The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids

Rud is a tank of the Hero's Party and is said to have the highest defense ever in history. The party often does labyrinth raids, but to Rud, it means more than just a raid. To cure his beloved sister's illness, he is searching for the wish-granting treasure hidden in those labyrinths. But one day, the arrogant hero kicks him from the party after an unsuccessful raid attempt, blaming it on his skills, whose effects he is still unaware of. Without nowhere else to go and nothing to do, he decides to return to his hometown, where his sister is waiting. On his way there, he saves a girl who is being attacked by a monster. Unexpectedly, this girl has an extremely rare skill called "Appraisal." Thanks to her skill, Rud can discover the truth behind his unknown skills, which are very powerful skills. With a defense of 9999 and powerful skills, thus begins the adventure of the strongest tank, Rud.

The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids is an anime adaptation of Makoto Kisaragi's manga of Ryūta Kijima and Sando's The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids (Saikyō Tank no Meikyū Kōryaku) light novel series. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Let's start with what I liked about this one: the fact that the legendary hero is just a normal-level asshole rather than an ultra-evil one. While he was happy to get Rud out of his party (likely to make himself the only male in the party), what happened wasn't some kind of setup. Rud was being less effective as a tank and it was due to his unknown skill—just as the hero guessed.

Of course, the trick to this is that said hidden skill was transferring all the damage any of the others took onto him. As the dungeons and monsters got tougher and tougher, everyone else was getting hit more and more—and Rud was bearing the brunt of it. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the party had subconsciously learned to be more reckless in battle as there were no ill effects that they could see.

Unfortunately, revealing all this so early on in the series is a massive double-edged sword. While the revelation is an interesting one, the mystery of what was happening to Rud is by far the most interesting part of the show. Without it, the anime is about as boring as any run-of-the-mil fantasy I've seen in years.

I don't care about any of the characters we encounter—neither Luna nor the fledgling adventurers. I also don't care about Rud's cliché mission to heal his sick sister. Frankly, I feel no reason to continue watching this show. The one mystery I cared about has been solved and Rud is heading home to see the person he loves most in the world while filled with renewed confidence. That's a happy ending as far as I'm concerned and so I'll be moving on.

I have two major takeaways from this premiere. First, I refuse to type out its full name, even once. I don't care what Crunchyroll or Square Enix say, I'm not writing past the word "raids" because there is not enough time in the day for that nonsense.

Second, I'm increasingly convinced the people writing all these shows/light novels obsessed with RPG skills don't play games. This feels like the fifth or sixth time I've seen a show about people not respecting the Tank in a raid party, and it makes less sense with every new addition. Never, in all my wasted years playing MMOs, did I ever witness anyone say, "We don't need that dumb armor class who draws aggro. He's useless." Sorry guys, but if you want to write your story to appeal to the audience's perceived persecution complex, you at least need to make it slightly believable.

If that feels like a lot of preamble, it's only because I have nothing much to say about this show. It's simply a mashup of other shows based on the dreadfully dull conceit of rattling off RPG stats and skill names to justify painfully animated fights with generic monsters. There's no interesting twist, like the existentially terrifying Skill system in Banished from the Hero's Party. There's no charming personality like the early parts of So I'm a Spider, So What? There is no tactical bent to the fights like Log Horizon or action spectacle like Sword Art Online. It's just a hastily assembled collection of tired tropes that you and I have both seen done better a million times elsewhere. The cast are all cardboard cutouts, save Rud, who has the fortitude of the particle board they make Ikea bookshelves out of. There is nothing to interest, charm, intrigue, or entertain you.

It's just so tired and empty, the obvious work of an author chasing trends and an adaptation team that does not care about what they're putting to the screen. It's the kind of hollow production that makes preview guide a slog, and my only saving grace is that I'm going to forget I even watched this hunk of junk after writing this.

I am certain I won't be the only person to note that protagonist Rud's name, pronounced “rude,” feels somewhat prophetic. Watching this was a rude shock after the new episode of The Apothecary Diaries, and the sheer amount of sad anime girls in the opening theme – as in, two screens' worth – also seems rude, since presumably we'll be expected to remember all of their names. Of course, they make that potentially easier on us, since two of them are named Lily and Lilia, so maybe there'll be a Nim to go with Nin and a Runa to go with Luna.

While we're waiting for that to pan out, we can enjoy that this series opens on nothing new. Like many other “booted from the hero's party” stories, Rud is unceremoniously tossed out by hero Kyglas in what I can only describe as a rude way. Kyglas, who presumably actually wants to be the lone dude in a party of women, maintains that Rud is an ineffective shield, even though none of their party members appear to have died or even been injured during their battles. He also likely knows (since Nin, the healer, does) that Rud is only doing the whole tank thing because his little sister is ill, and he needs the wish-granting treasure deep in the labyrinth to save her. See? Rude.

If this has all been summary and snarked thus far, that's because there's not much to say about this utterly lackluster first episode, whose unwieldy title I am abbreviating as Tank TL;DR. Sure, it's cute that the little party on an escort quest who picks Rud up appears composed of two love birds and a girl wearing Satoko's uniform top from Higurashi: When They Cry, and the forest snake reminds me somewhat of Kaa from Disney's The Jungle Book. (The animated one.) And the escaped slave that Rud saves hasn't started calling him “master” yet and doesn't seem inclined to act like he's her entire reason for living, so there's that. But that's honestly about all there is, and the unattractive character designs and uninspired backgrounds and settings don't do much to make this palatable. This rude attempt at storytelling and animation feels like one that can safely be skipped.

God, these things are getting harder and harder to watch, let alone write about. If watching your average godawful isekai anime about a generic RPG fantasy world (that isn't video game, for some reason) is like watching the world's least interesting streamer do a Let's Play of the world's least interesting video game, then watching The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids is like watching the world's least interesting streamer do a Let's Play of the same video game, except he's started an alt character with a new class. Now, he's trying to convince you that it's an entirely new and different thing. No, it isn't, my guy. Everybody here can see that it's just the same old crap with a barely altered coat of paint and a couple of different battle skills, but the result is in no way different from what we've already seen you do a thousand goddamned times.

I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm losing patience. You've got to understand, I have lost count of how many of these terrible isekai premieres that I've had to sit through over the years. It's like living life on the run from a shambling army of the undead that will stop at nothing to cram twenty-two minutes' worth of barely animated, spitefully boring cash-crab cartoon nonsense into my eyeballs. We're talking about a show whose entire premiere is wholly summed up by its awful, overlong subtitle: -A Tank with a Rare 9999 Resistance Skill Got Kicked from the Hero's Party-. There. In reading that sentence, you have officially absorbed every detail worth knowing about the show's premise. Nothing of value will be lost if you just…don't watch it.

“What about the setting, or the main character's personality and backstory?” I hear you asking, which must mean you've never watched one of these shows before. “Shouldn't we at least learn the main guy's name?”

Oh, you sweet summer child…No. Don't be ridiculous. The main guy's name doesn't matter. His life and personality do not matter, because they are completely inseparable from the role he plays as the barely-even-a-gimmick spin on whatever ghoulish, twitching carcass remains of the World-That-Is-Not-A-Videogame-(But-Still-Oviously-Just-A-Videogame)-Light-Novel-Fantasy-Sellout-Ripoff subgenre. He's a tank. He got kicked out of the party. He finds a little slave girl who uses the magical equivalent of pressing the Select button on the controller to check your character's stats page to tell Tank Guy that he does, indeed, have good skills, or whatever. He's going to meet more girls, and do more Tank Guy stuff. It will all probably look like wet garbage that got scraped onto an animation cell by accident and shipped off to the TV studios because the executives in charge of the company figured that nobody would notice the difference anyway.