The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Promise of Wizard

It's a windy night with cats making noise on a full moon. Akira Masaki, who was living an ordinary life, wanders into a world where wizards and humans coexist. In this world, which is made up of five countries, a giant moon called the "Great Calamity" attacks once a year. The "Wise Wizards" have the mission to fight and push back the moon---Akira was summoned to this world as a "Sage from Another World" to lead them.

Promise of Wizard is based on the Mahō Tsukai no Yakusoku - Promise of Wizard smartphone game from coly. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

Of all the scores I can give a premiere for the Preview Guide, I feel like three stars is one of the hardest to land on. Ones and Twos are just varying levels of “Bad”, of course, just as Fours and Fives are different degrees of “Great!” Two-and-a-half star scores are reserved for shows that didn't inspire any emotion in me one way or the other, while Three-and-a-halfs are for the shows I enjoy despite their noticeable weak points. Simple enough, so far. Threes, though, have to be just flawed enough to avoid my good graces without being so mid as to score, well, right in the middle. Promise of Wizard might just have to stand as my new exemplar of scoring alignment, however, since it's the most “3 Stars out of a Possible 5” anime that I've seen in a while.

In other words, it's one of those shows where every single one of its core elements holds some promise, but it never quite manages to deliver on any of them. Take our heroine Akira, for instance. She comes dangerously close to demonstrating a real personality with her penchant for taking care of the local alleycats, and her ability to express the occasional flare-up of charm and likeability (I appreciated her worry about being a poor choice for an isekai hero on account of not playing many RPGs). Unfortunately, it seems like Promise of Wizard is sticking to some of its soggier genre conventions, such as the mandate that the protagonist of a reverse-harem fantasy story has to be enough of a blank-slate for the audience to project themselves on. It's a staple of many would-be romance stories aimed at men and women alike that I have never agreed with, mostly because I only find romances to be flirty and sexy when there's clear chemistry between all parties involved, which is hard to manage when your female lead is hardly allowed to do anything but be the receptacle for a bunch of generic cute-boy banter.

That leads us to the cute boys in question, who are all…fine? Aside from their dumb names, they fit the bill expected from a cast imported straight from a mobile game. Their character designs are all internally distinct enough to motivate players…er, I mean, Akira to check out all of them in search of their favorite hunk, even while they are all trapped strictly within the stable of archetypes that we've all seen a million times. Still, it's not like any of the boys are total duds, and there's at least one tricksy purple catboy for fans to correctly identify as The Best One.

So far as the show's production values go, they, too, are adequate. For every elevated flash of a charming character animation or neat starlit background, we also get some rushed editing and bog-standard framing to bring everything back down to ground level. As I said, this is a pretty ideal reference point for a Three-Star Anime Premiere. It does just enough to keep me from dozing off or getting actively annoyed by it, though I'm not going to rush out of my way to see the next episode.

I was going to say that Promise of Wizard's isekai-via-elevator is at least something new, but then I remembered that Otherside Picnic exists and is generally a better use of the device, so there goes my one positive thing to say about this first episode. Although I suppose I could give it credit for being so obviously a reverse harem mobile game adaptation. Or is that more of an insult than praise? In any event, the staggeringly large cast shown in the opening animation and the fact that, prior to the anime's release, a “guide video” was produced don't give me much hope that we name-challenged people will have an easy time keeping track of all of the characters, although since everyone introduced thus far has a very loaded name, I may be wrong.

On that front, I desperately wish that this series didn't have a character named Shylock among the rest. I know that, given that the other characters are Faust, Heathcliff, and Arthur, the intention was clearly to be literary; even Lord Drummond suggests that, given the celebrated Scottish poet with that name. But Shylock isn't just a Shakespearean character (from The Merchant of Venice); it's also an antisemitic slur, and that meaning doesn't just go away because an anime series/mobile game gives it to a hot wizard. You may accuse me of overreacting, but that doesn't invalidate my feelings on the subject.

But back to the actual episode…there isn't much to say when you come down to it. The plot is fairly basic, with heroine Akira whisked away to another world via an enchanted elevator and a playful purple-haired wizard named Murr, a reference to a story by E.T.A. Hoffman of The Nutcracker fame: The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. She's the Great Sage that two factions have been awaiting and fighting over, and without having a whole lot of say in the matter, Akira joins the wizards' side, much to the ire of Lord Drummond. The whole thing feels like a perfunctory exercise, with Akira not having much personality beyond “feeds stray cats” and each of the wizards being a different kind of pretty. (Drummond is, of course, old and portly, just to reassure us that Akira has chosen the correct side.) Apart from the pretty young men, the art is somewhat generic, although the biggest issue is the odd way Akira walks into the elevator; it looks like her feet aren't connecting with the floor.

This very well may turn out to be a lot of silly fun; certainly, otome game-based anime has managed that before, and this isn't entirely without potential, even if it currently lacks personality. Ladies deserve derivative isekai series, too, so if nothing else, this brings a little equality to the market. I may even give it a second episode to see where it goes.

Alright everyone, nothing to see here. Just a group of beautiful men with giant, hard rods between their legs. Some are girthy; some have a bit of a curve. Some have interesting colors, and some even have a knob on the end. There is absolutely nothing sexual to be implied by any of this. It's just dudes riding brooms. Absolutely no visual metaphors are intended; if you see any, that's just because you're impure.

Now that we've got that out of the way, as cliche as this opening episode of Promise of Wizard is—you know, a normal person summoned to a fantasy world because only they have the power to save it—I did enjoy how things played out. Basically, our heroine, Akira, is being purposely kept in the dark about her summoning. This is because two opposing forces want control over her—the government and the wizards. Each side wants to get her out of the tower she has appeared in and to a location of their choosing ASAP.

At the moment, both sides seem evenly matched. The wizards are exhausted from battle and can barely bring any power to bear. Meanwhile, the government troops are fresh and numerous. This means her choice actually matters—as having to deal with her resisting on top of the battle between the two groups could spell defeat for whoever tries to take her by force.

Because Akira has so little information about the state of the world—and any info she has comes from obviously biased sources—she is forced to choose based not on the contents of each side's arguments but on how each argument was made. This interesting distinction makes Akira more than a damsel in distress. She may have no idea what is happening, but she can still see that those saying they want to use her to save a friend are likely far more genuine than the man shouting about how capturing her at swordpoint is “for her own good.”

All that said, we do actually get more than a bit of information about the state of the world in passing—even if Akira is too overwhelmed to realize it. Basically, something attacks the realm each year, and the wizards repel it. This year, they failed, and the kingdom believes it was on purpose. Thus, the kingdom wants to use “the Sage” to control the wizards and force them to do their job. The wizards, however, want to maintain their autonomy and protect their own in the fight to come. It's a complex enough situation to be interesting and one with plenty of room for drama.

Now, will I be coming back next week for more? No. It's not a show made for me. But if reverse harem gatcha game anime are your thing, I suspect this one could turn out to be an enjoyable one.