User blog comment:Miskos3/Fairy Tail Wiki in Anime: Summer 2016/@comment-7418318-20161118194000

Anyone else watching/watched "Hai to Gensou no Grimgar"/"Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash"?

I'm currently at episode 4 and it is quite interesting. It is rather slow paced, but it doesn't feel like it's slow due to the producers stretching it out to fit their episode quota for a season or slow in a boring way or adding useless stuff.

It's hard to put to words for me, but it's slow paced in a good way, like allowing every moment to sink in properly and set the mood.

If you are looking for an action packed anime, this one's not going to be for you, but if you like emotional, character driven stories it might be. It certainly looks gorgeous from the animation side. There is a fair share of still-frames, but only in quieter moments, like stroll through the city. The fights themselves are fully animated and there's actual team-work and tactics involved... from the 2nd onwards anyway. The first one is just the protagonists blundering badly.

Which brings me to the next point: Instead of the usual "We came to this world and immediately were masters of fighting" here they absolutely suck at first, barely managing to bring down even a lone goblin.

I rather like this change of pace compared to the vast majority of the anime in this genre.

I guess a few words about the setting might be in order. On the surface it's yet another "we got sucked into a fantasy/game world" story ala Log Horizon, Re:life, SOA, Hack/Sign and so on, but it feels very different.

For one thing the people who got sucked into that world lost all memory except for their name and occasional snippets. Like one character immediately reaches into a pocket and thinks that his cell phone is gone... only to wonder a second later what a cell phone even is.

Another thing that I like is that even the goblins are not portrayed as soulless monsters, but living beings who want to survive. When they kill their first goblin, the party has to come to grips with just having killed a sentient being. And they start out dirt poor where they can't even afford to replace their worn out clothes until they learn to properly fight as a team and finally start to earn money.

I don't yet know where the story is going to go (or if it's going to go anywhere), but up to episode 4 I like this series a lot.