The World's Finest Assassin
A short review of the first season
[December 8, 2021]1
The World’s Finest Assassin is a wasted opportunity that won’t reward your attention. Beautifully animated fantasy action can’t make up for lazy writing and clumsy pacing.
What made Overlord fun is that the protagonist is a gamer nerd in the body of an evil mastermind who pretends to be a fantasy hero: this creates opportunities for comedy as the different levels of disguise make him interact with other people in entertaining ways. In The World’s Finest Assassin, the protagonist is a single-minded assassin in the body of a different single-minded assassin who runs a business for assassin purposes. This doesn’t lead anywhere or reward the viewer for keeping track of it because there is no conflict of interest: he’s single-mindedly pursuing plot points at every level.
The pacing and structure are clumsy. The show will squander half an episode on a business deal that doesn’t really matter to the character or to the plot, cut to an equally irrelevant assassination side-mission, and end on the barest outline of romantic comedy. Why not tie some of those elements together? How about a plot-relevant mission that goes off the rails for romantic comedy reasons? A guard walks by, so he has to hide in a closet with his sexy sidekick: done. Maybe contrast his inner monologue with his outward reaction, too. It just sounds more satisfying that way.
Important plot points happen offscreen, which for me was the last straw. Ultimately, I couldn’t understand how the protagonist feels, so I didn’t care anymore. I wasn’t invested: by the end, I was pausing all the time, wondering why on earth they wrote a scene the way they did or if I might have forgotten or missed the part where they explained what was happening. You’ve got to ask more of a show’s writing than this.
A sort of companion piece to my broadly positive review of another seasonal harem isekai, namely The Fruit of Evolution. For an explanation of the context, see footnote 1 therein.