Feb 20, 2021
As the first French attempt at Japanese style shonen - 10/10
As a manga adaptation - 4/10 (manga always had really pretty and vibrant color pages whereas the anime art mostly feels flat)
Music 6/10 opening was pretty nice but the score itself is forgettably generic. It serves the anime when it needs to but never exceeds its’ station, so to speak.
Animation - 7/10
SPOILERS
Characters - 9/10 interesting, pass the silhouette test (makes sense coming from the French, a culture that so highly values fashion), the curses are unique and inventive, the voice acting (dubbed) is pretty good on a whole except when it comes to Seth.
...
His voice actor portrays him as way too pathetic and fails to make him cool outside of fights. He shines brightest when giving potency to moments of pathos but is grating in most other scenes. As a protagonist Seth is fairly generic with his can do attitude and Naruto style rejection by society (replace the swing with being burned at the stake and replace the orange jumpsuit with a dudebro sleeveless hoodie) he doesn’t get much development until the second half where he learns that there are decent inquisition members and that the Nemesis aren’t always evil monsters. I’m interested to see how his “save all the good people” works in the long run.
Melie’s defense and offense bipolarity acts as an excellent compliment to Seth’s bullheaded brawler style. Her curse of split-personality swap reminds me a lot of Launch from Dragonball but with more depth. I’m looking forward to seeing her flashbacks in season two that explain the backstory hinted at in this season.
Doc acts as the reluctant voice of reason that frequently gets the comedic relief treatment as well (a little too often IMO) but he has the kids best interests at heart and generally knows what he’s doing. I can tell that his curse of xenomorph-style resurrecting himself will be highly valuable in later seasons. It’s actually refreshing to see the older-than-they-look character be shota instead of loli.
Grimm has excellent style, a cool aesthetic and badass combat abilities. It’s clear that he’s after some specific Domitors and am curious to see where his character is going.
Alma is the wise, rough, one-armed (Shanks) and badass mentor to Seth. While Grimm is the too cool for school mysterious badass, Alma is the no nonsense matriarch with memory loss.
Plot - 7/10 pacing is not great, it has its proper generic shonen setup but then the pacing slows too much when developing the world building and training Seth (would have liked to see more traditional training) the Rumble town was excellent with proper escalation climax and deescalation of conflict over a satisfying 6 episodes. The amount of deescalation does seem a little excessive however since the climax was 2 episodes long (16-17) and then the deescalation of 5 episodes after sort of morphs into the next arc that doesn’t even really start until the next season.
Summary: Radiant is a fantastic start for French shonen with distinct vibes of both Fairy Tail (combat punchy magic) and especially One Piece (traveling from island to island in search of the Radiant=the One Piece, three factions of navy=inquisition, pirates=sorcerers, and the common folk caught in the middle, the MC’s family are revolutionary badasses) the wild card that mixes things up, however, is the Nemesis. They act as both the central mystery (are they mindless monsters? Where is the radiant? What is it and why do Nemesis come from there?) and the third faction in the show
P.S. whether or not you enjoyed Radiant (and the second season is looking leagues better than the first) y'all should check out Ankama's other animated works! Wakfu is amazing and the 4th and final season just got crowd-funded on kickstarter, meeting its goal in half a day and becoming the most funded animated show ever on Kickstarter! The movie Dofus Book 1: Julith is also fantastic and one of my favorite animated movies not to mention Mutafukaz which is just as amazing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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