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While this movie is excellent in its own right, its greatest strength is how well it prepares viewers to watch the OVA. As someone who was on the fence about investing the time to watch all 110 episodes of the OVA, this movie sold me in a heartbeat. The title crawl and use of classical music skillfully sets the stage for our two protagonists, who waste no time in introducing themselves and illustrating their incomparable dynamic.

While the movie's plot points aren't strictly necessary for understanding the rest of the series, I can't tell anyone in good conscience to skip it. It's hard to put ... into words, but there's just something magical about it. Seriously, give this a watch if you haven't already. Granted, I highly recommend watching the 4K remaster, as it fixes a great deal of the movie's now-outdated animation.

This anime is one of the most frustratingly generic pieces of entertainment I have seen in quite a while. With a mediocre-at-best MMORPG-esque dungeon-grind setting and a dreadful cast of one-dimensional characters, my expectations were already low a few episodes in. However, the banal story development and a looming sense of purposelessness managed to drag my opinion even lower as it went on.

We start off with our run-of-the-mill action protag Bell-kun, whose only discernable flaw is the fact that he's novice adventurer and thus isn't very capable at making a living for himself or his patron 'goddess' Hestia. Aside from this, though - he doesn't ... seem to have very many problems. Every woman he comes into contact with falls inexplicably in love with him (despite his obliviousness), he is generally respected by everyone, and manages to hold a naively wholesome outlook on life as his problems are always either solved by someone else or just resolve themselves thanks to luck.

In terms of his 'development', once he's saved in the dungeon by a beautiful swordswoman, his infatuation with her gives him the ability to progress at ridiculous speeds as an adventurer. A few episodes later and he's already OP, gaining an incredibly powerful weapon and unbeatable magic abilities with little to no effort on his own part. Thus, the takeaway we get from Bell-kun is that he's incredibly powerful, loved by everyone, and doesn't really suffer from any internal struggles: i.e., the tension and conflict throughout the show are nowhere to be found.

Writers need to understand that a main character who lacks any meaningful flaws (barring physical weakness, which is basically a given for the beginning of any action-adventure anime...) can easily sour a story with an otherwise interesting cast of characters. Unfortunately, since the side characters in this show aren't particularly interesting either, there's nothing to save this piss-poor cast. They're all just about as vapid as Bell, and either exist to fill a spot in his harem or serve as a temporary plot device.

If all you expect out of this anime is some turn-off-your-brain action and a harem of big tiddy anime girls, go for it. If you're looking for something deeper, you're out of luck, because this show contains about as much meaningful content as the back of the shampoo bottle you read while you take a shit.