Welcome back to the Summer 2019 Isekai Battle Royale! Our next contender is approaching… Entering the blue corner, he’s lean, he’s mean, and he’s fallen down the ravine, it’s Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest! Here we have the protagonist whose entire class was summoned to another world, and of all the skills he could have gotten, all he got was the ability to transmute objects, a super-commonplace skill. When he is betrayed during a fight in a dungeon against a powerful monster, he takes a long fall but manages to survive… only to encounter even stronger monsters looking for an easy meal. After losing his arm to one such beast, he survives by drinking from a pool of holy water, and after angsting about how life hates him, he decides he will find a way home at any cost. With some creative use of his transmutation skill and the ability to absorb the abilities of monsters he eats, he starts gaining the power to fight back against the world!
What a display of edginess! It’s clear that Arifureta means business, with how it jumps right into the action and how its protagonist comes to rage against the world… but it’s also left the audience scratching their heads? Probably because very little was explained about how Hajime got into his predicament in the first place. Indeed, being familiar with this scrappy fighter’s origins (a.k.a. the original light novel), I can see that this opening episode skipped over a ton of content that provides important background information, leaving those new to the series quite a bit in the dark. And while this show’s angst and edginess might be somewhat unique in the isekai crowd, I also have to warn them that, from my knowledge of its origins, Arifureta will lighten up on the edge over time. Though maybe for some, they might like it better that way. I must say, though, this isekai chose some freaking awesome background music… Anyway, a confusing opening reel has left Arifureta stumbling around a bit, but maybe it can pick itself back up on its feet as it introduces one of the main heroines and maybe explain a few more things? We shall see as the Summer 2019 Isekai Battle Royale continues!
Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest is streaming on FunimationNow.
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This was a horrible adaptation. I don’t mind that they started in the middle of the first novel and then used flashbacks… if they filled out the back story intelligently in portions as necessary to add better context (they could have even pulled it off it they did it in a non-linear “Pulp Fiction” sort of way). But instead they gave us this hatchet job.
Hopefully they’ll show some flashbacks to the early novel events in the coming episodes.