Ansatsu Kizoku | Anime Review: Disappointing

I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to post anymore episode blogs, nor did I really want to finish Ansatsu Kizoku. However, I had to or else it would’ve been lost forever on my ‘on-hold’ list. So I pushed forward and completed it, long story short, Ansatsu Kizoku was disappointing. Allow me to tell you about it.

The world’s greatest assassin had sworn lifelong allegiance to the organization that raised him. However, despite his loyalty, that very same organization takes action to silence him, ultimately leading to his demise. Drowning in frustration and regrets he can no longer suppress, he finds himself in an audience with a goddess attracted by his exceptional skills. The goddess offers him reincarnation into a magnificent world of swords and magic so he can perform a crucial mission: prevent that world’s destruction by slaying its hero.

Accepting the goddess’ request, he is reborn as Lugh Tuatha Dé, the son of a noble family of assassins serving the Alvan Kingdom. Under the guidance of his father, Lugh learns new assassination techniques that significantly differ from the cold-blooded and unsympathetic killing style of his previous life. Furthermore, his other talents bloom, allowing him to meet new allies and acquaintances. Even so, Lugh knows that his efforts are far from adequate, because a monumental adversary such as the hero can only be defeated with perfection.

Ansatsu Kizoku turned out to be one of those anime that had a good first half but a terrible second half. It is a tale of two sides. When you’re introduced to someone who was a world renown assassin in his previous life. Brought into a new world under the condition that he eventually assassinate the hero. You think “Hmm, that sounds interesting”. That’s certainly what I thought, however, as the episodes went on, the more disappointed I grew.

At first I thought to myself that there was going to be a genuine build up of power for Lugh. Early indications suggested that this would have been the case. The first few episodes were a prime example of this. We see Lugh building his abilities with the help of Dia and his father. So I thought to myself “This is neat” because typically, especially with anime being so short nowadays. Characters that require a strength build up, have already reached their ‘peak’ for the most part by the third episode or so. So I thought that Ansatsu Kizoku was going to be different in that it was doing to be something a little more gradual. In that once episodes 10 through 12 rolled around, Lugh would’ve been insanely powerful.

That was the biggest let down.

Instead, we were greeted with terrible character development and an anime that feels like it has lost its way. We go from building our magical capabilities with Dia to opening a moisturizer shop. Somehow, some way, this shop is linked to Lugh becoming a more skilled individual to take down the hero. Much of the anime sees Lugh going on all these various adventures not linked to his main objective. However, as I mentioned previously, all this is somehow linked to Lugh becoming a powerful and skilled assassin. How? Not a clue.

You can argue that it’s Lugh living his best life. Which in itself makes sense because in his previous life, Lugh was a tool and lived a life that his organization allowed him to live. After living a very minimal and restrictive previous life, you can say that Lugh is now living the life he wanted to live but didn’t have the opportunity to. Which is okay, but when you’ve already told me within the first two episodes that Lugh end goal is to be powerful enough to assassin the Hero. Then that is all I expect. Everything else is irrelevant to me.

There were a few other things I disliked, the second major thing being Setanta Macness. That ‘battle’ if you can call it one was the worst battle to end an anime I’ve seen in a long while. Like what even was the point of it? Lugh just blew him up as if it was nothing. It’s a shame really because I thought that Setanta Macness was the character I wanted Lugh to become because he looked pretty sick. I also expected the battle itself to last more than seven seconds, let’s be real. The anime needed to end with a bang. While it did in the literal sense, the confrontation itself was -100.

Now we move onto the final, biggest point of annoyance for me, Dia. Something I do not understand is how they managed to fit in a lackluster romance arc into it all. What I mean by that is we only see Dia at the beginning and at various points throughout the anime. So I didn’t expect anything from it, if anything I thought we would’ve seen a Lugh and Tarte relationship because they’ve been together forever. Not to mention, they fought and cared for one another. So it only made sense.

No sir, CURVEBALL. Lugh shall fall for the person we rarely saw. Then at the end of it all, we find out that Dia is Lugh’s cousin and that because they had to fake Dia’s death that she would now be living under the Lugh household as Lugh’s younger sister. Despite being older than him. No thanks, I’ve seen enough of those.

Ansatsu Kizoku was a disappointing anime, one I do not recommend watching.