With all the trapped-in-an-RPG shows that’ve been coming out lately, it’s kind of refreshing to see a show that cuts to the chase. The main character of Yuusha Yoshihiko (The Hero Yoshihiko/The Brave Yoshihiko) is an actual RPG protagonist—or at least a parody of one. The show is most directly a twist on the Dragon Quest franchise (which I’ve never played) but can be understood well enough in the greater context of the RPG genre. Yuusha Yoshihiko follows Yoshihiko’s quest to assemble a party, level up, collect items, and battle monsters. The cast includes:
- Yoshihiko: The cowardly, lustful, deadpan anti-hero
- Danjo: An elderly swordsman with incredible sideburns, unsurprisingly the only one who can actually fight
- Murasaki: The token chick, whose attractiveness takes a major dive in the third season
- Mereb: A bumbling mage who introduces a worthless new spell in each episode
- Hisa: Yoshihiko’s sister, who stalks him throughout his journey
- The Buddha: A guiding deity who is impossible to understand without subtitles
Yuusha Yoshihiko features all of Japan’s greatest comedic techniques, including:
- explaining jokes
- repeating jokes
- overacting
- overreacting
- being really loud
- reference dropping
- celebrity circlejerking
The jokes miss more than they hit, but there’s just enough on both the comedy and adventure sides to keep you going. It’s got some good music too.
Wow, it’s seriously a TV series? That’s interesting, I’ll check it out.
Speaking of tv series, you know that there is a Dresden Files tv series? Don’t watch it, I watched the first two episodes but it wasn’t much. Kind of a detective/cop drama but with a magic theme.
You don’t read that much these days do you? Otherwise, I’d recommend The Tutorial Is Too Hard (https://lightnovelbastion.com/project.php?p=285). A Korean novel where people are randomly selected from Earth to undergo a “tutorial dungeon” to get stronger so that they defend Earth from an invasion of monsters. The tutorial has various difficulty levels and he, while drunk, chose the hardest difficult Hell, the others being Easy, Normal and Hard.
It’s pretty interesting because of how insane the difficulty level is, and it is also interesting in that it switches between two different times. Present day he’s stuck on floor 60 for a particular reason but most of the story is in the past, starting from the first floor.
Oh and I notice you have 12 Kingdom in your Plan to Watch on MAL. It’s really good though the MC is a bit whiny for the first couple of episodes. Just thinking about it makes me want to rewatch is actually…
I saw some pics. Might check it out someday, but it’s far from a priority. In any case, I’m still waiting for Peace Talks…
Anything I read these days is in Japanese, and I read Japanese so slowly that my reading backlog may one day overtake my anime and posting backlogs. Sounds really interesting though.
I’ve been meaning to watch 12 Kingdoms for ages. Long ago I couldn’t find subs, and more recently I’ve had other priorities. But it seems like a good candidate for a raw anime. Maybe I’ll watch it in the coming months.
Like I said, don’t bother with the TV series. Actually, I’ve been waiting for the next Dresden Files book too. Already two and a half years, really weird considering his normal 1 year pace.
12 Kingdoms might be tricky to understand in Japanese since there are some complicationed conversations. Well, that probably is probably why you want to watch it raw I guess.
I prefer going raw for simpler language, but you can’t always tell how difficult the language will be from the subject matter of the show. I’ll give it a shot raw and resort to subs if I have to.
Well at least they don’t seem to yell every joke in this show. Why is it that in most japanese comedy anime they have to yell all the time. Even though the show seems shitty in my opinion it still seems better than most trapped in RPG/fantasy world anime. FUCK Sword Art Online!
People compared this to Monty Python on youtube and maybe that’s why I don’t like it. I never truly cared about Monty Python. I know that people usually say that it’s one of the funniest things in the world, but I just think that it’s average. I will admit that Life of Brian and The Holy Grail have some really funny scenes, but even they aren’t constantly funny.
Meh, I like Lucky Star. I would never call it one of the best comedy anime out there, but it’s decent. It’s more cute than funny. Just like K-on! and Hidamari Sketch.
I’ve only seen The Holy Grail and wasn’t impressed. Seems like something that was memefied into greatness during an era there was little competition.
It’s pretty classic.
But with anything humorous, if you keep hearing “this is hilarious! this is totally hilarious!” you are going to be disappointed.
It might also be like reading Lord of the Rings, where everything seems cliche. Whereas it was fresh and new at the time, everyone just copied all the good stuff latter on.
Ah, this show. My friend showed me this last year. We watched the first season. I was under the impression that the cheapness was a stylistic choice, but I have a pretty small frame of reference of Japanese media outside of anime and manga. I saw an episode of some Spiderman mecha sentai and some previews and clips of terrible looking movie adaptions of anime. I did see a few episodes of season 2 of this show, but most of the newness and charm wore off and there were other things on my watch list.
I’m sure it was a stylistic choice to a large extent, though production values are generally lower on Japanese TV programs than American ones.
Damn near all movie adaptations of anime are terrible. Post forthcoming…