There's a recent trend in RPG fantasy stories to bring the characters into the game world much in the same way that one actually starts a game, which is to say from the bottom. It can be comedic to watch a group of newbies enter their new world with the expectations of distinguishing themselves from the masses right from the get-go—of standing out as the protagonist—only to be stuck at the bottom of the barrel with no money or skills, scraping by on odd jobs and their know-how of games. But maybe it is too easy in these circumstances to overlook the issue with being in such a position. There’s nothing glamorous or comedic about being dead broke and needing to eat, or fighting a battle to the death with a more experienced foe. In a game the enemies may be monsters or other creatures, distinctly unhuman, but in the RPG world they too fight for the right to survive.
Therefore what Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash brings to the table is not simply the setting of making the world harsh and unforgiving to new adventurers, but rather a true and total immersion in such a setting. Maybe it is the unfamiliarity of such a world that begins to pull us into this mentality. The people who wake up in a clock tower on a hill are certainly from another world, and from their obfuscated memories of “cell phones” and the like we know it must be a world much like our own. But they only know that this is not the world they belong to, not where it is they actually belong. Marched down to the adventurers’ guild, they are told that there is no other way for them to earn money besides killing monsters and earning their rewards. Two parties are quickly formed, the strong and the rejects, and within a few weeks the rejects, led by the thief Haruhiro and the priest Manato, are running out of money. Their coordination is poor, and even low-level goblins are strong and cunning enough to outplay them in a fight. Without killing monsters, there is no gold, and without gold there is no food. Their famine weighs them down, and they walk the thin line of starvation with no respite on the horizon.
When they first kill a goblin, it is a bitter fight to the death that lasts nearly ten minutes, revolving around the party’s cunning sneak attacks, rotations, and gradual exhaustion of their prey. Their victory gives us some amount of hope, as well as the promise of being able to stave off hunger for a little while longer. And yet the most memorable part of the fight is the goblin, scared and defensive, with a look in its eyes that seems to understand it very well might die in this fight. There is nothing noble about the way they surround the tiny creature and slash it slowly to death from all angles, and the only reason we can support our protagonists is because we know that their lives are truly on the line as well. It was a slow and grueling scene, juxtaposed with the bright watercolor palate that washed out even the color of the blood.
In fact, the technical design of Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash may be the reason their slow progression towards forming a coordinated and effective party that can survive is such a compellingly told story. The beautiful watercolors bleed outside the lines and edges of objects at times while leaving parts of the world uncolored at others, a heavy contrast to the tightly drawn and vividly colored characters. When the music comes in it is fairly unnoteworthy aside from a handful of vocal inserts, but many times background music is conspicuously absent, lending a bizarre atmosphere to otherwise normal anime interactions such as light rom-com teasing or emotionally charged arguments. Oftentimes the only sounds are the characters speaking, and where a comical track could have led a group discussion to feel like a normal harem interaction, the absence of anything else makes it feel empty, transient, as out of place in their quest for blood as the washed out color palate under the harsh sun.
The characters begin as tropes and slowly flesh out into distinct personalities, capable of genuinely caring for and hating one another at times. Their dark knight Ranta for example is loud and boisterous, making jokes about the girls’ chests and acting solo much of the time. But this all has real consequences; he visibly drifts towards the outside of the group, hated by the girls and untrustworthy to the whole party. When confronted near the end of the show, he speaks from the heart: if everything gets accomplished in good time, why should they need to be friends or work together? Many anime characters are introduced on that motto, but seeing him live this philosophy for the whole twelve episodes, even come hell and high water as in the final episodes in a deadly abandoned mine, made it resonate more as his personality than as a way to set him up as edgy or misguided.
And with these sorts of characters in these sorts of circumstances, this truly begins to feel like the real world. Discussions revolving around party dynamics and distributing gold for upgrades and new skills feel as necessary as drama about their feelings, pasts, and traumas. The ones who can cook or clean feel vital to the well-being of the party, not just an amusing side characterization. When someone dies, they haven’t died in a game world; they fully and truly die. One of the party is killed in a skirmish early on, and the rest of the episode is not simply mourning their loss, but also figuring out how to pay for a proper burial to prevent undeath from setting in, or renegotiating the power structure and roles the party members play. Few deaths occur in the show, and most occur offscreen or in flashback, but each individual one carries weight, both with regards to emotion and to responsibility.
I struggle to decide how I feel about nothing truly being accomplished by the end of the series. Many audiences could hardly be faulted for calling the pacing slow, almost punishingly so, and to have little or no payoff beyond a final fight with a monstrous kobold from their past is perhaps too little to substantiate watching the full way through. Personally my feeling was that the final fight was too much that the show took on. The party comes to this world utterly lost, helpless in the face of the forces of the world, and in that context even defeating a goblin, or learning to consistently kill goblins, or just making a stable income would feel like they have reached a point of accomplishment. Also putting up a final boss character forced the show to lose focus of one of its early strengths, the interplay between the human adventurers and their prey. The enemy horde begin to resemble faceless bands of antagonism and adversity, although a few carefully placed shots do remind us that they too are living their own lives and culture before the protagonists break this delicate balance.
Perhaps there was no way for the show to end anywhere besides an open end, short of killing the cast off, so maybe it should be said that the ending couldn’t possibly give closure; but that in no way undercuts the severity and necessity of the struggles that happened during the course of the show. It is slow because living paycheck to paycheck is slow, and even slower when that paycheck has its own weapons, its own cunning, its own life. It is slow because some human interactions happen organically and some do not, the former binding a good party together in union and the latter subtly breaking it apart. We never truly learn where their origins were from, but maybe there is no such overarching truth to the world of Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash , let alone enough time for them to discover it. And amidst the merciless world disguised under those bright colors and utter silence, it is nothing short of a miracle that they find a way to sustain their daily lives in their new home, built on the lopsided sacrifice of their prey and tenuously built on their skills and well-being, a house of cards in a light breeze.