in their place showing how she’s held his hands so tightly she can keep the shape of his hand in the air, and while this is nothing major it is these little details that build up over time to elevate a show greatly, it’s pacing also helps in this matter, it never drags and yet it’s not too fast to go by you.
Now in a anime like this there a two things that take it to the top of its genre or sub genre, they are:
Jokes and memorable scenes. And this show has the both by the bucket load, I shall attempt not to spoil too much for you, but the fight scenes are excellent they build nicely and manage to layer on the story and not simply run adjacent to it, and the jokes oh the jokes.
There are many jokes throughout the season, some run the course and some are more episode specific, possibly the best running joke or bit throughout the season, is how serious Cid is about his role as a background character, his dedication to acting that role to perfection is somehow laughable and admirable at once, it’s done in a superbly creative way each time it re appears.
This is something we can all appreciate as nothing is worse then a bad repeating joke well perhaps a pretty good joke repeated so many times it becomes a hated joke and you just want it to stop is worse…
But what about Cid’s other much more powerful half shadow? Well shadow is the most stereotypical overpowered character imaginable so much so that even he himself is unaware of how much control he has over the world around him, one example is how he credits his seven shadows for the ‘inventions’ and ‘discovers’, which they ripped straight from his foggy memory of his much more advanced home world, which leads to some great scenes and pleasant jokes.
It also reflects what would be most likely to happen if a teenager was transported to a much more primitive world; there would be a grand revolution of the world around them, as their foggy memories of modern technology and culture would still trump any on the greatest minds of the time.
This is done in a way surprisingly many anime with similar occurrences have failed to do (looking at you “in another world with my smartphone”), I will mention that with a show like this your opinion of the jokes might be very different from my as humour is highly subjective.
In conclusion for me, this show sums up why I love anime as a medium, something of this scale and description would never be possible outside of a book, in a different medium, and that would be a terrible loss, thus I am giving The Eminence in Shadows a 8/10 a great score.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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