Day Three Hundred and Thirty-four - Legend of the Legendary Heroes: Episode 1, "More Slayers than Lodoss."

There are two types of fantasy anime... tongue-in-cheek and high fantasy. Tongue-in-cheek is usually all about comedy and reference humor, usually with comedy duos of the straightman/funnyman variety with titles like Scrapped Princess or The Slayers. High Fantasy also has comedy, but for the most part it's straight up Tolkien-esque adventure like The Record of the Lodoss War. LotLH is definitely of the former variety.

The pilot starts off with a brief prologue sequence about how the world was once ruled by demons and monsters who had the power to destroy the world... and that it was only when more powerful heroes arose that the world was spared and life settled into its current feudal state. Flash forward to this world's present day and a hero king is trying to reform the corruption of the noble class with the help of his talented underlings, among them a blue mage (magic copier) named Ryner and a master swordswoman named Ferris. Together they are traveling the frontiers between kingdoms looking for relics of the ancient heroes.

I have to say, LotLH starts off pretty bland and generic, very much like a poor man's Slayers. Attempts are made to make the leads interesting via personality quirks (Ferris loves a Japanese confection called dango to the point of obsession and Ryner is rumored to be a lecherous perv), but there's nothing in the pilot that is engaging enough to keep me interested. Everything is too clean cut and generic, from the plot to the art to the voice acting, nothing stands out as anything other than "blah."

And this is yet another example of Funimation dumping under-performing series onto Netflix because the quality stuff has already been snapped up by Crunchyroll or hasn't been licensed at all (;_; Hyouka). I honestly don't think I can recommend LotLH based on this single episode and, really, have no desire whatsoever to continue the series to see if it gets any better. There is a lot more content available on the Stream that I'd much rather check out than this. It's not terrible, but it's definitely not thrilling or even mildly interesting... so I'm gonna pass and recommend that you do too. You know, unless you're just dying for something similar to The Slayers but without the same magic.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~