As the title suggests, The Ossan Newbie Adventurer (I’m not typing the entire title again, tells the tale of Rick Gladiator (Takuya Satō), a man in his 30s who decides to quit being an adventurer’s guild receptionist and instead be an adventurer himself. By chance, Rick befriends and trains under the strongest party of adventurers in the world, resulting in him becoming freakishly powerful (though Rick himself is oblivious to his insane growth). In the first episode, Rick partakes in an exam to advance from adventurer Rank F to E. During the exam, Rick unintentionally provokes a young noble boy named Freed Diarmuit (Shinnosuke Tokudome), resulting in the boy’s older sister Angelica (Shino Shomoji) to challenge Rick to a duel.
At least based on the premiere, Rick can be pretty likable at times. The man thinks he’s late in pursuing his dream but he’s chipping away at it nonetheless. It’s a goal that makes him easy to relate with. And yet, I find the character to also be pretty boring. By making him overpowered at the start, you effectively make his journey way less interesting. It’s hard to root for him to climb the ranks when he’s a shoo-in to climb all the way to the top. The show compensates this a little by providing flashbacks detailing his rigorous training with his friends but frankly, I would’ve preferred it if the show was pretty much that entirely, at least for the first couple of episodes. Skipping straight to him being overpowered just makes him yet another average fantasy anime protagonist, a dime of dozen.
Since Rick is so powerful, you of course have the running gag of people, especially young adventurers, dissing him and getting completely shocked when he’s clearly stronger than all of them combined. The absurd contrast from their abilities to Rick’s can be funny but this joke quickly gets tiresome. There’s also Rick being completely oblivious to his power level, which seems a bit inconsistent. I’m sorry but if you can tank the strongest attacks with the weakest spells or see a fast moving opponent in slow motion, you should be able to tell how strong you are. That said, this joke does work at the end, during Rick and Angelica’s duel. You know Rick would easily win so the show wisely makes it fun by having Angelica screw up and Rick misinterpret these mistakes as some sort of special technique that’s beyond his comprehension. Rick fails to realize how weak Angelica is compared to him and Angelica rolls with it to save face and that does get a chuckle out of me.
It is atypical to see a 30ish year old protagonist in fantasy anime these days and I do appreciate its core theme of not giving up on your dreams no matter how old you are. Fundamentally though, this just seems like your average fantasy anime, right down the wish fulfillment and the overpowered protagonist. I might give it one more episode but I doubt I’ll be sticking with it for very long.
Watch The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, Trained to Death by the Most Powerful Party, Became Invincible on Crunchyroll
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