The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So I Might as Well Try Mastering Magic

A middle-aged commoner now finds himself in the body of Liam Hamilton, the young son of a noble house teetering on the brink of collapse. Between his fervidly desperate father and his utterly apathetic brothers, the only bright side to his new situation is that Liam can finally try learning magic like he's always wanted. Little does he know his hobby of choice may be about to turn his life upside-down yet again.

I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So I Might as Well Try Mastering Magic is based on a light novel series by Nazuna Miki. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

Usually, when we get these multiple-episode premieres, it is because that length is necessary to get to the point where the anime gets to show off—to hit us with its most visually stunning scene, tear-jerking emotional moment, or shocking twist that no one saw coming. Of course, I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So I Might as Well Try Mastering Magic does none of these things.

Not only does the show not look very good in most instances, but it also gives bog-standard isekai anime a bad name with how little of it is original in any way. Random guy reincarnated? As a Noble? With no actual responsibility? In a fantasy world? With super-charged magical powers? Does that require little to no effort to master? And constantly lucks out into even more outlandish powers? And eventually, gets a slave? Which is okay because she wants to be one and he's never going to do anything naughty to her (even if she wanted him to)? It's got all that and more.

It's honestly exhausting how boring it is having seen all this done before—and done better. I was racking my brain watching for anything I hadn't seen before—any twist on the isekai formula not directly lifted from some better fantasy story. And honestly, there are two things I was able to find—and they were the worst parts of this premiere.

The first of these is that becoming someone's “familiar” (read: “slave”) both de-ages them physically and makes them more attractive. How young? I don't know but I assume close to Liam's age (he's 12). The second thing is that showing off his second “familiar's” new special skill requires her to go to the kitchen and make a sandwich. I… I just… I don't even know what's real anymore.

Then there's the whole thing with him creating life. He makes an exact clone of himself and sends it out into the world so he can be in two places at once—and the story completely glosses over the implications of this. Do the two share memories? Will it become a different person completely if they're separated long enough? What happens to the clone when it's dispelled? Is he killing himself each time he does? How do we know which scenes feature the clone and which Liam? Maybe it's the clone who enslaved the girls, not him (after all, it's the clone who passed the adventurer's guild test). Maybe the real Liam is just practicing magic in the woods while this is all happening?

If the creators behind this anime are content to put zero thought into this anime, why should I waste my time trying to figure it out? I'm past done with this anime and hope I never have to experience it again.

Finding something interesting or unique about I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So I Might as Well Try Mastering Magic may be my biggest challenge of the season. Actually, no, scratch that - sitting through two episodes in one go was my biggest challenge. That might be the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

Just… you see that title? “I'm a noble on the brink of ruin” is a perfectly sensible sentence. It sets up a situation. I had to watch the convoluted explanation of why they're on the brink of ruin three times because it kept sliding off my brain. Some random Japanese dude has been isekai'd into the body of a prepubescent kid named Liam for seemingly no reason, and his older brother seems unbothered about why he needs basic concepts about their world explained to him repeatedly. Noble families need to accomplish something every three generations, and their dad has done diddly squat with his lifetime other than fathering six terrible children. But as contrived (there's that word again! It keeps coming up in my reviews!!) as it is, it still sets up a situation and stakes.

“I might as well try mastering magic,” is also a valid statement! It's lighthearted and breezy. Liam strolls through the world, picking up magic spells from Takehito Koyasu – oh wait, there's my interesting thing! Koyasu is here! Except that he was in that Fruitmaster anime so that won't work. Like most isekai protagonists, everything comes easily to him. He casts high-level spells right out the gate, defeats strong monsters, and has a super cool item box that he explains to us because I've never heard of such an innovation before! I'm so glad he told us about how his item box holds a large number of items in a small space!

Do you notice how that doesn't work as a sufficient conditional statement? “I might as well try mastering magic” doesn't follow from “I'm a noble on the brink of ruin,” because those two statements appear to be unrelated. After all, it's not like nobles are barred from magic, or that mastering magic comes at a cost to his status. He's the fifth son and also a child, so he doesn't have other noble duties that the magic is distracting him from. The title is how a lot of the writing works in the show; nothing quite flows logically. It's abstruse and overly wordy and if you stop to think about it for half a second, you'd realize it all falls apart.

The first episode could have flown by with one and a half stars; it was pretty bad but in a generic way. The second episode, however, did it no favors. It was so, so, so much worse. The animation, not particularly impressive to begin with, falls to ribbons, and having to sit through 50 minutes of dogwater writing is so much more painful than 25 minutes. But the last straw comes in the last act when Liam voluntarily enslaves two girls, one of whom he just met, in a deeply creepy enslavement ceremony that resembles a weird, creepy wedding. One of them flirts with him, even though we know he's not even a teenager because his older brother is 13. The other one runs out and comes back… with a sandwich. HE ENSLAVES A GIRL AND SHE IMMEDIATELY MAKES A SANDWICH. It's beyond parody! I was rolling around howling, “NOOO! NOOOOOOO! AUUUUUUUUGH!”

Something like that? Is uniquely terrible.

Entertain me, if you would, by joining me on a little tangent. I promise you that it is related to my thoughts on I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So I Might as Well Try Mastering Magic, just in a sort of…roundabout way. Not too long ago, I was engaged in a conversation with one of my anime-loving acquaintances from The Meatspace, and he was grilling me a little bit on how much I like to go off on all of the crappy isekai anime we have to review every season. He said, “It isn't like we don't have our own shows in the U.S. that are all just following a proven formula. Look at stuff like Law & Order or CSI!” I want to be fair to this individual who, to his credit, was simply defending his appreciation for That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime which seems like a perfectly adequate show. Every culture has its pop culture junk food that becomes popular precisely because of how formulaic and predictable it is, and it isn't like we would be getting all of these freaking isekai anime if people weren't watching them…

However.

Imagine, if you will, a world where we apply the reality of the isekai trend of these last few years to shows like Law & Order and its procedural ilk. Setting aside the fundamental differences in production and marketplace between live-action crime dramas and cartoons about virgins who get killed by a truck so they can get superpowers and girlfriends with boobies in a generic fantasy setting, there is one key difference between the two paradigms that is worth mentioning: The sheer, staggering volume of mediocrity. I counted, and even if you combined all of the major network crime dramas - L&O, NCIS, and CSI - and then also tacked on their tangentially related crossover cousins - FBI, Chicago ______, Jag, etc - you'd have between 30 and 40 distinct programs. Mind you, many of these shows have been running for decades, and some went the opposite route and got canceled after a few seasons.

You know that most of them will never bother to add anything substantial or creative to the basic procedural formula, because that would require effort and talent, not to mention a willingness to risk challenging the audience. At most, they will take the same five or so generic murder mystery plots and recycle them across different cities and professions to astonishingly diminishing returns. Law & Order: Food and Safety Division. CSI: Punxsutawney. NCIS: Bar Harbor. Brainerd 5-0. Criminal Minds: Felony Tax Evasion. Wichita Justice. Also, because the only way to make any money on these things is to criminally underpay the production staff and cut costs across the board, every series stars the same rotating cast of a dozen or so community theater actors, just in a bunch of different, bad wigs. Oh, and the shows are all obsessed with giving their lame-o protagonists slaves “familiars” and everyone just keeps acting like that's not a weird thing to do.

Just picture this cultural wasteland: A fresh new dozen random, interchangeable cop and lawyer shows getting churned out unceasingly every twelve weeks or so, year after year, for a decade straight. What does any of this have to do with I'm a Noble on the Brink of Ruin, you ask? Well, it should be obvious. This is the CSI: Punxsutawney of anime. Would I begrudge anybody for sitting down after a hard day of work to see if the cops figured out who ran a red light on the East Mahoning intersection and clipped a post office box? No, of course not. Just like I will not begrudge anyone who spends time trying to figure out what happens when Liam the noble boy shrugs his shoulders and decides on a lark to see if he can use magic (Spoiler Alert: He's the best at it, just ask his sexy slave “familiar”). Am I going to feel just a little bit insane when I wake up every day to find a thousand more of these damned things clogging up all of our streaming services, Blu-ray shelves, and TV listings? Yes. Yes, I will. Every single day of my life.

Gee, you guys, I think people are going to be way too hard on this show because the hero, Liam, is so strong that he has a spell that can make people his familiars. It's a contract that means that they have to do what he says if he gives them an order, but it's totally not a slave thing, because the girls (of course they're girls) volunteer to do it and they get their power boosted with special skills and they're made prettier and younger, and anyway, they say they don't mind even if Liam tell them to do weird things. It's totally different than a slave thing!

And now that that's out of the way, I'm not even sure it's the worst part of this show. It's certainly not great, but in the scheme of things, it's merely a drop in the bucket of this series' problems. The primary issue is that it's flying through its source material – time skips of a month or more are de rigeur across these episodes, and it's a way to get Liam through the early stages of his magic training. We see him go from learning magic is a thing he can study to mastering it, all in the space of half an episode. He conveniently meets a mysterious man who trains him mere seconds after his dad mentions a dangerous person floating around, and his older brother Bruno might as well be named “Explication-kun” because he exists to tell us things and not much else. Everything indicates a drive to reach a specific point in the narrative so that the story can really begin, but it's done in such a way as to be wholly uninteresting.

We don't even really know how Liam came to be “Liam” in the first place. He comments about how he was just drinking after work, so we have to assume that he's been isekai'd, but we get nothing beyond that, and it barely seems to matter. Is he magically gifted because of it? The brief scene before the opening credits could indicate that, but again, it's just blown through to keep things moving. Liam himself isn't even a character so much as he's an overpowered illusion of a protagonist, mastering skill after skill after skill with little fanfare and less personality. It's appropriate that he gains the ability to summon himself, because it's impossible to tell when it's Liam or his doppelganger doing something – during his test to join the Hunters' (read: adventurers') Guild, he briefly mentions that it's the doppelganger who's actually there; otherwise we'd never have known. Add to this stiff animation and a predilection for warrior women to have their stomachs completely exposed (no important organs there, right?), and this doesn't even look good, although at least some effort has been put into the ladies' character designs. There simply isn't enough here to be interesting, and I suspect you'd be better off reading the light novels instead.