Ningen Fushin: Adventurers Who Don't Believe in Humanity Will Save the World

Marinate1016★ 7

Ningen Fushin started out as one of the most promising shows of the season. One of the latest in the “banished from the hero’s party” style of betrayal and redemption fantasy shows. Unfortunately what started out as a promising fantasy show with a fun cast devolved into a directionless mediocre story with no sense of purpose. I want to be clear that while Ningen Fushin definitely fell off I still liked the show for the most part. I’m just disappointed that it wasn’t as good as it could have been. The first few episodes give us a ragtag group of adventurers who have been cast outby the world and betrayed for various reasons, coming together to form a party and slowly but surely opening up to one another. Seeing the characters’ mini arcs, how they went from being on top of the world to rock bottom before ultimately meeting the others was really cool. I thought there was something natural about how all of them reacted to that trauma and moved on from it. Once those mini arcs stopped though, around episode 6 or so, we got a couple of what felt like filler episodes before getting into the next arc which frankly just felt weak. I do understand that this is of course a light novel series so the second volume was probably just weak compared to the first, but still, it’s a bit jarring with how good those first few eps were. It felt like the last two episodes are where the actual meat and potatoes of the story gets going and where the series starts to earn it’s “disillusioned adventurers save the world” title. I think it probably needed 24 episodes to really do well here. Where the series is really lacking is in the art. The animation is pretty bad to say the least for most of the series. It’s acceptable to have bad animation when the story is good enough to overlook it, but after those first few eps when the story quality went down, the animation started sticking out even more. I mean some of the scenes look like they were done by me in MS paint or something, it’s that bad. The character designs are ok when the characters aren’t moving, but any action in a scene and it quickly starts to unravel. Ningen Fushin is an enjoyable but not mandatory Winter 2023 watch by any stretch. It’s got an interesting premise, but fails to really make the most of it. Instead becoming a rather generic and run of the mill fantasy series that, while not bad, isn’t anything special. Ningen Fushin gets 7 out of 10.

TheAsterNaut★ 3

This show is the perfect example of an interesting premise with poor execution. A group of outcasts form a party and begin adventuring and learning to trust again. However, the show takes multiple weird turns like modern/advanced tech in ancient locations, multiple episodes on side characters no one cares about, and generally no adventuring outside of the town that they live in apart from a few dungeons. There's also the issue that some of the animation is rather unpolished in some places, whether it is awful perspective or missing frames of animation that makes movement stop-motion like. Finally, the show spends too much time on charactersindividually listening to their thoughts, watching them go about their hobbies, or listening to a long sobby backstory. There's not much meat on the metaphorical bone so I would recommend not watching this; 3/10 just listen to the catchy ending song and enjoy that.