The moon. Blood. Someone has died in a car accident, but don’t you worry! As the images of flocks of flying dragons and strange chameleon-like creatures suggest, our anonymous protagonist has just been… well, yeah, you guessed right, and I’m not Rod Serling presenting The Twilight Zone, so I won’t say it. A flash-forward tells us that, surprise, surprise, the catgirl above will wield the protagonist-turned-sword, but then we jump back in time. You would guess that being a sword is kind of a static life, right? Wrong! After doing some readjustments on the video game screens that pop up, our protagonist can move on his own. He doesn’t like his first would-be wielders, a bunch of goblins, so he kills them all. Then, he becomes powerful enough to fly on his own and repair himself (itself?), and goes on a killing spree like a rogue drone, executing goblin mages and kings and monstrous creatures left and right, and greatly increasing his combat stats. After many successes, he gets trapped in a mana-draining soil, giving Fran, our cat-eared girl who is currently enslaved by a magic spell, her chance to be free…

Well, some small moments work visually (six moons! Dragons!), and the music is not bad. Other than that, this episode is about as fun as watching someone else play a minigame and wondering when your turn will come. It felt like ages. The world doesn’t have much depth, and the gamer/fantasy world dissonance is huge. If Fran is a real person with a past and a culture, we can assume that the goblins are too. In fact, they react with horror when our protagonist enters their village to kill their chieftain and their mage, and there is blood everywhere. But for our protagonist and the story, it’s just another chance to increase his stats by killing left and right, with bits of goofy dialogue. Since he doesn’t have any sort of backstory and adapts instantly to his new life as a sword, while also becoming as overpowered as it gets, the real mystery is why this drone-like, shooting, self-sustaining and self-repairing sword needs a wielder at all. Every battle is over in ten seconds. Fran’s story is pretty clichéd, and she has a super-serious personality. I don’t particularly dislike her, but I don’t think she has enough charisma to carry this show. All in all, this could be at least goofy fun, if not for the neck-snapping and chewing of slaves by giant creatures, which make it ridiculously dark at the same time. So yeah, not good.

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Reincarnated as a Sword is streaming on HiDIVE.