The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

Rentt Faina, a twenty-five-year-old adventurer, has been hacking away at monsters for a decade. However, without much talent for the job, Rentt finds himself stuck hunting Slimes and Goblins for meager amounts of coin every day. Swallowed whole by a dragon, he wakes up a short time later not quite dead, but not very alive either— He is nothing more than a pile of bones. Armed with nothing but his trusty sword, tool belt, and ghoulish new looks, Rentt sets off on his quest as a newly reborn Skeleton to achieve Existential Evolution, hoping to one day return to civilization with a more human form.

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is based on a light novel series of the same name by Yū Okano. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

There were a lot of places that The Unwanted Undead Adventurer could have gone after the somewhat intriguing opening scene that featured its protagonist getting horrifically murdered by a weird angel- dragon-thing and turned into a living skeleton monster. While I very briefly held out hope that this was maybe going to result in some fun and wacky hijinks (or potentially some interesting worldbuilding) the show instead opted to make the most boring and predictable choice possible: It spent fully half of the premiere on a flashback that explains—in excruciatingly boring detail—how its nothing-burger of a protagonist ended up fighting that monster in the first place. Things do not improve from there.

I'm going to take this opportunity to make an open plea to all of the writers working on these terrible, RPG-inspired fantasy stories that have been plaguing the industry for so many years: If you are going to commit to plagiarizing the already plagiarized bargain-bin crap that was itself ripped off from the half- baked clones of JRPG fantasy stories that haven't felt fresh or relevant since the early nineties, then for the love of God, please do not feel like you need to spend any time explaining to us how the hero guilds and monster loot systems of your setting work. We all know how it goes by now and the play-by-play has gotten a bit insulting—as if you think your audience possesses all of the long-term memory retention of a geriatric goldfish.

Anyways, that's more of a general complaint about the industry as a whole. As for the particulars of The Unwanted Undead Adventurer, well, I'd get into more specifics if there was anything “particular” that this anime was even trying to accomplish. So far as this premiere goes, at least, we get introduced to Skelly Boy, we spend an ungodly amount of time watching as the pre-skellified Skelly Boy goes about his depressingly mundane life, and then the post-skellified Skelly Boy monologues to himself in a dark and ugly cave about how difficult living life as a Skelly Boy is probably going to be. He also kills some slimes, I guess, and then he evolves into a more ghoulish form for reasons that I could not possibly be bothered to care about.

Unless you are in desperate need of something to use as background noise while folding laundry or doing your taxes, feel free to throw this bag of bones onto the “Anime That Do Not Exist and Will Not Be Remembered by a Single Living Soul When Winter Draws to a Close” Pile. It's a good thing that it's so emaciated and empty, too, because something tells me that the “ATDNEaWNBRbaSLSWWDtaC” Pile is going to be especially big, this year…

I know that I focus on themes, characterization, and world-building in most of my reviews but never let it be said that a plot alone can't get me hooked. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer is a straight-up classic fantasy-adventure story. We have no isekai shenanigans and no inexplicable status windows. All we have is a man, turned into a skeleton, trying to figure out a way to return to his life—and continue in the pursuit of his lifelong goal.

It's not a complicated concept but it is interesting watching him go step-by-step towards accomplishing it—though that's not to say he knows exactly what he is doing. He constantly makes little mistakes but learns from each in a relatable way. His new situation also makes him review the core concepts of magic in his world—thereby letting us learn them as well.

Simply put, while there is nothing here remotely groundbreaking, that doesn't change the fact that I want to see where this show is going. I want to see how he interacts with other characters. I want to see how he handles the numerous challenges in his undead life. Could the show turn out to be repetitive, monotonous, and/or boring? Sure. But I am willing to give this a few more episodes to find out. (And besides, it's not the first undead hero anime I've watched—and all those have turned out to be fun at the very least.)

I make this complaint with the full understanding that there may not have been a better way to handle the earliest parts of this story: The Unwanted Undead Adventurer relies too much on telling rather than showing in its first episode. Rentt's transition from living human to undead monster happens relatively quickly when he gets eaten by the weirdest dragon to grace this season, and after that, we're treated to him narrating his next moves. Yes, there are a couple of fights in there against slimes and skeletons, but mostly, Rentt is going over his options and how best to handle them, and that's not particularly compelling.

It's too bad because there are hints at more interesting subjects waiting in the wings. Even though Rentt (which I keep wanting to write "Rennt") is largely a solo adventurer, he's got people he cares about and who care about him. Early on, he mentions a friend who's a scholar, and later, when he fails to return from his adventure in the Labyrinth of the Moon's Shadow, two people are very obviously concerned about it. Sure, his scholar friend's words could be taken as "I was hoping he'd swing by and make/provide dinner," but she's still remarking on his absence, and Sheila at the guild is also worried about his failure to return. He's a solo adventurer, not a person devoid of social contacts and friends. That makes his determination to achieve a higher level of undead form so that he can return to town take on a different meaning. He doesn't want to hit "ghoul" and eventually "vampire" so that he can sleep in a proper bed; he wants to get back to the people he cares about and where he feels at home. He's also not willing to give up on his dreams of becoming a mithril class adventurer, which is perhaps less charming, but no less important when it comes to what seems to be a core concept for this episode: Rentt isn't done with being human.

Told differently, I think this could have been a much more engaging episode. I like that the snippets we get of the town are understated because he hasn't been missing all that long, so they would be concerned rather than panicked right now. I enjoyed the scene of Rentt juggling bread, and I genuinely laughed at his attempts to talk at the very end, so this has some things going for it. If you're at all intrigued, this seems to merit the old three-episode test – it may not look great, and the storytelling in this episode is very clunky, but it isn't without potential.

This is one of those premieres that's just a chore. That's not to say this episode is terrible, because that would be giving it too much credit. Its greatest and only sin is being boring as all hell, stretching out a thin premise across an entire episode, and filling all that time with incessant, unengaging narration from the most stultifying man to ever live, die, and undie.

This is another entry in the baffling genre of fantasy stories that's just about level grinding. There are a number of them in the general light novel adaptation sphere, and I have never understood the appeal, but it's especially dire here. 80% of this episode feels like it's endless scenes of watching a CG skeleton walk down blue hallways and fight other CG monsters, all scored by the main character's unnecessary narration that needs to explain every single goddamn thing that's happening on screen. You'd think that would be annoying, but the content and delivery are so dull that they can't even rise to the level of irritating. Rentt's voice actor could be reading the phone book for all it amounts to, turning into ever-present background noise while he kills another skeleton or slime in the same, identical corridor as the last one.

I can't even talk about the visuals much because there's barely anything besides blue dungeon corridors and the millionth generic fantasy town. Rentt looked like a background character before getting skeletonized, and afterward, he looked like a pre-made Unity asset. What few other characters we see look like first drafts from somebody who picked up How To Draw Fantasy Anime Characters For Dummies the night before. As a CG model, Rentt can't even emote! There's not even a goddamn "bone" pun or death joke to be found! That's like, the one thing every hack writer will lean into when writing an undead character! Where are the damn skull jokes? Playing a tune on your own ribs like a xylophone? Give me something, you godless bag of bones!

I genuinely don't know what the appeal of this is supposed to be. It's like watching a gaming session by a particularly uncharismatic streamer, but you only watch him play the tutorial level. There's no character, no interesting world-building, and barely a hint of conflict. The opening and ending themes insist this will eventually turn into an ensemble adventure, but this first impression is as one-note and dull as you can get.