The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Even Given the Worthless "Appraiser" Class, I'm Actually the Strongest

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In this fantasy world, "jobs" are god-given from birth, and heroes are born, not made. Ein's job as "Appraiser" has put him about as far from the "hero" pedestal as possible. Used, abused, and eventually abandoned by his fellow adventurers, Ein decides it just isn't worth going on. Lucky for Ein, though, the end may be the beginning and a new lease on life. It turns out that his "worthless" job may just be the key to becoming a hero after all.

Even Given the Worthless "Appraiser" Class, I'm Actually the Strongest is based on a light novel series by Ibarakino. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating:
Even Given the Worthless “Appraiser” Class, I'm Actually the Strongest sets itself apart from other LitRPG series in a couple ways, even without my making jokes about finding tiny details to call unique. I'm no sociologist, but their description of the job system actually vibed pretty well with the way caste systems have worked in many parts of the world. Your position in the world is determined by factors before your birth, including your parents' trade, and they are considered immutable. If you're someone who falls even further through the cracks of even that system, such as Ein's parents dying when he was young so he couldn't inherit the family shop, you're forced into an even further degraded life. Never mind that the lowest tiers carry out some of the most essential tasks; society has decided they're trash and treats them accordingly. This may have been the first time this type of plot structure has resonated with me at all, so kudos on that.

That said, this doesn't make the episode any more fun to watch. It opens with a suicide attempt, and after that is a solid ten minutes of watching Ein being mocked and abused by his party members. Then there's five minutes of him fleeing monsters, a five-minute break where he encounters the world tree, and finally, five minutes of gore as he's attacked by high-level monsters. It's damn near relentless, and Zoid and Jolene's cruelty is well beyond regular revenge isekai's levels. I get that some people really are that awful, especially to marginalized groups, but it's sickening to watch. The emotional gore is almost as bad to sit through as watching his eye get sliced open.

It's not just dark content-wise; much of the episode was difficult to make out because the lighting was so low, even the slightest bit of glare rendered everything happening on-screen invisible. The animation was fine? I guess? I needed the lamp in my living room on, so I really couldn't see what was going on for much of the episode. I thought it was interesting how Ein's high neckline kind of gave the look of a slave collar compared to Zoid's open neckline and Jolene's cleavage-baring dress, though I suppose the latter is a given. On the other hand, we get some of the goofiest-looking Rank S monsters I've encountered.

Even Given the Worthless “Appraiser” Class is to LitRPG what Attack on Titan is to battle shonen: a self-serious, grimdark take on typical genre tropes that think things through a little better than average. I don't disdain it, but I'm certainly not here for it either.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Alright, I want to be clear right up front: I actually like revenge stories. Watching someone who was wronged horribly overcome all the odds and dish out sweet vengeance upon some truly terrible people is some great entertainment. I even enjoy more than a few of the fantasy anime with the good old “betrayed by party and left to die” setup—including this season's Übel Blatt. However, to make such a story work, one key aspect cannot be overlooked: you have to make the main character likable.

The whole emotional connection to a revenge fantasy comes from seeing someone kind, good, and doing their best get screwed over. The injustice of it hits you on a personal, moral level. But without sympathy for the protagonist, a revenge story just falls apart… which brings us to this first episode of Even Given the Worthless "Appraiser" Class, I'm Actually the Strongest.

Within these 22 minutes, we watch the main character, Ein, complain endlessly about how unfair the world is—about how if only he had been born with a better job or skill or if his parents would have lived long enough to pass their business on to him, everything would have been better. But here's the thing: I don't buy it.

His problems are of his own making as much as they are the unfairness of the world. This guy had a house and land. He didn't need to run off and become an adventurer. Just because he had the appraiser skill, that doesn't mean he needed to become either an appraiser or an adventurer and nothing else. He could have been a farmer or learned a trade—the appraiser skill would be super useful in those kinds of jobs to measure the quality and success of your work. So, instead of feeling bad for Ein, I felt as if this was at least halfway his fault—for becoming an adventurer and partnering with idiots who didn't respect him.

The rest of the episode was just meaningless gore for its own sake and that's not something I particularly care for. In the end, I'm just going to assume Ein dies down in the dungeon and is imagining a sexy elf waifu in his last moments.

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James Beckett
Rating:

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that pretty much any anime that is brazen enough to stick “I'm Actually the Strongest” in its title has to work triply hard to impress me—because those words have become the anime equivalent of some new acquaintance showing up to dinner and shaking my hand, only to then casually lean over and cough a fat, greasy loogie onto my plate, all while maintaining disturbingly unbroken eye contact. Is it possible to come back from such an aggressively spiteful first impression? I guess so. Maybe the Snot Hocker will pull out a check for fifty-thousand dollars and immediately sign it over to me, who the hell knows? But, c'mon, folks. Let's not bet on this Worthless “Appraiser” show's ability to pull off such a comeback. It doesn't seem like the kind of production that is swimming in the excess pools of disposable cash required to buy my favor back after spitting in my food.

If anything, this is the kind of show that would merely scoot off to some dank, sullen corner to rant and rave like some kind of emo Japanese Gollum about all of the tricksy bullies what deserved to be spited on. Yes, dear readers, we've at last arrived at this season's rendition of that old, reliable standard: The “Someday All of The Hot Girls and Preppy Guys Who Treated Me Like Crap Are Gonna Pay, Because I Am Going to Be Suddenly Granted the Powers of an Untamed Fantasy God, and All Without Ever Having To Try Improving Myself in Any Meaningful Way!” anime. This time, instead of being a healer or a monster tamer, our main guy…Ein, I think his name is? Whatever. You and I both know it doesn't matter. The point is, Main Guy is an “Appraiser” this time, which means he can, like, analyze stuff. Except, you know, he's somehow fallen in with a party of sociopath bullies who belittle and berate him at every turn, which means that Main Guy's life is nothing but misery and wasted potential until he meets the pretty elf girl that wishes him into a fresh start of overpowered excess.

It might sound like I've spent way too much time going over the basic premise for the show when there's a perfectly good summary sitting at the top of the page, but that's honestly all there is to this premiere. We spend an agonizingly long amount of time in some featureless cave watching our protagonist living the crappy and pathetic life that is a prerequisite for starring in a show featuring that damned “I'm Actually the Strongest” tag, and then he becomes Actually the Strongest. It's the sort of anime where the experience of watching the premiere is functionally indistinguishable from reading the five-sentence summary of it in the “List of Episodes” widget on Wikipedia.

I was tempted to give the show an extra half-star for its honestly decent production values, but you know what? Nah. I've decided that the act of polishing a turd of a script with passable visuals doesn't actually merit any recognition or congratulations. Instead, I'll simply say exactly what would come out of my mouth if I found a real human person trying to guild some dog's freshly pinched loaf: “My god, sir or madam! Why on earth are you holding that moldy animal feces with your bare hands? And why are you attempting to make it look pretty by slathering gold paint all over it? Wash your hands, damn you, and throw that nasty thing in the bin!”

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

This show has a bad case of the self-important grimdarks. It's a disease that commonly afflicts LitRPG tales and isekai power fantasies, with this being the former. It will, presumably, follow Ein as he goes from being a put-upon, bullied nobody to a harem master with awesome skills and the love of at least one goddess, but this first episode is all about the inherent awfulness of his life at present. Ein, as an appraiser, isn't just ridiculed; he's tormented by his terrible party members, who don't just attempt to sacrifice him to a pack of hellhounds; they actively make sure that he has no option but to die, preferably torn apart by ravening beasts. The joke's on them, though, because instead of getting chewed up by monsters, he commits suicide!

(Here I would like to take a brief moment to acknowledge the fact that Ein wards off the hellhounds by offering them apples. Silly as it sounds, my dog would do pretty much anything for apples, so I applaud this knowledge of canine behavior.)

I've been frank with my distaste for excessive gore following my mother's traumatic brain injury five years ago, but it's still worth noting that this just gets gorier as it goes on. From ripping the teeth out of a giant dead rat to Ein getting chewed by hellhounds to culminating in him losing an ear and some fingers by the end, this is pretty gross. It's almost certainly intended to contrast with the mythical World Tree that helps revive Ein twice – the peaceful beauty and idyllic light-suffused waterfalls are a marked difference from the rest of the episode, which takes place in a dark dungeon labyrinth. The woman who I presume to be the goddess of light is also a study in contrasts when compared with the other people in the show – clean and bright, garbed in a flowing white dress, she's clearly meant to show that she's above the filth of humanity, or at least the sort of humanity represented by everyone Ein's interacted with. Do I love that we're introduced to her in the order of legs, breasts, face? No, I do not. But the idea behind her design is evident, at least.

Plainly, I am struggling to come up with things to say about this episode. That's because it's so busy trying to show us how dark and edgy it is that it basically forgets any coherent story. I do think that will kick in next week, now that goddess and Ein have met and we know his excessively tragic backstory. But nothing about this makes me want to stick around to see what that story may be.