Beryl Gardenant is a very fine swordsmaster indeed, despite being from the backwaters, but he has failed deplorably at one thing in life: providing his parents with grandchildren. And, well, the moment to rectify that may have already passed. His hair has started to turn grey, he’s still living at home, and the only marriage prospects on the horizon would have to come from among his own young students at the family dojo he took over twenty years ago. Good thing Allucia Citrus, former student and current Commander of the Royal Order of Knights, comes calling! She has a job offer to present to him—training her Liberion Order recruits three or four days a month—and maybe some other proposal in mind too, which escapes from under her breath. She whisks him off to the capital, where he is reacquainted with several other former (female) students, all of whom have made good since they were his pupils, now forming a constellation of elite knights and adventurers, all with a decided dislike for wearing undergarments. All in all, it’s a pleasant overnight trip. But when Beryl returns home, it is to find that his crafty father has replaced him with yet another former student—the lone male?—and is booting him out of the house. Fortunately, Allucia is happy to hand over all of her knights’ training to her master, though said knightlings are not all so excited, and the most flashy one, Henblitz, challenges Beryl to prove his worth with the sword. Is it all over for the aging swordsmaster? Has his former student overestimated him, as both he and the knights-in-training assume? Or is there still a trick or two left in this old dog yet?
You know, there may be something to this one. There’s nothing glaring on the production side—animation, sound, and voice acting are all nice, with a decent sword fight—though the worldbuilding is standard-issue Oldy Worldy fantasy. But what this one has going for it is the MC: It’s pretty rare to get a middle-aged protagonist in anime, and even more so in fantasy/adventure, so Beryl is kinda refreshing. The make-or-break question, though, will be whether subsequent episodes spend more time on the growing harem of former students, or demonstrating in more specificity what it is that age has to offer youth. Beryl, in typical oblivious MC style, doesn’t notice the fondness his female students bear him, but rather than this simply being a knee-jerk trope, I get the sense that his blindness is more because he takes his responsibility as a teacher (the fiduciary duty, or standing in as a parent) quite seriously, and unlike his father, views his students in terms of what is best for them, not himself. I can respect that. He’s a bit down on himself about his age, but it’s not disproportionate or over the top. He’s no victim. In short, he’s a decent bloke and quite deserving of another shot at carving his mark on the world. But will the series let him do this, while maintaining his boundaries as a teacher? Or will the primary means of “building him up” be through the advances of scantily clad women ten or twenty or more years his junior? Will we get a story about an actual middle-aged man behaving like a mature adult, or is this about chasing a “redo” of his twenties? Surprisingly for anime, this first episode sets up the former a little more than the latter, but we’ll see how it plays out. I’ll check back in after a couple of weeks and see where we’re at.
From Old Country Bumpkin to Master Swordsman is streaming on Amazon Prime.
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