Alternative title(s): Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou
Light Novel Adaptation by White Fox and Asread
Streaming on Funimation

Premise

Wait, is this isekai or not?

colons’ verdict: It’s a shame to have such a great opening theme wasted on a show about how spite is a good justification for mass murder

Shit Protag is bullied, because he’s a low-level pleb who can’t even cast cool spells. One day, on a trip into the dungeon that his school uses for tutorials, levelling up, and looting, one of the bullies takes advantage of a scuffle in order to attempt to kill him. He falls many floors deeper into the dungeon, where he meets some extremely high-level monsters, one of which attacks him. While fleeing, he loses his arm, but he does manage to escape by using Minecraft magic to bury himself in a hole the monsters can’t fit inside. Conveniently, he stops in a puddle of holy water, so bleeding out doesn’t kill him.

He wakes up extremely hangry. While hangry, he decides that his entire class is to blame for the situation he’s in, and in a fit of rage at them, kills and eats a few of the high level monsters that are roaming outside. Since he’s so underlevelled for this floor, consuming such high level monsters gives him enough experience to level from 2 to 8, and he gains many new magic abilities. Also, his hair changes colour and his eyes turn red.

I wrote in my notes at this point that Protag was ‘going full school shooter’. I was not prepared for how right that was. The rage does not pass. Only a few minutes later, he’s magically manufacturing firearms and lovingly naming them. He kills more monsters, levels up a bunch more, and then reiterates his intent to murder his classmates.

Look how cool this is. It’s almost like a regular pistol, but it’s fired using lightning magic.

There are some plot points still to come. We still haven’t seen the bunny girl whose arse was prominently featured in the opening credits, and we know almost nothing about the nude, bound, and famished child who we see wake up at the end of this episode. It’s possible that one of these reasonable people will dissuade Protag from his Murder Quest, but the horny framing we’ve seen of them so far makes that seem unlikely. Hopefully we will at least get out of this dark and boring cave.

This is what levelling up looks like.

What little research I’ve done into this show since watching it only raises more questions. There’s a throwaway moment in the opening credits where we see what looks like an Earth classroom getting transported somehow, but this is never elaborated on in the text, so I had just assumed that was a shot of what classrooms in this world look like and something else was happening in that moment. Based on a synopsis of the books, I assumed wrong; as it turns out, this is an isekai story, but the actual text of this episode doesn’t mention it. According to a comment on Funimation’s website from someone who enjoyed the book, this first episode rushes through the story of half of volume 1, which explains the clumsy flashback structure, but it seems weird to not even spend fifteen seconds including a pretty fundamental establishing scene that you’ve already animated most of.

I wonder what this show was going to be before the author of the light novels fired the staff who were originally working on it. Anyway, if you’re not looking for media that glorifies school shootings, give this one a miss.

Before taking on this legendary raid, Shit Protag couldn’t even do Spirograph. What a dweeb.