Promise of Wizard – Episode 1

Content Warning: antisemitic slur.

What’s it about? Masaki Akira was an ordinary person who was summoned into another world where wizards and humans peacefully coexist with each other.  Unfortunately, that peace is threatened with the yearly attacks from the moon called the “Great Calamity,” and it’s up to our heroine to lead the fight against the moon.  

I had a good laugh when I thought about Akira literally fighting the moon.  That image alone is priceless, but this premiere? It was BORING with a capital B! A majority of the episode is spent on a staircase where everyone explains to Akira that they need her help in their fight against the moon.  We are getting so many isekai shows every season that a quick glance at the synopsis for this show made me think it was another story about an overpowered male protagonist.  While we are in desperate need of more women leads in fantasy stories to grace our screens again, this one just feels so basic.  Akira doesn’t have any personality worth mentioning and she mostly feels like a secondary character in her own show.  I don’t expect her to suddenly become an overpowered edgelord (though I wouldn’t mind it), but at the very least, I don’t want her to be a total blank slate.  

The few selling points of this premiere is the mysterious blue-haired wizard named Murr, who seems to have ominous intentions towards Akira.  He also doesn’t appear to share his comrades’ sentiment about saving their world and moves in secret, which is very suspicious behavior.  While the overall staircase scene was tedious to watch, I did find the conversation about who is lying or telling the truth interesting. Can Akira truly trust the handsome men who need her help? What if they are lying? The fact that everyone is so secretive about their motivations is intriguing, but can Akira become a compelling enough heroine that would make me even want to stick around to find out the answer? 

Another problem is how are we going to remember the huge cast of characters seen in the opening theme? That’s A LOT of pretty men, but at a certain point the design of their faces start to mesh together.  There aren’t enough episodes to truly shine a light on all of them, which makes it obvious that there’ll be major cuts to certain characters for the sake of time.  

Lastly, I want to give a shout out to the AniFem crew for bringing to my attention that the character named Shylock (almost sounds like Sherlock) is actually an antisemitic slur and references a major character in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.  It’s sad that the makers of the original mobile game didn’t seem to do their research about the names and while I can understand they wanted the characters to have quirky names, it doesn’t excuse this lack of oversight.   

At this point, I’m almost begging for the premiere date for Witch Hat Atelier to be announced sooner for the sake of having something to look forward to in 2025.  Overall, I think some of our readers will probably enjoy this show for the pretty men alone, but if you are looking for a solid plot then this ain’t it.  I’ll pass on this one folks and hopefully something with more substance comes out next time.