Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest

Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest

Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest anime series cover art
Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest

Overview

Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest (Arifureta Shokugyou de Sekai Saikyou / ありふれた職業で世界最強) is one of the four isekai anime series I watched during the Summer 2019 season. The others were Okaa-san Online, Demon Lord, Retry!, and Isekai Cheat Magician.

There were two animation studios which worked on Arifureta, Asread and White Fox. Asread is best known for The Future Diaries (Mirai Nikki) and White Fox is known for a number of high tier anime including Steins;Gate and Re:ZERO.

You’d think that they’d be able to pull off a decent anime when working together. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. This series ended up being one of my three 1/10s of the season.

Shea and Hajime from the anime series Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest
Shea and Hajime

The series starts off on the wrong foot with a bad premise. An entire class of high school students, including their loli teacher, get sent to a parallel world. Our protagonist is then betrayed by one of his classmates and ends up at the bottom of a dungeon alone. He then vows to take revenge and eats monsters to gain a bunch of abilities.

Yes, Hajime is just an edgier version of Rimuru from That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.

He then goes on an adventure to save the world so he can go home, without caring about his former classmates — or at least pretending not to care. Along the way he gathers a harem and fights bad CGI monsters with magical, modern day weapons such as machine guns.

Oh, and he also has a CGI Hummer he drives around this fantasy world.

Worst Anime of the Season?

The biggest question regarding Arifureta isn’t whether or not it’s a bad anime — it is. The question is whether or not it’s the worst anime of the season. And although it’s definitely close, I’m not sure this was the worst.

Demon Lord, Retry! exists.

But like I said, it’s close. There’s only two things I’d say this series does well, and they’re sort of connected. First is that some of the female characters have surprisingly good character designs for a show this bad. Second is the fact that Shea exists — we’ll get to her in a bit.

Really, though, aside from those two things I can’t think of anything else I would say this series even does decently. The OP song was good, I guess, but I generally don’t count that in my actual rating of a series. The soundtrack was bad, most of the characters were bad, the animation was terrible, and the plot was bad as well.

If I had to pick just one thing that really makes this a bottom tier anime it would be the animation. Look, I’m not exactly a stickler for great animation — after all, I really enjoyed Cop Craft. But when the animation of a series is offensively bad, even I draw the line.

You know how Overlord is sort of infamous for its use of bad CGI for monsters? Well imagine that, but worse, and also in a series that doesn’t have an interesting premise or good characters. That’s really the best way to describe what Arifureta is.

Characters

The protagonist of the series is Hajime Nagumo — a combination of the edgiest isekai characters you’ve ever seen. Think of if Kirito from Sword Art Online was combined with Naofumi from The Rising of the Shield Hero, and then throw in another angsty character and you might have Hajime.

Hajime’s first companion after being betrayed is Yue — a literal bootleg version of Shinobu from the Monogatari series. She’s a blonde, smug, loli vampire who wears a lab coat for some reason. I guess that means she’s also chuunibyo-esque.

Their next companion is the best girl of the entire series, Shea Haulia. The best way I can describe Shea is like so: take Aqua from KonoSuba, but instead of having her be a water goddess, have her be a bunny girl with a large hammer who wears even less clothing.

Shea Haulia from the anime series Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest
Shea Haulia

Not only does Shea share her appearance with Aqua, but the two of them act extremely similar as well. And as much as I love Aqua (Megumin more so), I think Shea might actually be better simply because of her high tier character design.

The fourth member of the party is a dragonkin named Tio Clarce. Her defining characteristic is that she’s an extreme masochist — you know, just like Darkness also from KonoSuba. There isn’t too much originality in this series.

Towards the end of the season we also get two more party members I just want to briefly mention. Myuu is a loli mermaid. And no, she doesn’t look like a normal mermaid. The only mer-part of her body are her ears which look like fins. Finally is Kaori Shirasaki, a healer with a great character design like Shea.

Conclusion

I didn’t expect to be linking out to so many other series within this review, but that just goes to show how unoriginal this series is. Just about everything in it is borrowed from another, more popular anime (light novel).

And as I mentioned towards the start of this review, Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest, is a 1/10. The only reason I would say it’s acceptable to watch this anime for is if you want to see some Shea content. If you’re watching for any other reason, please stop and get some help.

But for those of you who have already watched this anime: what did you think? Let me know in the comments.

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Oh, and I almost forgot, this series somehow got renewed for a second season.

2 Replies to “Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest”

  1. The premise and story of this anime is almost the same as that of Shield Hero, a protagonist who starts as a normal student, he is transports another world where he has to play hero and is betrayed, he becomes an anti-hero, but the problem with the anime is that they jumped the prologue from the story of the novel because in the manga they dedicate at least 4 chapters to the prologue where the protagonist was shown in the same situation as that of Naofumi before he began to gain skills and be strongest, I think that’s why it didn’t have the same effect. Also that the animation was awful.

    1. I don’t really think expanding the prologue would have been enough to make this series any better. And even if the animation was great, I’d still probably say it was a 2 at best because of how terrible everything else about the series is. There’s nothing original here and it does everything worse than the other series it steals from.

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