Boy, the title of this one is a mouthful.
My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s follows Akira Oda, a high school student who gets transported to another world along with his entire class. Everyone is given the usual assortment of RPG-style classes and abilities, with one student becoming the Hero while Akira gets stuck with the supposedly less impressive Assassin class. Except Akira quickly discovers that his stats are actually higher than the Hero’s, and it doesn’t take long for him to realize that the king who summoned them might not be telling the class everything. After things go sideways, Akira separates from his classmates and eventually teams up with an elf named Amelia while trying to figure out what the hell is really going on in this world. You know the drill: fantasy kingdoms, demons, magic, suspicious royalty, and a Japanese teenager who suddenly discovers that he can kick everyone’s ass.
The easiest way I can describe this series is that it’s kind of like Solo Leveling for kids.
Akira isn’t anywhere near as absurdly powerful as Sung Jinwoo, but he’s significantly stronger than most of the enemies he faces and considerably stronger than all of his classmates. He still runs into opponents who can legitimately threaten him, so he can’t just casually steamroll absolutely everything in his path. I actually like overpowered protagonists, so I wouldn’t have minded if he could. There’s something satisfying about watching an enemy spend five minutes talking about how powerful they are only to get their shit pushed in by the main character thirty seconds later.
Still, Akira being a little more vulnerable works for the story they’re telling here. He’s strong enough that you understand why the Assassin class is apparently busted, but not so strong that the rest of the world becomes irrelevant. There’s still a sense that he has room to get stronger, and there are people out there who could potentially put him in the ground if he gets careless. It gives me some of the same appeal I get from Solo Leveling without just being Solo Leveling with more elves thrown in.
I’m not going to pretend My Status as an Assassin brings anything super-unique to the isekai genre. Most of the ingredients here are shit we’ve seen dozens of times before. We’ve got RPG stats, adventurer guilds, elves, demons, a fantasy kingdom, an obviously shady king, and an exceptionally powerful main character. If you’ve watched enough isekai, you could probably make a bingo card out of this series and have half the spaces filled before the first episode ends. One character even says “This is just like in my isekai stories!”
I still had a good time watching it.
One thing I particularly liked was Akira’s struggle with deciding whether or not he should kill Gram. It would’ve been very easy for the series to brush past this because Akira is an Assassin and Gram very clearly deserves what’s coming to him. Instead, Akira actually thinks about what killing someone means and worries about how he’s eventually supposed to go home and face his family after taking another person’s life. For all the fantasy RPG stuff going on around him, that reaction felt surprisingly human.
It’s easy to sit there and say you’d kill somebody if you were put into a certain situation. Actually looking another human being in the eye and deliberately ending their life is something entirely different. Taking a life isn’t easy, and living with the fact that you took one can be even harder, regardless of whether the person deserved it. A lot of people don’t really seem to understand that distinction until they’re confronted with it in reality.
I’d like to see a future season actually follow up on this. Akira made his decision and Gram clearly had it coming, but that doesn’t mean Akira should suddenly be completely fine with killing people from now on. There’s some potentially interesting character development there if he starts dealing with guilt or questioning how much he’s changed since arriving in this world. Hopefully they don’t just turn him into a casual murder machine because he got his first kill out of the way.
Another little detail I appreciated was the series briefly showing what was happening back in our world. There’s a news report about the missing class, which is something isekai anime usually don’t bother with because Earth stops existing the moment the protagonist gets transported. It was neat seeing some acknowledgment that an entire classroom full of teenagers disappearing would be a pretty fucking big deal back home.
That scene also left me with one extremely important question.
What the fuck happened to the teacher?
All of the students were transported to another world, but there’s no teacher anywhere to be found. Was it between periods? Did Sensei step out of the room for five minutes and come back to find that thirty kids had apparently been raptured? Because if I was a Japanese cop investigating the mysterious disappearance of an entire class and the teacher was the only person who somehow didn’t vanish, I’d be questioning the absolute hell out of that guy. And considering that Japan has a 99% conviction rate, it ain’t looking too good for Sensei.
The weirdest part is that the students don’t even seem to mention their teacher. Nobody wonders whether Sensei is worried about them or asks why the teacher wasn’t transported too. These kids spend plenty of time talking about getting back to Japan, but apparently not one of them gives enough of a shit about their teacher to wonder what happened. Maybe the teacher wasn’t in the room when it happened, but give me something here.
The more interesting mystery involves the other people from Earth who apparently came to this world before Akira and his classmates.
People in this world have access to things that shouldn’t normally exist in a medieval fantasy setting, including cameras. There’s also an entire town modeled after feudal Japan, and we eventually learn that these things trace back to previous heroes who were summoned from our world. Even one of the demons can read kanji, which Akira immediately recognizes as being strange.
That’s the part of this world I really want to know more about.
How long have people from Earth been getting summoned here? How many have there been? Did they all come from Japan, or have people from other parts of Earth ended up there too? How much of this world’s culture and technology actually came from previous heroes screwing around and introducing things they remembered from home?
The cameras especially got my attention because they suggest these previous heroes did more than just show up, defeat whatever evil they were summoned to fight, and disappear. They left a lasting impact on the world. Someone introduced an idea from Earth, the people living there adopted it, and eventually it became normal enough that nobody thinks anything of it anymore. That opens up a much bigger history than the show has explored so far.
Unfortunately, there still hasn’t been any indication of a second season, and considering how little I hear anybody talk about My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s, I’m not getting my hopes up. It feels like one of those perfectly decent seasonal anime that people watch, enjoy, and then completely forget about once another 40 shows come out three months later.
That’d be a shame, because I actually want to know more about this world. I want to know who these previous heroes were, why so much Japanese influence has been left behind, whether Akira is going to struggle with having killed someone, and, most importantly, what the fuck happened to his teacher.
My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s isn’t some revolutionary new take on isekai, but it doesn’t really need to be. Akira is powerful enough to scratch that overpowered-MC itch without being completely untouchable, the story moves along at a decent pace, and there are just enough mysteries surrounding the world to keep me interested in what happens next.
If we don’t get a second season, I might actually have to jump into the source material for this one.
I’m not much of a light novel guy, so that should tell you something.
AJ’s rating: 7/10
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