Hortensia Saga

This is a fairly traditional fantasy anime series, based on a Japanese RPG game, where the most that managed to surprise me was in the last few minutes of the twelfth episode. The rest is pretty generic, boring, full of clichés - in other words, I did not enjoy it very much. On the other hand, I probably enjoyed it a bit more than, say, King's Raid: Successors Of The Will which had twice as many episodes, and which I found as traditional, predictable, and uninteresting. I did not like the main duo, and only found two of the minor characters interesting (Deflotte and Adelheid). I definitely did not like the mascot and the maid. The villains were, in my opinion, very weak with uninteresting characteristics (especially the Pope) which I thought detracted a lot from the tension and atmosphere. I was more amused by the design of the last monster than I was scared or excited by the final confrontation. Thanks to the last part of the show, I did get the impression that somewhere very deep under all the generic pathos and clichés there might be something interesting. In other words, there is something more complicated going on behind the scenes. However, I did not see anything that deep throughout this anime series (if there were any hints, they were pretty damn weak) so I was both surprised and disappointed like "it finally started to get interesting, but now it is the end?!?" - So find out in the sequel or you will just have to buy the game! Err, no thanks - I was not pleased, I did not find the show entertaining, and even the decent twist at the end could not save it! 3.5/10 (03/25/2021)