I refuse to use the title Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry because that sounds stupid. Just like hitting the top of your head and putting band aid on your forehead.
Synopsis
Meet Stella. She’s a princess. She’s a super talented magical knight. She’s a transfer student seeking to reach higher levels previously unavailable to her in her homeland.
Meet Ikki. He’s a failure of a knight. All his grades and assessments in terms of capability as a magical knight are very very bad.
Ikki and Stella have become roommates. And that means roommates hi-jinx.
Because of the roommate-induced misunderstanding, a challenge is issued out for the two to duke it out in a combat arena. Cause you know, civilized people resolve conflicts using violence.
While on paper this seems like a horrible match up for Ikki, it turns out that Ikki is actually a pretty good fighter. He manages to copy Stella’s sword techniques (that’s essentially his combat style), and eventually pull out a victory by compressing his entire magic power to be used in a one-minute window. So yes, he’s essentially a fighter who can only fight in turbo mode for a short amount of time.
And so after finally proving himself, Ikki finally gets accepted Stella and the two become happy roommates. Or something like that.
Review
Yes, it’s really waaaaaaay too similar to Gakusen Toshi Asterisk. Both have a flame-bending tsundere princess. Both have a sword wielding main character. And both begins with the interweaving lives of the two via an accidental peeping.
What differs the two, though, is their treatment of the two core elements of the show: Fighting and fanservice.
Rakudai Kishi, based on what we’ve seen, has battles that focuses more on the swordplay than the magic part. While Stella did fire off a large flame magic later in the fight, it was rather uninspiring and lackluster. But the problem Rakudai Kishi encounters here is not really the lack of elegance in the magic, the problem was that the swordplay failed to deliver.
Ikki’s combat style is essentially to steal people’s technique, and incorporate those into his arsenal of moves. His talent is supposed to lie in understanding the core concepts of each sword technique. But Rakudai Kishi doesn’t really show anything distinctive about Stella’s swordplay, which means once Ikki stole those techniques, we really couldn’t see for ourselves that he’s now using those techniques. It felt like both parties were really just randomly slashing and parrying. The show had to resort to actually telling us that Ikki is now using those techniques, and showing a shadow of Stella overlayed on Ikki when slashing. While those did convey the point, that kind of animation goes against the age-old adage of show-don’t-tell.
As for fanservice, Rakudai Kishi takes a more in-your-face path to fanservice. And somehow, the show manages to make it work. And it’s largely thanks to how it gives us another different angle of fanservice to work with.
Instead of the usual tactic of having the guy fall into perverted situations and “gaining” from it, the show presents Stella as a sheltered princess who is reluctantly interested in guys. And that gives the viewers a chance to see the fanservice roles swapped. What if the girl is the one who manages to take advantage of the situation?
And therein lies perhaps what Rakudai Kishi can offer us: A different kind of fanservice.
Waifu Index
Only one girl, Stella, has been shown so far, and she’s a pretty good waifu material. The best kind of tsundere is the one that doesn’t focus on violence, but on the embarrassed reactions to situations. Stella pulls this off quite well.
1 Comment
Asterisk seems to be better based on their 1st episodes. Let’s see after a few more eps.