Anime Review: Repetition and Flaws — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:02] The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System. Got a group of adventurers in the cemetery. Oh, zombies are popping out of the ground and we have this big gigantic face monster and he screams and then we fade to black

[00:14] presumably for a commercial break. Now, let me show you another scene from The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System. Oh, look. It's a group of adventurers in a graveyard and there's zombies and this big head monster guy

[00:27] decides to scream at you. I didn't accidentally show you the same scene accidentally show you the same scene twice, but the show decided to go out of its way to repeat over 40 seconds of content back-to-back. Now, I was

[00:41] where it's the most egregious cuz it's literally here's 40 seconds of content, we're going to fade to black and then we're going to reshow you the exact same 40 seconds of content like you didn't just watch it. And that's on streaming.

[00:53] more charitable and we're going to say, "No, that's actually supposed to be designed for television audience, there was a clear your fade to black for a to that is, "Okay, let's assume that I do the exact same thing that most people

[01:06] do during a commercial break and I go use the washroom. Did you expect me to flush my memory down the toilet alongside everything else? I don't need 40 seconds of repetition. 5 seconds, sure. Let's get back into the groove of

[01:19] this action scene that we're about to dive into. That's fine. Hundreds and thousands of shows have done that over the literal decades. We don't need almost a minute of repetition in a show that doesn't even have 24 of them. This

[01:33] show, The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System, doesn't trust you. trust your memory, it doesn't trust your judgment. And we're going to look at all of it today cuz once you've noticed that it doesn't trust you, you can't not

[01:48] notice it. Welcome to Glass Reflections. So, what is this series? Well, this is a series that started as a web novel on Nadoru back in 2021. Then in 2022, it was adapted to both a light novel and a manga. And now here we are in 2026 where

[02:02] we have an anime adaptation by GoHands. The premise of the show is pretty simple. Our protagonist gets isekai'd into a world that runs on MMO gaming rules. He was born as a noble, but for his random divinely given class pick, he

[02:15] is given the heavy knight. A class that he, with his meta knowledge, is super stoked about because he believes it to be broken as heck. But it is a class that this world, of course, treats as functionally useless. It is defective.

[02:28] Everyone knows that this is the garbage class. Again, he knows better because he world is based off of. He's read the patch notes. He's min-maxed the heck out of everything. But because nobody else has the same knowledge that he does, he

[02:42] gets exiled and spat upon and, you know, generally discarded by the nobility. hundred times before. But the other reason that I kept it up, the only my seasonal video, if you'll remember, is because this is a GoHands show that I

[02:56] didn't want to turn off in the first 5 minutes. And that feels like the only GoHands is well known for having a very uniquely animated style of show, but it's usually on top of uniquely

[03:09] thought of plots and characters that are just incomprehensible at the best of times. So despite the fact that this is isekai slop, and that and that is being fairly generous. It is an extremely generic isekai plotline. Despite that,

[03:24] incomprehensible stuff that they normally have. And therefore, I was actually fine with it and impressed that they decided to even do this in the first place. But when I ranked it as high as I did, that was just based on

[03:37] actually had a half-decent future. I am now five episodes in and I regret problems that I already list out because it doesn't trust your eyes, it doesn't trust your memory, it doesn't trust your judgment. So let's go through all three,

[03:50] Well, we're going to start with what hits you first, which is the show's entire visual language. Now, GoHands is a studio that has a house style, let's

[04:02] say. And that style is just more. More of what, you may ask? Yes. Let's have hair that moves like it's underwater on a character who is standing still indoors with no wind. Let's have a camera that swings under

[04:17] through it. Let's have lens flares in produce one. And let's add this permanent shiny texture to all armor in the show. It's not laziness. That's the thing is I don't ever want to attribute

[04:32] anything that GoHands does to being lazy. Everything that they do is a very determined choice. It is a specific choice that they are just determined to do constantly. People worked very hard on all of this, but they worked overly

[04:47] hard on all of these small things so that the big things can be worked on less, it seems. When it comes to like the world and the 3D and the constant camera movements everywhere, let's say that there is a defense cuz there is

[05:00] subscribe to it, but let's say there is one, all right? This world is an MMO, essentially. It is a fantasy world like an MMO. And in some games that I have

[05:12] played, the camera does act like that. It clips through geometry. It swings around wildly. It'll do things that a physical camera can't do cuz it isn't a physical camera. It's an in-game camera. And so, one could argue that all of the

[05:25] camera movements in the show aren't broken, they're diegetic. It is showing you the game, this world that is like a game. But my problem with it and the reason why I don't actually subscribe to that reasoning is that the show never

[05:38] calls it out as such. There is not a line. There is not a look. There is nothing from our protagonist who is identifying that this entire world he lives in is from a game, a character who comments on absolutely everything else

[05:51] makes no comment on how this world looks like a game. To him, as far as we can tell, it looks like a normal fantasy world. The visuals is just how we are perceiving it. And that's not good. And I'm not even entirely sure on why. The

[06:05] best guess I have, and this is legitimately a guess, is that all of those small things, the 3D elements, the shininess of the armor, the hair movements, I can only imagine that the reason why Gohan's anime looks the way

[06:18] produce that way. Because the alternative is that someone legitimately thinks that this looks good and continually does that because they're like, "Well, obviously we're going to keep making our amazingly looking show

[06:31] saying that it's not lazy because there's so much little things moving around. There's movement constantly, or near constantly. When there's no movement, it looks like very bad still shots. That's terrible. But, on the

[06:44] times that it moves, there is so much movement. Or rather, it looks very busy. There is no real shot in the first five episodes of this show that I can sit here and defend. A lot of it is just that's fine.

[06:58] Right? But, then you get shots like these freaking lens flares. A lens flare implies a lens. It implies that somebody is holding this camera in this two-dimensional world. Where is this person? Who is it? Are they okay?

[07:17] cuz we love math. Nobody said there'd be math except it's an MMO world. So, yes, run entirely on spreadsheets, I'll have you know. This show loves to flashback constantly. Like, flashbacks we've seen before, you've seen flashbacks, we've we

[07:32] know how a flashback works, we know why flashbacks are implemented. Um, but this show likes to flashback things from earlier within its same episode. Worse flashback to the same scene. Let's start with a

[07:47] less egregious one because even then we start pretty bad, and that's the one the one that I had at the very top of this video from episode 3. Episode 3 is 23 minutes and 40 seconds in length if you're looking at the time code at the

[08:00] bottom of the Crunchyroll player. The recap from the previous episodes and the opening credits run until about 4 minutes and 17 seconds. That's 18% of the episode right there, you know, before anything new even happens. The

[08:12] first new line of dialogue lands at about 4 minutes and 47 seconds because scenery on top. Then near the halfway point of the episode, we have the that I mentioned before, and that repeated shot takes from 11:41 through

[08:26] to 12:33. Then the credits and the next episode preview of this run from 21:39 until the end. If you add it all up, that is 7 minutes and 40 seconds. Let me

[08:38] put this another way. A third of this episode is not this episode. It would be one thing if this was a one-off. We've seen that before. It is understandable sometimes that the production of an anime can go over and things need to be

[08:53] massaged and padding needs to be added, but this is not a one-off. This is normal. And then you get to the one that's even worse, which is from episode 5. In episode 5, we see this Harlequin girl. We know that she's important

[09:06] last however many episodes. I don't remember if the opening played in Either way, we've seen her in the opening a lot. We know that she's a main character. Our protagonist finally sees her for the first time, and she's having

[09:18] she's about to get kicked out because again, she has a useless build, and is oh, people just don't know how to play their class properly. I want to come back to that, but not important yet. So, our protagonist

[09:31] needs to learn that this Harlequin character has a class that he's interested in and is almost as equally broken as his own. And do you know how they tell us that he has come to this realization? They replay the scene, not

[09:44] do you do you understand? He and we is introduced and she's talking to her former party and they're talking for a couple of minutes and then at the end of that our protagonist realizes that she

[09:57] has a class that he wants to have in his party and he realizes that by replaying the first like 30 seconds of this whole scene again. And I mean maybe this is have the funding to be able to actually make more scenes like this so they're

[10:11] just repeating things constantly. Because if you wanted to showcase this feel like they're children. If you wanted to do protagonist still come to that realization, but you do it with a line.

[10:26] You repeat a line from the earlier part of this conversation, from the earlier part of this scene. You don't need to repeat cut for cut the same animation of like 30 to 40 seconds. You don't need to do that. We just watched it. That scene

[10:41] as as ridiculous as that is, that whole scene could be forgiven if the rest of the the other 15 minutes in this episode was worthwhile content. It's not. What happens in episode 5 you may ask? Well,

[10:54] let me remind you that this is episode 5 which means we're almost halfway through this core. Sure this show has been slated for a full 26 episodes, but let's be fair there probably only be like 13 episodes worth of content by the time

[11:06] episode 5 we're actually starting to ramp up into like the to showcase the show's raison d'etre, why this show is the way it is, how it works, how much No, no, no, no, no. Here's what episode 5 shows you. We go to a store because

[11:22] skill book. We go to one store. We spend looking for this item. He doesn't find it. So we go to another store. It's a little bit more of an illicit store. Ooh, it's a back alley store. Ooh, but

[11:34] he finds the item that he wants, and then he spends so long explaining to us why he needs the specific item. This is the item that makes his class broken, if only he had it. But for whatever reason, the the the seller lady wants to charge

[11:50] millions upon millions of in-game currency for it, and he can't possibly her or anything. He's just like, "Okay, I guess I'll figure out how I'm going to make this absurd amount of money." And he leaves. But that, all of that, the

[12:03] visiting of two stores, the explanation on how necessary the skill book is, of the episode is the whole Harlequin thing that I just explained, where we're watching this conversation play out about how this girl is useless because

[12:17] she took a class that they told her to take, but she's still useless anyway, protagonist says that he wants her. And we don't even finish that introduction cuz the show doesn't trust us. And how much of that scene is going to be

[12:30] wonder? Probably most of it. But that's all of episode five. We go to two and watch the girl get kicked out of her seen hundreds of times in other anime in

[12:44] under different contexts and perspectives. I didn't need to rewatch it here in this context, let alone watch it twice cuz WE NEEDED TO REPEAT IT. >> [laughter] >> Please. This is a show that like if

[12:57] you're trying to enjoy it, this needs to be a binge show. I know that sounds like it's going to make it worse. It it really does. Because if you do binge it, face-to-face with all of the repetition constantly. But if you're doing this

[13:13] week to week like I am, that's still happening anyway, and the actual amount small, it doesn't even feel like it's worth it. Binging won't fix the repetition, it will make it more obvious. But then at least if you binge

[13:26] something out of it because the little bits of new pieces that you get, they're >> [sighs and gasps] >> And I still have one more problem. >> And that problem is the show's premise in and of itself. So,

[13:40] the narrative of the show, it it rests its entire narrative on a particular knight class is a trap. It's a class that the world has written off as useless and pointless, and if you get it, it is garbage and you are garbage

[13:54] for having it. But, as the narrative states, because our guy has the super secret MMO isekai knowledge, it's actually broken and overpowered, but only in his hands. That's the key part. And the thing is is that if the claim of

[14:07] this class being useless is false, then the entire premise of the story falls Guess what? Let's check this out, shall we? Episode two. Our protagonist gets a skill. It is a skill that reduces the enemy attack by 20% for 60 seconds. This

[14:23] skill is attached to his sword, apparently, and activates when he hits something. And it activates every time he hits something. And the power stacks. You hit it enough times and it is functionally disarmed and can't hurt

[14:35] you. To me, a class that could perform this maneuver doesn't seem underrated. It seems like it's a bug. And that's the first skill that we see. That is the first skill that this show decides to showcase to us from a low-level

[14:49] this point has been showing us that it's a useless freaking class. He has a debuff that disarms almost anything in front of him. He can move and dodge despite wearing heavy armor, and said armor gives him enough defense so that

[15:02] he can even take a hit from a boss who is several levels above his. That is not average one. Now, you may be saying, "Oh, but hey, this class. He's the one that has meta-gamed everything, and his class is broken." Except in episode

[15:17] five, you remember that skill book I told you he was looking for? He spent so long explaining to us that that skill book is what makes his class broken as hell. And he doesn't have it yet. So before he gets that skill book, him

[15:31] using this class is just him using the class correctly. Everybody in this world is just an idiot. Okay, maybe that's unfair. Let's think about this for a moment, okay? To be fair to the people of this world, this is not an MMO. It's

[15:45] a based on an MMO, but the people within it aren't actually playing an MMO. You can't respect your character class. If you take a class, if you take an probably are stuck with that for the rest of your life. And because of that,

[15:59] I can understand a mentality where people are always choosing the safe options because if you try to experiment, you could land yourself with a useless class, useless skills, unoptimized, and you just are garbage at

[16:13] want to avoid things like that. And it also means that nobody is really a min-maxer because you can't risk attempting to min-max because you're going to land either with yourself or whoever you're experimenting with having

[16:26] and be functionally useless. Do you know what sucks about this argument that hey, and that's why they're absolute garbage at their classes and roles except for, you know, the the the handful of people that were magically able to luck into a

[16:41] good path and made the correct choices and all of that. Um the downside of this it. I made it. The show doesn't. Like the world where the meta is wrong because people can't properly examine the meta. That would be

[16:56] a cool story, especially with a protagonist that is a min-maxer like ours seemed to be. But instead, the show just wants to hand you this premise and then not actually double-check. The show wants to tell you, "Hey, this class is

[17:09] useless." Only for us to see no indication that this class is useless whatsoever. What is useless is the people who have the class, not the class world to ever double-check. And this is

[17:21] that breaks the class even more than it already is. He's defended himself against the boss monster that is levels and levels above his skill grade. Now, he couldn't defeat it, he was just buying time, but he should not have been

[17:34] wiped out. The show wants you to not notice these things. Maybe that's why it repeats things so often so that you skip over everything and you don't notice that's the thing. Maybe the show is hoping you don't read. But then we get

[17:48] to, you know, things that actually work cuz there is frustrating thing about any show like this is when there are legitimately good things about it. It's just surrounded

[18:00] with garbage. There is a scene in episode 4 that is genuinely good. All right? [music] We get this guy here. This This is our raid leader. This is our raid leader that is introduced as like this noble guy who is really good

[18:12] at his job, really good at his superpower, and he treats his underlings not very well, only to then, you know, get curb-stomped by the boss monster And our hero has to be the one to come in and save the day with his broken

[18:26] class. We've seen this plot a lot of times before, but usually in those plots, this raid leader is the type of guy who doubles down or who like becomes a mini antagonist because he got embarrassed by our main character. But

[18:42] here, the dude's bro. He understands that "Oh, no, I messed up. Sorry about that. No, you saved all of us. You are the reason that we're all still standing, and I will fight anyone that says that you are useless because you're

[18:55] not. We would be dead if it weren't for you." That guy is great. That character has a spine. And do you know what even is the best thing about that character? scenes. >> [laughter]

[19:08] >> As good as he is, then there's things that counter it like having a female character who's called Malice. That's her name, Malice. What kind of parents do you have to call your daughter Malice? I mean, oh my god. So, where

[19:20] does that leave us? Eyes, memory, judgment. None of these things are reason why it's so frustrating. You could fix all of these things. A tighter direction, a premise that will earn its own logic, and a willingness to just let

[19:33] the audience to trust your audience, to let us remember things that happened literal minutes before. Like that raid leader, his existence in this whole plot proves that there's something there. But, the

[19:46] the goodness that this show is or could be is not what we're getting. And so, the show, don't. Especially in a season where there is so much other absolutely amazing anime out there. You don't need to watch this.

[20:00] One, if you are an isekai, a heavy isekai enjoyer or completionist, yeah, itself is already comfort food for you general shape that isekai provides and this is it. This show will keep you fed.

[20:15] something for like a bad anime night. This is perfect for that because all of its problems are so obvious and so mind-boggling that watching this in a group with other people to just [music] be like, "What the heck are we doing?"

[20:29] is gold. But, in both cases still, let the show finish. Don't watch it while it's airing because despite the repetition being made worse if you try to watch it in bulk, watching it weekly is just worse. And I'm looking forward

[20:42] to reading the comments on this one. I'm sure there's going to be some defender someone's favorite anime and I'm sure that whoever considers this to be their favorite anime or their favorite manga or their favorite web novel is going to

[20:54] come at me and say that no, actually, you don't understand. I'm sure. But, I'm something that I'm not understanding here, it's because the show wasn't good enough to make me understand. It decided to say that I am can't remember things

[21:06] anyway. So, if I'm just completely off base here, let me know in the comments. Tune in next time where hopefully we watch something better. Very special like this possible because the more support we get over on Patreon, the less

[21:21] sponsorships The Glass Reflection will [music] need at any given time. And so, an immense thank you especially to patrons like City Yamako, Ryven Bonaparte, Omar Showman, Ross Emerson, Aiden, and Geek Wik. We can't continue

[21:34] much you were able to help, I am immensely grateful. And that's us dropping this down in the tier list a bit cuz based on its first episode, yeah, it might have gotten a decently high score. It's not there anymore.

[21:47] Should I find out if anything else needs to get dropped? Until next time, stay to get dropped? Until next time, stay frosty.