The Beginning After the End

As a big fan of the original The Beginning After the End novel and webcomic, I went into the anime with sky-high hopes - only to come crashing down faster than Arthur in a bad mana training session.

First off, the pacing is a complete mess. They cram major life events - rebirth, childhood, training - into just a couple of episodes with almost no emotional weight. One moment baby Arthur is being adorable, the next he's somehow a mana prodigy, and you're left wondering if you accidentally skipped three episodes.

The animation quality is painfully average. For a series that's supposed to be filled with intense battles, beautiful magic, and rich worldbuilding, the visuals feel lifeless and rushed. Fight scenes lack the fluidity and impact needed to make them memorable, and sometimes characters look off-model mid-conversation - like they were drawn by two different teams.

Voice acting? Hit or miss. Arthur's voice actor tries, but some emotional scenes fall flat because the dialogue feels stiff or way too melodramatic. Also, the supporting cast sounds like they're reading a fantasy script for the first time in their lives.

Worst of all, they butchered some of the most important moments from the original story. Deep character development and world lore? Almost nonexistent. Instead, they favor tired isekai clichés and shallow action.

Honestly, it feels like a cash grab banking on the popularity of the novel and webcomic without respecting what made the original special.

Unless they turn things around drastically in future episodes, this anime adaptation might be the real "beginning of the end" for the franchise's reputation.

The storyline and the development are going to be the only things keeping me around for this slideshow of an anime. You cannot and I mean CANNOT animate a manwha of this caliber and simply ruin it like that. Almost all of the action scenes are literally projected like a slideshow. The monsters and other animals are CGI. Animation is a key factor in keeping watchers around and making it look more pleasing to the eye while making the watcher feel more immersed. A-Cat is ruining an anime that could be so great. If only another studio got this it would be portrayed so much better than what they are doing with it.

Horrible animations, stolen incipit (not all reincarnation stories copy each other, but here there are literally the exact same scenes from another series), absolutely uninteresting protagonist (usual manhwa character, very powerful for no reason, at the center of the universe, who relies more on this horrible "aura farming" stuff than on writing an interesting character), generic battle shonen narrative, in short at this point just watch leveling, which has the exact same problems but at least it is extremely well animated (personally I don't find it a great added value, but between a banal badly animated thing and a banal well animated thing I would choose the lesser worse).

I've never seen animation this bad - if you can even call it animation. This anime is basically just a collection of slides. And on the rare occasion something is animated, it's worse than any fan animation I've ever come across. Is this supposed to be an anime or a PowerPoint presentation? I genuinely can't understand what the studio was thinking with this. It's a complete disservice to the source material and to the viewers.

What makes it even worse is that the story actually had potential. Fans were excited for this adaptation, but what we got is an insult to everyone who supported the series. The lack of effort is painful to watch, and the end result feels lazy, rushed, and soulless. Honestly, this should be used as a case study for how not to adapt a beloved web novel.

The first episode is horrible, the animations are among the worst I've ever seen (not the worst in absolute terms but they are definitely in the top 3 of the worst), the plot is insipid (ok, it's the beginning, but I've seen generic isekai start in a more original and less forced way), the protagonist is the usual character that Manhwa followers like so much, cool, very powerful, absolutely not interesting and with whom it is impossible to empathize.

They had me so excited for this series but apparently it is simply Solo Leveling but without the animations to make it at least an entertaining view.