In this first episode Orhun is thrown out of his party, saves a girl in the dungeon, then gets a job offer from her sister, the head of a famous guild.
If that sounds a bit thin for a first episode, don’t fret: there’s plenty of unnecessary exposition to fill up the runtime,as Orhun monologues to himself about things he already knows. A common flaw in light novel adaptations, of which Yuusha Party wo Oidasareta Kiyoubinbou of course is one. You can get away with it in text, but there’s not much fun in watching him fight utterly generic monsters will thinking about how he was kicked out from his party for not being a good enough support magician, as he retrained from being a swordsman. Even if it’s all animated a bit better than usual for such series. The whole experience is less like watching anime and more like having somebody read a fan wiki entry to you explaining the world building.
It’s not great. And the worst thing it does is give you room to think about how absurd the setup is. Orhun is thrown out of the Hero’s Party supposedly because he’s not good enough an support magician. He’s not good enough because originally he was a swordsman and had to retrain himself into this new role as his party needed it. Nevertheless, they still became a record-setting S-rank party. So why sack him? Because they teamed up with another S-rank party, whose leader Sophia Claudel — inventor of the party system and a support magician herself — was so much better than him that they had no choice but to sack him. A bit unfair if you ask me and it doesn’t really make sense. Especially since Sophia herself clearly does value him, despite only having met him once, during that team-up. Sure, ulterior motives may be in play, but it all seems not very well thought out. Easy to skip over in a manga, but hard to ignore in anime.
A better adaptation would’ve avoided all this by cutting down on the exposition and start where this ended: as Orhun accepts Sophia’s job offer of mentoring a group of newbies in her guild during their first dungeon crawl. Start it there, then you can show why he got the job and hwy he was available much more naturally. Or they could’ve started with that collaboration between Orhun and Sophia’s parties, which would’ve neatly led to the banishment etc. By keeping rigidly to the way the manga/light novel did it, we instead got an episode where the action was done less then ten minutes in, the rest of it just being people talking at each other. A good example of the weakness of most of this sort of fantasy series, putting setup over storytelling.
