Original Run: October 10, 2019 - December 26, 2019 Number of Episodes: 12 Genre: Action, Fantasy Based on the Series Created By: Kei Amagi and Ninomotonino
***Warning, the following may contain spoilers for Assassins Pride. Reader discretion is advised.***
Series Synopsis
The last refuge of humanity lives within the city-state of Flandore. The gap between nobility and commoners is wide since noble bloodlines contain mana. With this power, it is up to mana users to protect the populace from dangerous monsters. To fight these terrible battles are the assassins of White Night, and one of their best operatives is Kufa Vampir (voiced by Yuuki Ono).
Kufa’s newest mission is to serve as bodyguard and tutor for the daughter of the prestigious Angel family, Melida (voiced by Tomori Kusunoki). Although Melida’s family is known for its mighty mana warriors, Melida herself appears to have no such talent. However, Kufa sees potential in his young student.
Despite the odds and ridicule, Melida’s powers do eventually blossom and are only getting stronger. Still, she will need the guidance of her teacher if she wishes to become someone worthy of carrying on her family’s name.
Series Positives
As I am writing this sentence, I am unsure how ranty this review will become later. I plan to hold everything in check, but I won’t be making promises I’m not sure can be kept. When you come right down to it, Assassins Pride was a colossal mess.
I’m trying not to rage on this series quite yet, but I need to be honest with you; it is proving difficult. This is supposed to be the Series Positives section, except I’m struggling to think of a single aspect of this show that could be considered a positive. After all, even its strongest moments were mediocre, forgettable, and would not be worth mentioning in any other review since they weren’t anything spectacular.
To whatever credit this amounts to, Assassins Pride wasn’t the worst thing I have seen from 2019. Then again, it wasn’t the worst thing in the sense that other shows actively infuriated me. Therefore, it was to this series’s fortunate benefit that it came out in the fall rather than the winter. Had it aired any earlier, then perhaps I wouldn’t have been as numbed to Assassins Pride’s problems as I was.
Granted, this show was laughably dull and all over the place, but at least it didn’t put me in a bad mood afterward.
To force something into this section, though, whenever there was a fight scene in Assassins Pride, the inclination to fast forward wasn’t squeaking as loudly in my ear as it was during the rest of this series. Battles were tensionless but interesting enough to hold my attention. Sadly, this was a pick-and-choose situation because I could either have a moderately decent fight or nothing.
Assassins Pride was sort of like cookies you can buy at a Japanese convenient store. Let me explain.
For starters, Japan has an atrocious cookie selection. Do you like butter cookies? Well, you better otherwise your options suddenly drop dramatically. Regardless, if you do manage to find something like chocolate chip, you’ll take it home, hoping to snack on it later. The problem is, Japan has this frustrating idea that everything needs to be in its own bag.
Thus, when you open up the package for your cookies, there is a high likelihood that every single cookie inside will be in its own individual wrapper. You can’t lazily pop one into your mouth at your leisure. Every time you want a cookie, you need to rip open a wrapper, toss it aside, and repeat until they are all gone.
Now, is having to take a few extra seconds to get to your cookie that big a deal? For the simple act of wanting to eat a cookie, no. However, it’s the culmination of everything that gets annoying. You’re given an utterly unnecessary step for something you weren’t particularly keen on; the enjoyment of the cookie itself isn’t much consolation; if you get a bag of about twenty, the monotony of it all builds up; plus, when everything is done you’re left with a massive pile of garbage.
That’s Assassins Pride, a few measly seconds of mediocre fun wrapped in trash.
Series Negatives
I will give more details, but if you want a real sense of how bad Assassins Pride was, let me just say this:
Fairy Gone was a better series.
If you want to know why a cold chill went down my back as I wrote that, then I suggest reading my reviews on Fairy Gone and Fairy Gone 2nd Season. To make a long story short, Fairy Gone was an over-complicated slog that lost itself in a crushing amount of frivolous details, instantly forgettable characters, and an unearned ego that thought it was going to be the next big thing. But even with all its flaws, at least Fairy Gone was consistent.
If you haven’t seen Assassins Pride, you shouldn’t. However, if you want to do a little challenge, only watch the first and last episodes, and try, just try to imagine how any story could have traveled between these two points.
I actually watched the damn series, and I’m still not sure what happened.
How was it we went from a dystopian-esque society with warrior classes such as paladins, samurai, and mages, to the courthouse of the Red Queen from Alice and Wonderland?
Now, some shows begin with a quick recap of the previous episode. Other shows pick up right where the last episode left off. Then there was Assassins Pride, where it was a crapshoot whether two consecutive episodes were going to tie into one another.
For example, at the end of episode five, main character Melida Angel fought and won a significant victory. That episode focused around Melida trying to reconnect with her beloved cousin, so the story centered on them, and there was zero time for either character to interact with anyone else. Cut to episodes six when Melida and her cousin formed a group with two characters they had never once spoken to before this moment and were suddenly traveling together to go on a throwaway side quest. I honestly thought I had accidentally got the episode order wrong because there was nothing to bridge these two plot points.
Assassins Pride did this all the time. It would randomly throw out scenarios like they were a huge deal, but give no context to what was happening, who was involved, how certain people were involved, and why it had anything to do with the larger story.
Villains would show up out of nowhere. Some villains were actually allies. Some allies thought they were villains. Backstories were hard to follow. Character connections were simultaneously tight and non-existent. Key character traits were introduced at frustratingly convenient times to then be forgotten almost instantly. Locations made no sense, where the story was at any given time was questionable, and too many places looked indistinguishable from one another.
And on top of everything else, Assassins Pride was as generic as they come. Absolutely nothing about this series stood out. There was not a single idea that had any potential. Honestly, I feel like I’ve seen this story hundreds of times before.
Lastly, and I think this makes for a rather fitting endcap, Assassins Pride was so random, so dull, and so inconsistent, I actually forgot Kufa Vampir, the titular assassin, was an assassin. That’s how disjoined this series was. Its title had almost nothing to do with it.
Final Thoughts
Do you ever want to know what it’s like to have everything and nothing happen at the same time? This series will give you a pretty good idea.
From story to characters, animation to action, locations to time of day, there was nothing to this show. Even with something as paint-by-numbers as this was, it still found a way to be exceedingly dull and forgettable.
Assassins Pride can be skipped.
But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? Have you seen this series? How would you advise Assassins Pride? Leave a comment down below because I would love to hear what you have to say.
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For Anime Hajime, I’m LofZOdyssey, and I’ll see you next time.
I had some hopes for this after the first episode, the idea of the cities as huge glass balls hanging from a tree in a sea of darkness was pretty impressive and the initial idea that he was there to kill her, if she didn’t achieve was also a good one But the world was completely irrelevant to the plot and they abandoned him as an assassin/mentor to implied love interest/protector by the end of the first episode and everything else as you mentioned seemed kind of random. Not really worth watching.