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WARNING: This review will try to keep spoilers at is minimum, but it will still contain some. Read at your own discretion.

Being a regular anime watcher is a weird ride. You get to watch good anime, bad anime, surprising anime, predictable anime, anything in-between and any combination of these two spectra. Sometimes, an anime is straight up good or straight up bad so it's easy to allocate some space and energy from our brain to process what we think of it; but sometimes it falls into a gray zone where, personally speaking, I can only really decide how much I liked it if I write ... an essay on my brain. Might as well publish it on MAL.

After thinking a lot about how good each point I wanted to talk about is, I decided it was better to divide this into a "the good, the bad, and the ugly" style, with some cross-references between the sections. This is because, in the case of Shield Hero, there are some important distinctions to be made regarding its strong and weak points. Starting with "the bad", which is the vast majority of the anime, mostly things that aren't bad per se but were at best mediocrely executed, with "the ugly", things that were terribly executed, or major parts of the show that were bad in essence. The "the good" section will be mostly minor stuff since most of the good points of the show are either mixed with the bad ones or in a state of superposition with them, thus being spread out throughout this review.

The main reason I decided to watch Shield Hero was the imminent coming of its second season. I already had some interest in it but not too much, since I'm not exactly a hardcore fan of the fantasy genre. Now, I know of the infamy of the isekai genre, but all three isekai shows I've watched were very good (Re:Zero, KonoSuba, and HonGeko), and, apart from SAO and Shield Hero, I didn't know any other isekai show that was very popular, so even if I trust most sources and assume SAO is terrible, that's still a 75% chance Shield Hero will be very good based on my samples, so I went in with some relatively high expectations. Well, to put it simply, it was a hard disappointment.

The very first episode has some things that catch my attention. One of them in particular I will talk about later, but to me it is the single thing that made this show so unpleasant to watch at all times, even at its highest point. Now, having this terrible idea that makes me lose a bit of the little faith in humanity I have is not necessarily enough to completely doom the quality of the show if it makes up for it. But does it? Well, not really.

The very beginning of the story, to my limited knowledge, can be described in a simple way as a better thought out take on the generic isekai trope. The MC, Iwatani Naofumi, and three other Japanese young men are summoned against their will to another world they have to save from demonic apocalypse, one that is extremely similar to famous JRPGs from their own, granting them the status of heroes, which theoretically should make so that the people of this world should compensate for the task imposed on them, and the three guys try to rationally negotiate their conditions to the best of their interest. Going into the world as heroes with magic powers, adapt to their new reality making use of their newfound tools. Naofumi, not being as knowledgeable about this type of fantasy world as his peers, begins his journey as the typical isekai MC fool, being manipulated by the denizens of this other world into a situation where he pretty much loses all he has, including his status as hero, forced to face the world alone with nothing but his shield. At this point, it is a cliché, but a more well thought one. Now, is it bad? Well, the biggest problems with your stereotypical isekai story were circumvented, but it is still, in essence, your stereotypical isekai story. So, with the problems fixed, I can't really say it is bad, but that's not enough to make it good, either. It is, as precisely as you can say it, mediocre. However, there is a single element in the story, probably the one that made this show so popular, that there is still hanging. The entire isekai hates Naofumi for something he didn't do, blindly believing in the word of someone because of their cultural and political authority. Like the whole introduction part, this is cliché that keeps its relevance by probably making a lot of viewers relate to Naofumi on some level or, at least, sympathize with him, because not only the injustice plot is somewhat realistic, but it also feels similar to something most people have probably at least heard about in real life. Again, it's not particularly good writing, but it's not worthless either; and the emotional factor is probably what hooked everyone into this show and will continue to do.

The immediate followup of this is Naofumi buying a slave, Raphtalia, to fight for him, since he can't fight with a shield and no one wants to join him. Starting the theme of Naofumi being this world's Joker but not really (seriously, when this thing started I couldn't not think of movies like The Joker or American Psycho), Naofumi treats his slave extremely well, giving her a better life than the one she was living for God knows how long (for this and "other" reasons, her race conveniently matures in an irregular pattern, so we don't know how old she really is), only activating her magical slave crest that binds her to his will on life-or-death situations (even allowing her to run away when she refuses to fight) which makes her deeply attached and loyal to him. When other people get the word, they get utterly disgusted at him, and, when confronted, he seems not to care at all about. While this could serve to show how Naofumi became an amoral person because of what was done to him, the interesting part is that Raphtalia is a slave only in name, and other people, while disgusted at this, would treat Raphtalia less like a person than Naofumi does. Now, does it really matter that that she is officially his slave even if she wants it? To some people, apparently it does, which, to me personally, makes this whole sequence all the more appealing, probably the best part of the whole show. In fact, the show's best or most redeeming quality, depending on your point of view, is the take on how people are quick to judge and take action on other people while only thinking superficially and only caring about appearances (again, American Psycho). Usually, I don't like when my piece of media is a disguised political manifesto, but the doesn't really come across as that (at least not as much) because of how it focus on Naofumi and Raphtalia's personal point-of-view. Yeah, maybe Naofumi is a jerk (not really, but you can see the show tries to portray him this way), but this story is about him, not the viewer.

Speaking of Naofumi being a jerk, after all the drama from the first episode, the show tries to portray Naofumi as this guy who lost all morality and trust in other people, and thus only does things that personally benefit him (e.g. he always charges people for helping them), but he never does anything strictly immoral, and later in the series he actually starts doing things that makes his own situation worse for the sake of other people. You can argue that his bad guy attitude is just a façade to let him do his good guy things while being less vulnerable to other people or that he recovered a bit of his "goodguyness" after a specific point in the series, and these are valid points, but it kinda makes the whole thing a bit... forced. Even after being forced into his lowest point by the whole world, he still maintains his morality and trust, but only when the plot demands it. Once again, the good points of this show are balanced off by the bad ones.

These are the major examples, but the show is filled with scenes that are corny, cheesy, cliché, forced, inconsistent, or that don't work for one reason or another. However, there is a single scene that we can pinpoint that takes the cake. I don't think "killing = bad" plots are necessarily bad, and I think there are some, at the very least, pretty decent ones out there spread through different cultures and types of media (think Avatar, FMA:B, and Spider-man). However, in these examples, even when the bad guy in question undoubtedly deserves to die, there is a reason, often personal, that the good guy shouldn't kill him, with A LOT of buildup of the character's reasons not to kill and them questioning themselves and what they could become if they became a killer. In Shield Hero, there is none. It's just "killing = bad", and Raphtalia*, the MC's sword whose purpose is to protect his life even if it means killing (something she had to learn in the first episodes), ends up refusing to kill a guy that has a continuous hobby of making the life of countless innocents miserable, after the advice that "killing = bad" our "anti-hero" Naofumi gave her. In this single moment, he went from arguably amoral to having reversed morals. Truly a Joker-like character.

*Important to make a distinction between this and another arguable "killing = bad"-ish moment later in the series, which ends up working because it's an actual act of mercy rather than something any character actually believes is the right thing to do, although, following the theme of this show, there is the problem of having an "alternative" act of mercy Naofumi's ends up preventing, but I still don't understand how this one would help accomplish the original goal of the killing or how it would not make the life of everyone (at least the good guys) substantially worse; and the problem of this being the supposed super-satisfying moment of closure for all the shit Naofumi went through being somewhat underwhelming.

This was the first ugly. Now that I'm pretty much done with the poor execution of the show, it's time for the terrible concept embedded in this show's story. Hope you're not eating while reading this. I don't really understand why, but there is one thing I wasn't expecting going into this anime. Something so strongly ingrained in its plot, but never have I seen a reference to it in by other people. Something terrible yet fundamental for the plot. This world's magic system. It isn't just a magic system, it's a fucking JRPG. In a world where games go out of their way to make abstractions of game mechanics more and more like in-universe elements, making them more obscure and harder to use, for the sake of giving the players a better immersion experience, because no world, fantasy or not, would have actual an actual game menu, gamefied stats, gamefied class and level systems, and anything of the sort. Because it makes no sense. These things only exist because computers only run a bunch of numbers and we can't create games without these numerical abstractions, so we simplify the way the games work by displaying things like "HP = 60/150" or "Power = 75". You know these card games where you compare IRL stuff like predators and the White Shark card has the Ferocity stat of 10 and it wins against the Lion that has the Ferocity stat of 8 or something like that. Imagine a novel that's supposedly set in our world but people actually go around saying "be careful when you go swim at the beach because it has sharks with a ferocity stat of 8". Shield Hero's magic system is silly on this level. Honestly, this is the hardest part of the review to write because it's something that's so obvious in my head that I have a hard time understanding why would anyone write something like this. Maybe it's to copy SAO so it will sell more, but SAO's world is an ACTUAL GAME. Well, maybe the author is this shameless. Or maybe it's because there are many otakus who have a boner for JRPGs so having these elements in the story will make them love it even if it makes no sense, which is a possibility utterly depressing for me to consider. And even if you consider that this was a sacrifice made by the write to make the story work (things like Naofumi getting a rougher start because he's the only hero that has never played a JRPG similar to the world they were summoned to, or him getting cucked by the church and not being able to level up), I'm sure you could still make these plot points work with a regular soft magic system. You don't need to explain it. They're just there. We don't need to understand why a shark's bite is so powerful to understand that it is and be afraid of it. Still, the author preferred a gamefied world. Again, no idea why, and I'm still not sure if any comment about this decision will suffice because I can't fathom the possibility of someone deliberately make a fantasy world work like a game for no reason instead of just going with the more conventional soft magic system style.

Now, the easy part. The waifus are great. The characters taking Naofumi's side is kinda wholesome. The cliffhangers are kinda nice. The animation is nice sometimes but the CG is abysmal. The OST is really good and just short of being top-tier. These are just small things that can exist in a vacuum and aren't held back by any hugely questionable decisions. Things that aren't extremely necessary to comment about but it's still nice to do so for the sake of completion.

Now, was this anime worth my time? Well, I don't know exactly why, but I didn't really feel the time pass watching this, so even if it was effectively 26 episodes long, it didn't feel that much like it, so having to deal with all the bad and the ugly wasn't that much of a sacrifice. I will still probably watch season 2 just to see how it is, but being the mixed bag of pros and cons, hanging in the balance between Death Note level mediocre show that at least satisfies my curiosity and Takagi-san level garbage that I can't stand for more than ~10 episodes, it might very well be my second ever dropped anime, but only time will tell.

ATTENTION: This is a review directed at people who have already finished watching this anime. Therefore, it will frequently reference elements of the story readers are expected to be familiar with. That means spoilers.

At long last, I'm taking the time to elaborate on why I hate this anime so much.

Needless to say, I started to watch it with very high expectations. FMA:B has been the indisputable king in the anime community for most of the time it's been around and almost everyone you ask (and probably most people you don't ask) will regard this anime very highly. I believe the only exceptions are people who ... like to hate on popular stuff, people who liked the '03 version too much, and people to whom it failed to live up to the expectations (like myself). Of course, having this amount of hype can only be detrimental to one's more skeptical experience. I believe the only massively popular anime that I've watched and that I liked more than what I expected was Re:Zero season 1 (might have been because most of what people talk about this season is ~that~ scene everyone hates). Surprisingly enough, I absolutely loved FMA:B when I started watching it and it had me absolutely hooked for the first couple of seasons. Well, if that's not the problem, what is it, then?

As I've said, I hate this anime because it failed to live up to my expectations, but I also said it's very good and that I loved its first seasons. While you probably correctly assumed I'm crazy, the answer lies in where the failed expectations were built, and by now you've realized my problem is in the fluctuating quality of the show. More specifically, this is the tragedy of an anime that builds up an amazing story but midway through it it has exhausted most of its quality fuel and it's simply out of steam to make the story keep up with what it set up in the earlier stages. For simplicity's sake, I'll say the quality drop happens between seasons 3 and 4, but keep in mind the quality drop is not discrete and the last two seasons also have great things about them (this is a great show, after all).

The end of the third season is more or less aligned with the big reveal about the anime. Who is the big bad and what's his plan. Of course, details are yet to be unfold, but we have a general idea. At this point of the story, the enemy has almost complete control over our heroes and we are aware of what's the end point of our journey. What's the next step? That's right. Nothing. Two whole seasons of comparatively very little narrative development.

During the first three seasons, every step we took was either to step up the game so we feel more threatened or to reveal more about the story so we get more curious. Even though the show starts in a very intense episode, it ends on a "the threat was taken care of" note and we go back to the start. A start we know it's rough and very mysterious, but that's the fun, right? We taste it bit by bit so we can savor it, almost like when we swim in cold water, but we have to enter it slowly so we don't feel like freezing. But maybe you like that freezing sensation, so you hasten your step.

Every few episodes we discover something new. A new threat, a new piece of information. We get ourselves wet with story on a steady pace. And it's great. Liore, Nina, Scar, the fifth lab, Al's soul, Hughes' death, Lust's attack, the people from Xing, Bradley's attack, Izumi's relationship with the boys, Ling and Ed getting swallowed by Gluttony. Even though we don't really lose many people, we're always closing further and further on the realization of it. And then it happens. We learn the truth about the Ishvalan War and the foundation of Amestris as well as the existence of Father, and then Bradley explicitly takes everyone as a hostage without making a single move soon after that. We've reached the peak. We had a buildup momentum in the story and we've crashed into a wall. Nothing can happen in the story that can continue the trend of getting us more and more excited. And, although it is not 100% discrete, like I said, much like a physical wall we feel the impact of stopping.

Winry is in danger? Don't care. Fort Briggs was taken over by Bradley's agents? Don't care. Selim is actually Pride? Don't care. Buccaneer and Fuu died? Don't care. Riza had her neck sliced? Don't care. Al undid his soulbind without knowing if there was a way back? Don't care. At this point, as long as we don't see a character that's dear for us die, it's not as bad as what we have already seen, so what's the big deal? The show keeps threatening us for two seasons straight, and we just wait. And wait. And wait. And it never happens. And every attempt of the show at making us anxious about losing someone just makes everything even more painful, kind of like when Envy was trying to make everyone attack each other but it fails so miserably everyone just pities "him" (?), characters and audience alike.

(Okay, Hohenheim died, but he was already hundreds of years old and he was only alive because of the very thing we were fighting against, so even though he is one of the best things about the later seasons we embrace his death like a natural thing. Sad, but inevitable.)

As expected, the characters I dislike the most are Kimblee and Pride, who get into action after the wall crash. They were set up to be these super dangerous end-game villains, but they don't even come close to cause the same damage the first villains did. The first three homonculi felt very much like forces of nature, who were only taken out by an alchemist who possessed a forbidden knowledge about an extremely powerful and dangerous alchemy technique (one of these almost killed him in the process) or by another homunculus. Yes, Pride, the homunculus who is a literal extension of every shadow in Amestris, doesn't feel as disastrous to our characters as a busty woman who can extend her fingernails (I'm not talking about Meg but I guess she fits the description, too). Even Bradley, who at the end only killed a bunch of unnamed Briggs soldiers, Buccaneer, and Fuu, at least felt actually threatening until the boys went up north.

Speaking of which, season 4 sends the boys to Fort Briggs (I just mentioned that twice without need but anyways), which, although it gives us some nice change of pace and some interesting characters (no, not Olivier), it's also very illustrative of the narrative crash. Things are terrible and they show no sign of getting worse. It isn't bad enough that the main villains of this season and the following fail to live up to the trend of the show and the expectation they've set for themselves, but now we have a whole division of soldiers established by the show as infallible, incorruptible and independent from its leaders, and soon after we get to know them they are aligned with our heroes' ultimate goals and they will help them fight the big bad when the time comes. But wait, Father has plans to spill a ton of blood on the soil around Fort Briggs. What kind of disaster needs to happen to manage to strike such a blow on our perfect boys while maintaining their core traits, which are fundamental to the story? They take the most obviously untrustworthy character of all and he convinces the enemy nation to initiate a sudden assault on the most well fortified section of the amestrian border. And it works, leading to hundreds of drachman soldiers dying by their own stupidity. The show has dug itself so deeply into not wanting to bring tragedy upon our dear characters that the solution that works best in this situation is the most nonsensical one. That's by far the most infuriating scene of all the 64 episodes to me.

So there we have it. A first part that builds more expectations than it can fulfill, plot constraints created by not thinking the whole thing through before writing (or simply just bad ideas) and some direct plot holes that are too specific for me to get into. Surely it can't get any worse for an anime that's rated 9/10 by a guy who spend a few hours of time he should've dedicated into writing his college thesis which is due in a week by utterly bashing the anime in the longest text he's ever written. Oh, no. It definitely can; but that doesn't affect the rating, since it's not the anime's fault. Yeah, with the hint I gave you at the start of this text, you guessed it: there's still the cult around it.

More specifically, the combination of all the aforementioned bad things with this anime's popularity is by far the most hateful thing about it. As it is with anything that's just too popular, especially with certain kinds of audiences, there is a cult built around this series, and I'm not simply talking about a cult in the sense of having a faithful fanbase or too many references in popular culture. You see, FMA:B is the type of anime whose popularity and unpopularity are strongly tied to a single feedback loop. Too many people praising it causes a lot of people to start praising it too because otherwise they're not "true otakus" and some other people to start trashing it because they don't want to get mixed up with those "filthy weebs". Likewise, people trashing it causes more people to trash it because disliking popular things makes you cool and might get you laid (according to the internet) but it also causes people to praise it because only trolls can hate this anime. On the other hand, being the #1 for many years, getting surpassed a few times only to get back to the top right away, in a site that's famous for the bad opinions of its users can only spell doom for the credibility of its popularity; although I was really surprised to see that only 1 of the 4 most popular reviews on MAL for FMA:B rated it 10/10. I suppose I underestimated the popularity of hating popular things. Silly me.

Still, that doesn't change the fact that the force behind the popularity of this anime is no joke. As the feedback loop gets stronger and stronger, so do people's opinions on it, and God forbid you don't think FMA:B is perfect and the best anime that has ever existed and that ever will. Of course, as with many things in life, the healthiest solution for this problem is simply staying neutral and avoiding conflict, but failing to withstand discipline will prove to be a huge mistake. In my case, I have spent much more energy caring about this thing than I like to admit, but I suppose it's much more infuriating when something makes you care about it, even a little bit, and then fails to live up to the expectations it created for you than something that is straight up bad.