The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Demon Sword Master of Excalibur Academy

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One of the most powerful demon lords ever has been sealed away for a thousand years. When he finally awakens, he is reincarnated as a 10-year-old boy. Now, under the care of the girl who released him, the demon lord Leonis must navigate the perils of Excalibur Academy.

The Demon Sword Master of Excalibur Academy is based on a light novel of the same name by Yū Shimizu and Asagi Tōsaka. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

It's hard not to sound like a backhanded compliment when your main praise for a show is that it's competent, but I swear I don't mean it like that. There are so many light novel series dumped out onto the airwaves these days that are astonishingly inept and devoid of basic writing fundamentals, churning out the same premise repeatedly like a busted copy machine. Having one of these adaptations that is, at minimum, capable of telling a coherent story that could potentially be interesting is a sincere compliment compared to its peers.

That said, the other word for Master Excalibur of The Academy Sword Demon is “unremarkable.” It's still using a lot of calcified tropes – a powerful demon lord reborn as a human thousands of years later, the titular magic school, etc. – but it's executing them with enough confidence that it feels like an actual story rather than a checklist of tropes from other popular web novels. The exposition is pretty heavy and harps on the fact that Leonius is a man (demon?) out of time for too long, but I appreciate how much has changed since his first death. The calendar is entirely different; magic has either been erased or advanced so far that it's unrecognizable to him, and the very appearance of monsters has shifted drastically since his time. Those are some cool concepts, showing that more thought was put into this story than many other Reincarnated Strong Guy shows. This feels like a world that exists and changes irrespective of our main character, and it's far richer for it.

I don't suspect that distinctiveness will last, sadly. The characters other than Leo are all pretty stock and even his shtick of being stuck in a child's body gets old before the episode's over. I'm far more interested in what was going on back in Leo's first life when he was a former hero who'd turned into an undead ruler, loyal to the “Goddess of Rebellion” for unknown reasons. The opening battle scene isn't much to look at – nothing in this is, other than the main girl's garter straps and constantly glowing earrings – but it hints at a larger, wilder form of Magical Warfare than the magitech stuff seen in present day. I would much rather follow the edgelord adventures of Bonehead McEvilDude fighting angels and saints than watch that same guy in a 10-year-old's body, being gently cradled in teenage girls' tiddies at magic school.

Alas, that doesn't seem to be in the cards, and I don't have the option of sleeping for a thousand years to try for another chance at this story. So I'll just be thankful there was something moderately interesting here and let it go on its way.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

With each show in a well-worn genre like Western fantasy, I always ask myself one question: What's the twist—what's the thing that sets this fantasy anime apart from all other similar fantasy anime? The Demon Sword Master of Excalibur Academy begins like so many others. The demons are losing to the heroes, so the Demon King vows to be reborn again in 1000 years and begin the war anew—however, this time, a lot changes in those 1000 years.

Rather than your typical magical world of spells, knights, and kingdoms, our hero, Leonis, reemerges into a world of modern-esque magical technology. The characters dress in modern clothes, have transforming weapons, and ride motorcycles. We basically get a world whose magic system has changed completely—to the point that Leonis might as well have been transported to another world. Leonis knows nothing about the invasion of the “Void” or the “holy swords,” yet his magic still works, and his goal to find a vessel for the Goddess of Rebellion remains the same.

All this serves as a decent hook. There are tons of mysteries built into the setting to be explored. How did the world change so much that the war against the demons was all but forgotten? Why is magic basically unknown? What are the Void, and where do they come from? Why has the existence of the Void caused humans to gain superpowers?

The weakness of this first episode, however, is the characters. Each is a walking trope and nothing more at this point. Leonis is the arrogant king, Riselia is the protective older sister, and Regina is the loyal follower. At this point, there's no compelling reason to care about any of them or their struggles. That said, in general, I'd call this a run-of-the-mill fantasy anime—nothing great, but nothing terrible.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I am assured that I have read the first light novel this series is based on, but I can't remember it at all, which is pretty unusual for me. Possibly, I was trapped in a giant crystal and reborn without all relevant information, like Leonis. Or the story wasn't memorable enough to stick in my mind, which, as of this first episode, looks like the more plausible explanation. That's a shame because there is some interesting background going on here. The fact that Leonis, one thousand years ago, appears to have been dying as a hero and was seduced by Roselia, an evil being of some stripe, and then became a demon lord is certainly intriguing, as is that his reincarnation has somehow gone awry. That likely concerns the Voids, monsters formed of crystals and darkness who appeared sixty-four years ago. At this point, the world seems to have shifted from fantasy to science fiction. Since Leonis' mausoleum was magic-fueled and protected, the downfall of magic could explain a lot about what happened to him – and possibly Roselia.

For now, though, he's stuck in the body of a ten-year-old with two fifteen-year-old girls, who were sent out to explore the probably dangerous ruins by themselves. Selia, the less brilliant of the two, is a champion of acting before she thinks things through. Within five minutes, she activated an ancient door with an unreadable inscription and then decided that the shape she saw in a crystal inside must be a recent human addition. Does she stop to think that if she and Regina just broke the seal no one else could possibly be inside? Of course not, nor does she consider that it could be an ancient corpse. Nope, she starts blasting away to "save" the person she's convinced is inside. That Leonis survives is pure luck, which goes double for him being in little boy form.

As of right now, the past is far more interesting than the present, and that makes the decision to jump back and forth between the two a good approach. We're essentially with Leonis as far as Voids and Swords and all of the other terminology, and the realization that we've swapped genres over a thousand years is well done. This also looks much better than its story has any right to; it isn't perfect, but there's a sense of being underground in the mausoleum, and the scenery outside has that post-apocalyptic feel with a dash of hope in the form of the shining walled city. The girls are pleasantly attractive, although the camera loves Selia's butt a little too much, and the shift in her eye color about three-quarters of the way through has some good implications about how past and present will collide.

On the whole, this isn't terrible. Selia's lack of brainpower is my major issue with it, but Leonis seems a decent enough character to make up for it. It's based on a light novel in how it tells its story, but given time, it may turn out not to be as bland as it feels right now.

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James Beckett
Rating:

Stop me if you've heard this one before: The nefarious demon king is finally defeated by the heroes of the land, and though he attempts to use his endless magics to reincarnate himself into his previous form, something goes wrong, and he instead finds himself as…*gasp* a precocious anime child that nobody takes seriously as a threat to all life on Earth!? If you're not sick of that setup yet, then maybe The Demon Sword Master of Excalibur Academy will be for you. Otherwise…

Okay, if I'm being fair, here, Demon Sword Master does have some positive aspects going for it, despite the fairly boring premise. The devil is in the details since while none of the individual components that make up the show are all that interesting on their own, the way they all come together can sometimes be intriguing. Take the cool, unsettling tree-vein-body-horror-whatever magic that is used to take Demon Lord Leonis down in the opening segment, for one, or the cool designs (and surprisingly passable 3D execution) of the Void monsters that Leon encounters after his thousand-year-long nap. There's worldbuilding potential abound, here, and while the actual animation of most of this premiere is hit-or-miss, and I don't love some of the tacky-looking effects the show uses to underscore its magic, there's been at least some effort to make Demon Sword Master look like…well, like something, at least.

The main issue I have is that characters don't have any opportunities to present themselves as anything other than the most bog-standard fill-ins from central casting that you can imagine. The only real thing differentiating heroine Risellia from her spunky friend are the girls' hairdos, and Leon is the same “Acts like an evil Demon Lord but is secretly the real hero" that we've seen dozens of times, by now. Given that most of the episode takes these bland characters and has them faff about in an equally bland series of underground caverns, I simply couldn't be bothered to get invested in the story of this anime at all, which is kind of a major problem.

Still, I at least didn't hate my time with this one, and it's very possible that Demon Sword Master could make great strides in its upcoming episodes. Still, the job of a premiere is to get me excited to see more after Episode 1, and I can't say I care much one way or the other if I ever hear from this particular show again.

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Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. One or more of the companies mentioned in this article are part of the Kadokawa Group of Companies.