There are about four or five settings The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party, Is, in Fact, the Strongest has at its disposal: a labyrinth, a guild hall, the city streets surrounding said guild hall, and the fields between said city and labyrinth. The world doesn't feel like a sprawling fantasy anime should; it is more like a stage play that only has a limited number of sets to save on time and costs. On the one hand, Healer's few settings help the show feel redundant enough that it becomes easy to navigate through. Conversely, it's at the cost of making its world and its inhabitants feel less immersive. The result is something that feels cheap and comes off at the seams.

The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party, Is, in Fact, the Strongest focuses on Laust, better known as “Laust the Ignoramus” for his weak spells and inability to help his former party, the Band of Lightning, slay a fierce hydra. The young monk girl Narsena decides to team up with Laust to start a new party to go on adventures and quests. As the title reads, Laust is way stronger and more competent on the battlefield than rumors let on. However, he is an ignoramus in other ways unrelated to his strength. More on that in a bit.

The very start of Healer is marked by dialogue that introduces the characters in a manner that feels too expository. It's all a game of “tell and don't show” since we get to know the characters through their class and profession and never through their personality. None of the people inhabiting Healer's twelve episodes go through any meaningful development. Narsena stays the cheerful monk sidekick with a hankering for adventuring, while Laust does not stray away from being the helpful, nice healer with a strong side. They don't share a meaningful relationship and are only shoved in there because the plot says so.

Laust is so one-dimensionally nice that it's too much for his own good. Laust's former party banishes him from the party after failing to slay a hydra, and then when they come back to re-recruit him, he forgives them and turns down their request. Okay, fair enough. But then Laust's former party fails to defeat the hydra again, which prompts Laust to come to the rescue to defeat it. Alright, I guess. But then, after the hydra is blown into very profitable smithereens, the former party comes up with the keen idea to enrich themselves through child slave trafficking. You'd think that the moment an undercover cop comes to bust them would be when Laust becomes rightfully petty. Who wouldn't experience some schadenfreude after the group you had a falling out with got in hot water for something so reprehensible and illegal? What does Laust do instead? He asks the cop to let them go and give them another chance. If the circumstances were different, I'd say that Laust's ability to forgive would be admirable, perhaps even noble. But since they're not, Laust's naivety has him living up to his title as Ignoramus. The worst part? This is probably the height of Laust as a character.

There are a couple of other moments like this in Banished Healer. The undercover cop and another healer discuss their plans to join Laust and Narsena right in front of them, but they never seem to notice. Laust does not recognize that the guild master's assistant is someone he was adventuring with some odd years prior, despite said assistant looks the same now as he did then. There's a plot point involving how Narsela got her blue hair, which is as convenient as it is insipid. I realize that like this show is with its dialogue and characterization, my stance here is to err on the expository side of things—I'm simply relaying the show's plot points as fuel for my criticism. However, the logic of Healer's main character and his world is so baffling and nonsensical that it's impossible not to list its flaws like an IMDb goofs page would.

The animation is as flat as its characters, leaving the fight scenes a lot to be desired. The monsters and the fight sequences are lifeless as they move across the screen, and their eventual demises often feel anticlimactic, if not unintentionally hilarious. Adding insult to injury is how some finishing blows or big attacks are skimmed over to make way for a battle's inevitable conclusion, resulting in action sequences that feel slapdash on the fronts of plot and action.

The anime is not only lazy with its lack of settings but also lazy with the settings' lack of creativity, resulting in environments without any detail or flourish. One recurring gag where a soldier drops his axe on his foot in the guild hall is repeated 3-to-4 times for no reason. What should be a moment of slapstick is without a single comedic bear or punchlines. We can't even get a guy to shout, “Hey, careful with that axe, Eugene!”? I would have laughed at that reference.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting too much from this show, and I knew what I was in for the moment I saw its first episode. Without much substance or style in this story, it isn't improper to banish yourself from watching 12 episodes of this series in favor of something else.