Feb 17, 2025
This is really not interesting: it's lacking both intellectual depth and superficial spectacle, making it a complete bore that is hard to watch. It's a typical episodic story of encountering people/places with different mini stories to tell that has been done far better by many others. The philosophical aspects are all juvenile and often just contrived nonsense to force misanthropic/wishy-washy morals ('the tyranny of the majority in democracy is unavoidable'(No. The anti-execution minority wouldn't accept a decree to be executed, it's literally the definition of their group, they'd revolt), 'slaves want not to be free but to be the masters'(No, just no. Also, reinventing the concept of sports doesn't necessitate death sports. But at least the author managed to headass another way to smooth their brain enough to try to justify genocide), 'We will not leave before the known natural disaster destroys the town tomorrow and then come back and rebuild the day after! We will murder-suicide everyone instead!', etc. And the story itself is mostly just (not like your other girls') world-building/character's exposition dumps interspersed by power(point)fantasy shonen action and emotionless tearjerkers where non-characters die.
The MC, Kino, ironically preaches be true to one's self like the story insists, despite how Kino's entire personality/character/name was simply copied from the person who saved them before literally forgetting everything else. With similar irony, Kino refuses to live life, almost always avoiding involvement in anything to a sociopathic degree (effectively watching people drown in a puddle while choosing not to say anything to help). Kino's entire personality and highest ideal is to be a traveler (read: bystander/sightseer/voyeur) who contributes nothing but juvenile pseudo-intellectual commentary filler for the viewer. As written Kino and the talking bike-partner non-character make for one of the most boring non-character main casts ever.
And don't even get me started on the braindead Coliseum super-powered shonen tournament arc that finishes in a deus-ex-fireball bullet for no goddamn reason, or the bs about MC having never seen flying machines despite how simple the concept is and after seeing tons of hover crafts. There is something so frustratingly juvenile about the plots in this series. It's like the author just wants to make twists like M Night Shamallama and doesn't care about anything else.
The art is uninteresting. There's almost no cinematography outside the OP, just a bunch of generic sideshots of people talking and silly everpresent CRT screen lines to cover up how generically bland and low-effort everything is drawn.
If you like elevator muzak, then this has, like, a boring OP and ED for you I guess, skip. I don't think it has much music anywhere else.
It's almost exactly like a serious version of Jing: King of Bandits by a different author which one would assume is parodying this, however Jing's source material actually came first by 5 years. I didn't enjoy either as they're both juvenile and boring slogs, but that one at least had some spectacle/humor. For something of similar style done well instead of this, I'd highly recommend: Mushi-shi, Girl's Last Tour, Golden Boy, The World God Only Knows, Made in Abyss, even Full Metal Alchemist. It's also very similar to Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina and due to those similarities that one isn't particularly much better.
2/10 (where 5/10 is average)
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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