Fall 2021 Anime Season’s Two Big Surprises

This year started off with a bang for anime fans. We got to see the amazing (and often troubling) storytelling of Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation and its astonishing animation. And despite my problems with the second cour, To Your Eternity‘s first cour is one of the best things ever made in the anime field.

Spring kept the quality train running with the brilliant Odd Taxi (seriously, go watch it if you haven’t), 86 with its incredibly deep world building and Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song with equally good world building and equally affecting story telling. The Summer season brought us mostly fun and easy-to-watch shows like Tsukimichi and Fena: Pirate Princess with two standouts; the consistently wonderful Kageki Shoujo and the inconsistent but even more brilliant Sonny Boy.

So the Fall season has its work cut out for it if it plans to end the year with the kind of bang it started with. As of right now there are two new Fall season anime that could make that happen, not counting returning shows like the second cour of Mushoku Tensei. I’ll describe why I think they have that potential with no spoilers that might affect your enjoyment of the story. I’ll start with the one I was most worried about and end with the biggest surprise.

Takt Op. Destiny
Whenever I see a title like that, with weird spellings and punctuation, the alarm bells start going off. Then I saw the trailer for Takt Op. Destiny and got even less optimistic about this new anime. It was about music as a weapon. The last anime like that was the incredibly boring Listeners from Spring 2020. And one very well done action sequence in the trailer looked almost exactly like the famous action scene from the first episode of the unwatchable The Detective Is Already Dead, which was so far above the animation quality of the rest of that series it was shocking.

I was pleasantly surprised by the first episode of Takt Op. Destiny. The animation quality was consistently excellent. The characters were actually interesting. The world, in which two waves of meteors that struck the Earth brought with them monsters that hate music because it has the power to harm them, and the very human-looking beings that can harness the power of music to fight the monsters, is well developed. We find out just enough about the D2 (the monsters) and the Musicart beings (the fighters) and the humans that can activate and guide those fighters (Conductors) to get us hooked while wanting to know much more about the mystery behind all of these things.

Wisely, the story is a picaresque tale, giving us a reason why the characters will encounter different D2 each episode and giving us a goal that will clearly define the end of an arc or the season.

Since Takt Op. Destiny is a collaboration between the studios MAPPA and Madhouse, I probably shouldn’t have been as worried about it as I was. It is an original story, and both studios seem to have put some of their best talent on this show.

The Faraway Paladin
While the names MAPPA and Madhouse should have eased my concerns, the studio behind The Faraway Paladin, Children’s Playground Entertainment, has no such effect. The only anime it has made in the past that I watched was Hatena Illusion from Winter 2020 and I dropped that after one episode. In fact, MyAnimeList.net has only two series listed as being made solely by Children’s Playground Entertainment, not counting the two running this season.

That’s right, two. In addition to The Faraway Paladin, the studio is also behind the isekai comedy The Fruit of Evolution: Before I Knew It, My Life Had It Made, which I am very much unsure about after one episode.

What I am sure about is that after one episode of the more serious isekai The Faraway Paladin, I am hooked. The characters are intriguing, and the world is fascinating and seemingly deeply realized, based on what we get to know of it after just one episode. The story seems to be taking its time to develop, much like Mushoku Tensei or last season’s surprisingly good How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom.

The story of The Faraway Paladin is about Will, a human child raised in a necropolis by a mummy (Mary), the ghost of a sage (Gus), and the skeleton of an ogre (Blood). The trailers and the OP and ED indicate Will eventually leaves the necropolis and his undead surrogate parents behind, but when that happens or where the story goes from there is unclear, unless you have read the light novel series the anime is based on.

I’m hoping this turns out to be as well-told a story as Realist Hero turned out to be.

Most of the other anime I am interested in this Fall season are returning series like Mushoku Tensei or 86. I do hope that there  are other surprises in this season’s lineup, but mostly I hope that the two series I highlight here keep up the quality. Nobody wants another Wonder Egg Priority.

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