What’s it about? King Grey was a powerful ruler who made a lot of enemies on his journey to win the throne. Eventually, he dies mysteriously and is reincarnated into a fantasy world as Arthur Leywin. This time he was born into a supportive family and is determined to use his knowledge to protect his loved ones from any unknown challenges in the new world.
This actually surprised me because it turns out, I read the webtoon a long time ago! I made it quite far but eventually dropped it for dragging on too long. I’m not joking when I say, the story is LONG, and we spend a majority of time following Arthur’s childhood before reaching his teenage and/or adult years. Once I found out it was based on an ongoing novel, it made sense that we’d ended up with a webtoon that’s over six seasons long. But the reality is, I didn’t have the attention span to follow Arthur’s journey because I just didn’t find him interesting.
Perhaps the series becomes more interesting later on, but Arthur’s story doesn’t really have that “hook factor.” I honestly blame the sea of mediocre fantasy/reincarnation stories that have come out in recent years that recycle the same plot over and over again. At this point, there needs to be something original and/or exciting going on, otherwise they aren’t going to gain any interest from potential fans. So what’s the verdict on this adaptation? It’s very good and the animation definitely elevates the source material. If anything, the anime added new scenes since I don’t recall Arthur’s original appearance being shown in the initial chapters of the webtoon. It’s nice to get more details about Arthur’s past life, and it certainly heightens the mystery surrounding his death.
Since I dropped the series, I’m not sure if his past life will have any relevance to the plot, but it certainly reminded me why I was interested in the story in the first place—the concept of sending a sci-fi character to a fantasy setting. However, the execution doesn’t manage to make it stand out from a dozen other fantasy/reincarnation stories with the same basic premise. The premiere is a perfectly fine setup of the usual “the baby mastered his mana core and therefore is a genius” trope, but it doesn’t have enough staying power for me, personally. Perhaps, the anime will continuously drop hints about future events that’ll keep the viewers interested in the story, but I don’t recall Arthur’s story being anything truly unique.
I don’t want to sound harsh because this series is decent in the grand scheme of things, it just has the unfortunate timing of being compared to other similar stories. In the interest of being fair, I think it wouldn’t hurt to apply the three episode rule just to see if the anime will play out all its cards to keep people interested.
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