Akira is a good girl. We know this because she provides each of the local cats with a dinner suited to its individual tastes. After noting the strange weather, Akira heads home, her good deed done for the day. As she enters the elevator in her apartment building though, things take a turn for the bizarre. First, she realizes the ornate wood paneling of the small space is new, then a floppy pointed hat appears, floating in the air, addressing her as the Great Sage, and then a handsome man gradually materializes beneath it. Seems they’re headed on a journey! But he disappears before they get anywhere. When the elevator doors open, a decidedly less handsome man (plus retinue) greets our heroine, also welcoming her as the Great Sage. Things get tense though when Akira doesn’t hop to saving their world for them straightaway (she’s taking a slack-jawed moment to process), but luckily some wizards show up and rescue her from the now irate unhandsome man and his peeps, who turn out to be soldiers. Fortunately, the wizards are very handsome, so things seem to be back on track. But then Akira and her attractive guide get cornered on the circular staircase despite it not having corners, and before our heroine knows it, she’s caught between two groups of shouty men mansplaining the worldbuilding, the nature of wizards (cat-like, yet mysteriously obedient to the Great Sage), and recent events at each other and her, while yet not really saying much of anything at all. Confused and befuddled, and not really understanding anything that has been said, Akira isn’t sure what to do, but ultimately decides to go with the handsome wizards, especially once one of them starts acting like a cat, nyan! As they fly across the sky on broomsticks, Akira remembers something that people used to say about people who fly across the sky on broomsticks, and she begins to suspect that these handsome men might actually be…wizards.
Well, that happened. This has all the ingredients for a wildly popular women’s fantasy series: cats and ikemen. At least, that’s what I think the pitch for this one probably sounded like. Sigh. Listen, I know fantasy MCs are generally on the blander side so that we audience members can self-insert and feel like we’d do at least a slightly better job than them in navigating all the fantasy craziness, but Akira is so dull she just fades away into nothingness. And the thing is, that’s not even her “thing”! She’s not meant to be shy or overlooked or unpopular or something. In fact, we don’t know anything at all about her, except for her culinary sensitivity when it comes to the local felines. As for the handsome men, well, if we include the OP sequence as well, there are simply too many of them; they come across the screen in wave after indistinguishable wave, their character designs offering nothing unique or memorable, with even their names being recycled from a thousand isekai anime. The backgrounds are practically non-existent and the layouts pointedly unimaginative, with the occasional canted angle or unnecessary crash zoom trying to liven up the bleak storyboarding. Great swathes of purple nothingness dominate the long middle sequence on the stairs, for instance. The writing is onerous, and all the speechifying tedious in the extreme. At least I don’t need to worry about having insomnia anymore: I can just rewatch this one to send me straight off into dreamland, preferably without any wizard accompaniment though, thank you very much. I won’t be back for more of this one—not even for the screencaps.
Promise of Wizard is streaming on Crunchyroll.
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Oh, I was wondering what this anime was about. The Crunchyroll description didn’t explain much. Thanks for the heads up, I think I will skip this one.
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