The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Ishura

In a world where the Demon King has died, a host of demigods capable of felling him have inherited the world. A master fencer who can figure out how to take out their opponents with a single glance; a lancer so swift they can break the sound barrier; a wyvern rogue who fights with three legendary weapons at once; an all-powerful wizard who can speak thoughts into being; an angelic assassin who deals instant death. Eager to attain the title of "True Hero," these champions each pursue challenges against formidable foes and spark conflicts among themselves. The battle to determine the mightiest of the mighty begins.

Ishura is based on a light novel series of the same name by Keiso and Kureta. The anime series is streaming on Hulu and Disney+ on Wednesdays.

In the most general sense, this episode is the story of the first meeting between the isekai'd hero and the fantasy world heroine. The twist, however, is in the details.

Our hero, Soujiro, is insanely one-note. He's a flat out battle maniac who thinks only about the next fight—and doing the bare minimum to get him there. As he stands, he's a rather boring character—which is where Yuno comes in.

Yuno is realistically complex. Amidst the chaos of everything and everyone she's ever known being reduced to rubble, Yuno is being bombarded by her own guilt. She stood by in shock while her best friend was graphically torn limb from limb. Finding out that her magic could have potentially stopped the attacking robot and saved her friend only makes things worse for her fragile mental state.

To survive—to keep her sanity—her mind latches on to the idea that the robot attack must have been related to Soujiro and his arrival. That way, it's not her people's fault for wandering into a “dungeon” they didn't fully understand but his for simply existing. Without his involvement, the whole situation—and thus her guilt—surrounding her friend's death becomes moot. The ultimate blame lies with Soujiro.

However, even in her crazed state, she can tell she has no hope of killing Soujiro—no direct way of getting revenge on him. However, there is the indirect route. If he's a battle maniac, she'll guide him to where the strongest people in the world are—people who can certainly kill him. It's a great setup for the show—and I can't wait to see if she can maintain her resolve as she travels with him and gets to know him.

I'll give Ishura this much: it has some cool ideas. Across this premiere, it utilizes several potentially interesting story concepts and framing devices that could make for a good time in a well-structured introduction with a competent production. Unfortunately, this show is written like a hastily scrawled first draft with animation that already has one foot in the grave. Still, I can imagine a version of this premiere that was really good, which isn't something I can say for most isekai fare.

For one, it's not immediately obvious that this is an isekai story, as we start from the perspective of a girl native to this world of fantasy and monsters, and don't meet one of the "Visitors" her people talk about until mid-way through the episode. Theoretically, that would let us feel grounded in this setting before the overpowered teenager wearing a tracksuit shows up. In practice, all you need to know about the writing here is that at 3:50 into the episode, our female lead declares, "There's no need to be scared of anything anymore," and by 4:46, her girlfriend was being torn limb from limb in front of her. Whatever potential this story might have about the upheaval of random overpowered teenagers wreaking havoc on a fantasy world, it's far more interested in cheap drama and poorly animated gore.

Similarly, some cool elements could make for great action sequences. This first episode features our isekai anti-hero cutting down an army of rob- er "Golems" with just a sword, and going full Shadow of the Colossus on one the size of a city. Unfortunately, the production for this episode is already falling apart at the seams between terrible compositing and a shocking amount of reused footage. So while the big action climax has a couple of cool cuts and several conceptually interesting action beats, the actual fight is a mess that's hard to follow at the best of times, to say nothing of the poorly integrated CG elements clashing with the gritty aesthetic of the 2D art. It just looks like a mess, and while there are some scattered attempts at interesting shots and direction, the muddiness of the backgrounds undercuts those at every opportunity.

There's not much to praise here that doesn't come with a huge caveat. I like the idea of our heroine leading her unlikable Isekai Protag companion through a gauntlet of other overpowered characters so she can watch him die. Still, I am left baffled at her reasoning for how he must have caused the disaster that destroyed her life. I'm intrigued by the conceit of our male lead actually being kind of an unlikable jackass who is indifferent to the suffering of people because all he cares about is fighting, but the actual dialogue our leads share is stiff and repetitive. On the one hand, I'm glad this at least had enough interesting elements for me to feel disappointed, rather than just numb to the constant deluge of isekai cliches. On the other hand, disappointment still isn't a great motivator to watch any more of this. I'm more liable to ask for another season of The Executioner and Her Way of Life, if I'm being honest.

Now that's what I'm talking about! I was excited to party down with Ishura from the moment I saw its trailer, which features the instantly classic image of a steampunk-goggle-wearing dragon wielding a double-barreled shotgun, but I honestly didn't expect to love the show's premiere this much. You can chalk a lot of that love up to the very final minute or so of the episode, which elevates the story and characters into a concoction that feels tailor-made for viewers like me.

Before we got to that ending, though, I was picking up pretty much everything that Ishura was putting down. It has a relatively unique fantasy setting with a magic system based on the spoken word that packs in just a dash of spooky uncanniness, which I always appreciate. That, combined with the fact that the "heroes" like Soujiro the Willow-Sword seem to be getting isekai'd from our world, reminded me of one of my underdog favorites from a couple of years back, The Executioner and Her Way of Life. Plus, Ishura generally looks quite good, with its deep colors and well-drawn background art complementing the frenetic and violent spectacle quite nicely, even if the visuals sometimes look a little dark and muddy.

Now, it's one thing for Soujiro to be the kind of borderline sociopathic violence-junkie that can actually make a good fit for a grim story like Ishura's, so long as the show gives him just enough charm to remain likable, but the best character moment of the whole premiere has nothing to do with any of his slicing and dicing, as fun as it is to behold. Yuno drew me in, and how her story ties into Soujiro's at the end of the episode got my fists pumping like mad when the credits rolled. Her meek personality and the antipathy she holds towards "strong" people like Soujiro could have easily come across as trite, but the show manages to get you on her side, I think, by showing us how much the everyday people of this world stand to lose when the powers that be run rampant as they do (even if it was a bit heavy-handed to fridge her girlfriend in such a violent manner.) Either way, it all leads up to the moment where Yuno decides to join Soujiro on his quest to find more opponents to slay, not because she wants to help him rid the world of evil, but because she thinks he is the kind of evil that can only be taken out by the even more powerful legends of her world. She even gives herself the moniker of "Yuno the Distant Talon," reasoning that she might as well commit to something "truly wild" now that she's lost everything.

I won't play games with you all: That is straight up one the coolest goddamned things I've ever heard in my life. From that moment on, I knew I was all in on Ishura, and I cannot wait to see where things go from here.