Goblin Slayer - Season 1

After the first episode, you may have thought you had stumbled across something dark and raw - a new Berserk? No way... After the first episode, which was interesting, followed episodes featuring a rather ordinary narrative about a main male protagonist who has decided to dedicate his life to only one thing: slaying goblins. While this may well be all lovely and creditable, it does have one drawback and that is the limited variation concerning the differences between his enemies. While classic fantasy RPGs often rely on the fact that their opponents are switching and so are their abilities and characteristics, and therefore the main protagonist has to adapt and invent new strategies, so with this show there are only about four to five different variations of goblins and the only thing that gradually changes are the strategies to destroy them in the most efficient way. This is not about saving the world, this is not about anything that would give the audience goosebumps, this is just us slaughtering goblins and everyone is trying to convince us how dangerous this can be. I believe them, even though I was just as bored as though I had been running around a forest for an hour in WoW slaughtering pigs for 5 exp. The fact that there are "only" goblins in this show makes me slightly indifferent, or rather, it does not give me the same chills and jitters as when, say, Rimuru (That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime) encounters a dragon, and then a few episodes later he is crossing paths with a genie, and then perhaps dealing with an overgrown pig. So the opponents do not really change, and the only thing that really changes is the tone of this anime series, from a dark fantasy to a classic adventure, and I think that is a shame too. I love adventure, I love crawling around dungeons, and I am even used to tropes like "the journey of a hero" and rescuing damsels in distress, however... With anime series about adventurers, you kind of subconsciously know that good will always inevitably prevail, so you do not get too concerned about the characters, and you are only curious regarding how everything is going to fall into place, and how much you are going to root for the main protagonist. With dark fantasy, you can never really be sure of anything, and this has its own appeal. Well, when you have something that looks both dark and interesting at the beginning and then it turns into an ordinary adventure anime series, where you also get the impression that this is going to be about a strange antisocial person, who manages to make some new friends and then, together with them, defeats all kinds of goblins, then you (if you are someone like me, i.e. a strange and antisocial person) could actually feel a bit disappointed. Weird? Not for me! However, that is enough of what I did not like, let us now talk about what was good. The action scenes are pretty good, the fight scenes tend to be quite interesting (although classic 1v1 confrontations are not often featured in this show) and even the mission to slaughter as many goblins (or one overgrown bastard) in a hundred different ways is still original. Likewise, I quite liked the main male protagonist and his brusque way of speaking. So, I thought it was a good show, even though it could have been much better and that is what I am sorry about because, in the end, I was not that into it... 6.3/10. (07/04/2023) (less) (more)