What is that?
A young man named Al Wayne vows to use all his farming skills to the fullest and become the king of the farmers. Finally he manages to do just that to live as the best farmer ever. However, the day he mastered these farming skills, his life took a completely different direction than farming… (from manga)
Somehow I got stronger as I improved my farming skills based on Shobonnu‘s light novel series and streams on HIDE Saturdays.
How was the first episode?
James Beckett
Valuation:
What you might want to know about me going into this preview is that not only do I dislike anime in which characters occupy a ridiculously boring fantasy world so tied to video game clichés that their reality is literal JRPG stats menus contains for navigating; I am philosophically opposed to them on a most fundamental level. So if you love nothing more than watching cartoon characters spend their entire lives flicking through the user interfaces of their lives, tracing the incremental growth of every abstract concept of their existence that can somehow be quantified into a set of simple numbers , then feel free to add a few stars to my score. Getting crazy! Although not too crazy because Somehow I got stronger as I improved my farming skills is still ugly and boring enough that it would probably suck even for fans of this weird sub-sub genre.
Here’s the thing: The only reason RPGs developed stat systems and attribute trackers in the first place is because they’re a necessary metaphor for communicating a bunch of really complex and nuanced ideas about the completely fake version of yourself that’s in it exists A pen-and-paper game about dice-rolling and monster-fighting in the theater of the mind. When RPGs transitioned to the medium of software, stats were still useful and will remain useful because we haven’t gotten to the point where we can fully engage with a virtual world using all our senses and natural intuitions. If you can’t feel your body getting stronger, the only way to know if you’re strong enough to slay a dragon to death is to have a handy reference sheet to pull up at your leisure, so don’t open it die horribly in a misguided search for treasure.
The point is that, barring very select circumstances, I don’t know how it’s even possible to make a good story out of a world where these mode-specific metaphors are simply taken to their most absurd literal extremes. There are a few select examples that I’m sure someone other than me could come up with, but I’d bet that 90% of the time if your anime has a character mixed with an RPG menu messes around then it probably sucks a bit. Even in a silly sendup like I’ve kind of gotten stronger, the joke can only get you so far if your protagonist is a complete jerk (not even the funny kind) and everyone around them has the characters overall personality cheap sketch comedy parody of cheap unoriginal light novel garbage food. There’s exactly one moment in this episode that got me a reaction at all, and that was when Al blew up a kite by throwing a carrot at it. I didn’t laugh, didn’t even snort with mild amusement. I just said quietly to myself, “Oh, I see. He has insane farm power. Huh.”
That’s maybe five to ten seconds of mediocre visual comedy out of half an hour that’s otherwise completely devoid of any creative, amusing, interesting, or even complete ideas. Regardless of whether or not you share my particular aversion to the tropics I’ve kind of gotten stronger I don’t think you’ll take anything away from this show at all. Save yourself some time and just pretend it never showed up in your streaming feed.
Richard Eisenbeis
Valuation:
One of the things I love about anime is that we get so many stories not only from the same genre but also from the same subgenre, but most of them still have some kind of twist that makes them different from the rest. Of course, their own spins will also have hits and misses. I Somehow I got stronger by raising farming skills is unfortunately a failure.
This whole anime seems to be built around a joke and a joke only: Al is super powerful, but all he wants to do is work his fields. That’s it. Everything in this episode is just another twist on this joke. He kills a dragon with a carrot – and then runs away because he doesn’t want to deal with things unrelated to farming. He saves the princess from being kidnapped, but only cares about delivering his crops on time. Even the potential deaths of thousands at the hands of a monstrous army mean little to him until he realizes that if everyone dies, no one will buy his crops.
While everything is played for laughs, it also makes Al a boring and extremely predictable protagonist. You know how he reacts in every situation because only things directly related to his life as a farmer count for him. The humor basically writes itself, but without the element of surprise it fizzles out.
Rebekah Silberman
Valuation:
Despite the fact that I keep referring to this as “Isekai farming,” it’s actually not an Isekai show. At least nothing in the first episode suggests that; it’s RPG-based fantasy instead, complete with stats screens, levels and all that. I also enjoyed it a lot more than I expected, which is always a nice surprise. In part, that’s because I love a Shakespearean reference, good, bad, or indifferent, and it definitely has. Possibly the original author of the Source Light Novels really doesn’t like Shakespeare because the names are all on the demon side – Demon Lord Macbeth and his faithful sidekick Romeo. (Unless Princess Fal-Ys is meant to be a Falstaff reference? I have my doubts.) I got a good chuckle from it, even if it’s not particularly friendly to my favorite Shakespearean play. (MacbethNot Romeo and Juliet) But there’s also something delightful about a man who can detonate a dragon with a slung carrot, a carrot I desperately hope he didn’t sell to an unsuspecting customer.
The plot is relatively thin, which could become a problem at some point: Al is an incredibly strong farmer with very broken stats. The king and princess want him to work for them to defend the kingdom. Al just wants to farm, but with nowhere else to sell his produce when the kingdom goes up in smoke, Al reluctantly accepts farmland as a bribe. Now he’s ready to become a reluctant warrior builder, and we can all guess which role the royals want him to put more time and effort into. This isn’t a setup for much storytelling variety, but if it paves the way for Al to bore more demons with his in-depth descriptions of farming magic techniques, it could still make for a pretty good time.
Overall, this feels like a standard production in terms of plot, quality of animation, and art in general. The forest dragon is far from impressive in terms of animation, there’s nothing remarkable about the way anything looks, and if you want some fantasy eye candy you’re better off Legend of Mana. But this could be some loose, low-key humor where Al farms, fights, and gets all the girls (according to the opening theme). If the stats screens aren’t a deal breaker, it’s harmless enough to take a look.
Nicholas Dupree
Valuation:
Hey kids, do you like it One punch man? Well, what if I told you there’s a new version, but it’s not as fun as crap looks, but Saitama also occasionally rattles off basic farming trivia during battles? If this sounds like fun to you, then please get help, but while you’re doing that you might as well watch this show with its overly long, grammatically confused title. To all others, this is a barren, salted field from which no food shall grow.
This isn’t the most arduous premiere I’ve experienced – vazzrock still exists – but it was certainly the one I had to check the most to see how much time was left. While this isn’t an Isekai story, it has all the annoying features of one without the world hopping gimmick. Our hero is a harmless potato who was just lucky enough to gain superhuman powers that put the rest of the world to shame, information he’s privy to because this world runs by video game rules where everyone has a glowing stats screen showing all of theirs Skills perfectly quantified and game skills. The world as we saw it is a generic JRPG environment with the default monsters and negative charms. The characters all exist to either talk about how awesome our protag is or to be beaten by said protag. Everything’s been made better in millions of other places, and the tacked-on gimmick – which our reluctant hero really just wants to farm – is too thin to make it even a little interesting.
It doesn’t help that the show looks like butts. After a full season of Lucifer and the cookie hammer Anime, I’m mostly inoculated with poor animation that sucks the energy out of comedy and action scenes, but there were still moments that surprised me at how poorly this episode delivered its punch lines. The funniest part of the episode is the one no-joke moment when our leading lady fights an attacking demon and they spend what feels like an eternity just switching between the same still frames as the two parties shoot magic beams at each other. If the only moment I can laugh is the one time I should take any of this seriously, that’s a sign this show is cooked.
There’s just nothing here. Any aspect of the show that could be charming is either delivered poorly or is so common that you can find it done much better in a variety of other places.
#Fall #Preview #Guide #kinda #stronger #improved #farmrelated #skills
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