To start, it's pretty stupid. But, that doesn't mean there's not important lessons deep inside it. It's an anime based on a light novel series that started as a web novel, and it's absolutely, utterly mindless, though somewhere along its transition to an anime it filtered out some of the worst ideas.
It's an Isekai, which is Japanese for "lazy overused trope that is currently super popular", and the ten-second blurb is "Japanese businessman who loves mechs gets killed and reincarnated into a world with magic and mechs."
Thankfully, that gets knocked out in the first few minutes of the anime and never really mentioned again, and the series essentially just follows a super-genius young boy who revolutionizes mech designs in a retarded fantasy world. And when I say retarded, I mean that his genius ideas that revolutionize the mech designs (which they constantly reiterate have otherwise remained unchanged for centuries) are very basic common sense, like "robot designs don't have to directly imitate humans."
Now, why I want to bring this series up is because despite its glaring flaws, retarded premise, and pure-and-simple Mary Sue protagonist who's never seriously challenged and always succeeds just by applying common sense in a world of retarded people, it's watchable and the characters are likable, even the protagonist. In fact, the protagonist somehow even manages to be sorta likable. How?
Because he's passionate about robots. Super passionate. Excitable, single-minded, he's always shouting and running around and fawning over robots. He's got a clear goal (to make his very own personal robot), and the anime breaks down that goal into clear steps, and you end up rooting for him to succeed because he's doing everything for the sheer joy of it, and that joy is infectious.
It's an anime that really hammered home the importance of giving characters passion and goals. It's something I've often struggled with whenever I played, and it's a common issue with my players since their initial goals often end up getting muddied and indistinct as the plot and and their character's develop. Though it's good to have deep, multi-faceted characters that face actual struggles, setbacks, and internal debates, there's something refreshing about pure and simple passion towards something.
You should probably review your character's goals and passions, and try to refine them as best you can. It might be what makes a terrible character a fun one, or a mediocre character a great one.
David Hughes
I miss when super robots looked really goofy and awesome like pic related. Nowadays there's too much stuff going on. I blame Gundam seed and 00
William Ortiz
Forgot the fucking pic
Eli Lee
Blame Gundam Wing. G Gundam had plenty of goofy and silly designs, but Gundam Wing followed the year after and said "No, no more Dutch Windmill gundams."
Logan Williams
This was a nice two-part post. I really should remember long-term, purely-by-choice character motivations more often.
John Ward
If you think Knights and Magic is "utterly mindless" then you haven't even begun to plumb the non-depths of the light novel world. It's god damn high art compared to some of the shit that gets published.
Easton Morris
It's not as if G Gundam wasn't a radical departure in tone from other Gundam series. If Gundam Wing was any one thing it was the one that appealed to fujo's, not some sort of backlash to wacky robots
Josiah Lewis
I'm not the OP. I don't even know why I watched it, but "utterly mindless" is a pretty apt description. Just because it could have been worse doesn't really change that.
Caleb Clark
I was largely speaking under the assumption that many people here may not be entirely familiar with how stupid webnovels and light novels can get, but you're right.
K&M does have some good things going for it, and I think I highlighted the major one, with the other key strengths being a sense of excitement from watching rapid technological development and several likable if not particularly deep supporting characters. It having anything to like at all already puts it head and shoulders above much of the light novel quagmire, and it having next to no romance is actually another plus, since I don't know how many more Incidental Harem series I can stomache.
Josiah Reyes
Weebs like it because it has tits in it
thats the main reason why
I watched it, other than that, its a stale as shit thing
Adrian Brown
This anime is fucking bad. Really fucking bad, even by the low standards of mecha anime.
Caleb Fisher
Fuck off, shill
Christopher Collins
It has some grade A tits though.
Daniel Stewart
You're seriously overestimating the reach of shitty chinese cartoons. Not to mention even the OP admits it was a really shitty one
Cooper Ward
By all means, do not spend a penny on this series, and don't for a second think that anyone is actually recommending this series to anyone. It's actually hard to imagine anyone with a particular itch this series would scratch.
It's a C- at best, and that means that well before you even consider watching it, there's hundreds of better series even within the Mecha genre.
Ian Jenkins
I liked it. You could tell at least some of the people making it were doing it as a passion project. It was fucking trash, but it was fun trash.
Plus it's hard for me to hate any universe where pic related was a thing
Ayden Perry
Sorry, fucked up
Cooper Thompson
would you use Warmahoards for this setting or is there something more appropriate
Chase Nguyen
Fuck you OP. Why did you have to show me a "future tech in fantasy setting" thing and then tell me it's shit.
Sebastian Martinez
Yeah, passionate gays. The plot was just a cheap vessel to try and sell shitty traps to doujin writers
Carter Powell
Because there's lessons to be learned.
One of the dumbest things is that there's magic, and the only way it's used is to blast things and to power mechs. Even flight is just using wind attacks at the ground to propel yourself. Outside of that, there's also two instances of barrier magic, but that's it.
There's no mind-influencing magic, no stealth magic, no creation or summoning, it's almost entirely just magic replacing gasoline/electricity. And that's a waste of a fantasy setting.
Kayden Flores
...
Samuel Baker
I disagree with the fact that just because a setting has magic that it automatically has to have all these different rediculous uses for it. And I like the fact that they outright say "it's magic, we ain't gotta explain shit" instead of throwing bullshit psuedo-science at us.
But I do agree that the setting in general is kinda stupid.
Christopher Richardson
Even just the basic "We can harvest engines from monsters that allow us to extract essentially free energy from the air", and the only use for those things is to power mechs, is enough to make me go "Yeah, this is a lazy, lazy, single-minded setting."
The "Magic" part of "Knights and Magic" is essentially a misnomer, since the majority of the magic is really nothing more than an analog to electricity, and this series is less fantastical than plenty of "pure" science fiction mech series, especially many in the super robo category. Hell, even Gundam 00 ended up being more magical once they really started to abuse the question of what GN particles could do.
Tyler Taylor
that fucking apostrophe burns my biscuits like you wouldn't believe
Bruh, Gundams were serious war machines for a lot longer than hat. G Gundam is the exception, not the norm
Justin Garcia
I'll do you the honor and assume you're not just shit posting. In what way was this a trap show, unless your bar for trap show is so low that having a bishonen shota MC qualifies?
Xavier Jenkins
It's actually sad when a forgettable series has decent character designs.
Cameron Barnes
I wasn't blaming Gundam as a whole, and I love some of the wing designs. I'm just saying Seed and 00 put an emphasis on excessive designs, and that seems to be where mecha is right now
Matthew Clark
Knights and Magic was really weird for me as a mecha fan. On one hand it feels like how I would write a shitty self-insert mecha show, and from that alone I should know that it shouldn't be good, but I like it. I try to avoid making my characters in games self-inserts because I feel it lessens the central "role playing" aspect of games.
Too bad titty elf only had like 30 seconds of screen time. Helvi is underrated as fuck.
Ryan Miller
Gundam Wing had a robot with giant feathered wings.
Lincoln Jenkins
Man, I was a huge armored core fan back in the day. I still remember visiting the official forums and seeing fuckers asking for them to include wings and scythes like those from gundam wing.
Jeremiah Butler
I love how they just went to eleven with the Zadoulek Empire's capital in the anime version.
Luke Johnson
dude, anime tits aint enough to make me nut, so it aint worth it to embarass myself to watch a series solely because of them
>super robots Knights and Magic is a real robot show though
Luis Parker
I liked it for its start, but I agree, the series suffers from the same problem as nearly all isekai, been that the guy's just steamrolling the universe. No conflict, no rivals, just pure power fantasy thats not very satisfying.
Liam Bailey
The series ends with him in a decent rivalry with a non-isekai mad scientist who is really into airships that he isn't able to steamroll. They spend a few episodes creating countermeasures for each other.
Angel Johnson
I wish you'd have actually explained what the fuck an "isekai" was as I keep seeing it thrown derogatorily and I still have no fucking clue what it means, and context gives me nothing because it has, like words like "autism", become solely synonymous with a generally bad thing, in this case, "anime genre I don't like".
Cameron Green
It's a story where the main character is taken from earth somehow and winds up in an alternate world, usually a fantasy setting. Shenanigans ensue.
Blake Gray
See this shit pisses me off because I'm like 0-% certain I've heard the term applied to anime where what seems to be the primary premise here (protagonist thrown into alternate world" was not the case.
Samuel Perez
>0-% Don't know how I got that, suppsoed to be 90%
Nathaniel Jackson
>Knight's
Grayson Russell
It gets thrown on some gaming anime like .HACK or Sword Art Online because that's kind of what they boil down to (.HACK less so because I think they actually have plot happen outside the game). The fact that they're trapped in a game is just a vehicle for moving the character into a new world without involving magic.
Andrew Turner
Google does exist. It probably would have taken a tenth of the time it took to write your post than it would have to plug in that term and check out the first few results.
Logan Adams
>high heel boots >thigh high socks >tiny hot pants >corset >coat What is she, a hooker? That's literally the stereotypical hooker outfit; the only way it'd be more stereotypical is if the coat had fur lining and the socks were made from fishnet.
