The Exiled Heavy Knight
“Raid Quest Arc”
Episode 3 opens with the same intro as Episode 1, and at this point I have to laugh. The good thing is that the recap is quick, and then we are moving. These two episodes, three and four, form one continuous arc: a raid quest in a cemetery that goes sideways when the boss evolves mid-fight. By the end of Episode 4, Elymas has gone from mocked F-rank nobody to promoted E-class adventurer with a pocket full of gold and the respect of a D-rank veteran. If you are applying the three-or four-episode rule, this moment is where the series makes its case.
The raid quest is a rare chance at promotion, and a level 30 Ghoul Head leads an undead horde that has overrun the cemetery. The quest overseer is Gowtan, a D-rank level 40 adventurer who has no intention of helping anyone. He will handle the boss himself while the examinees deal with the Wights (There’s a South Park joke buried in there, but I probably tell too many of those). Fellow examinee Teal, a Red Mage, uses the Search skill to locate roughly 30 enemies. Teal also has the personality of someone not to be trusted; more on him shortly.
So there’re quite a few adventurers assembled, and Elymas’s inner monologue is brutally honest. He looks around at the group and identifies what he sees: cowardice, arrogance, and a newbie who expected raids to be a walk in the park. That last one is him. He also clocks Gowtan as a careless leader who won’t look after his team. He estimates the odds of survival at 80 percent, which is not reassuring. When Elymas politely asks Gowtan for clearer instructions, given that the intel on the undead horde may be inaccurate, Gowtan gets upset. Elymas bows in humility to defuse the situation, which is smart but also allows Teal to mention Elymas’s weakness.
Then the undead make their move. Ghouls erupt from underground, having already surrounded them. Gowtan, Teal, and a third adventurer named Paul rush toward the Ghoul Head while Elymas takes command of the panicking examinees. He tells them to split into teams of three and says he will buy them time to rally. Before anyone can question how a slow Heavy Knight plans to do that, he demonstrates his speed and parrying skills. He solos the majority of the Wights, hits level 16, and one of the scared adventurers says behind him, “He is scaring me more than the Wights.”
Meanwhile, Gowtan struggles with the Ghoul Head, which refuses to go down. The boss has a skill called Consume Corpse that lets it eat the undead and regain HP. Teal and Paul are too afraid to draw the Wights away, so they stand there and watch it happen. It reminds me of a creature in the game Bloody Spell that runs off to drink wine or eat grass to regain health if you start attacking it. The Ghoul Head eats, roids up, and evolves into a level 40 Mad HeaHeadder—theme level as Gowtan.
This is where the game-versus-reality theme hits hardest. Existence Evolution (Jitsuzai Shinka) is a rare event in which monsters awaken latent abilities and transform into other species to escape sticky situations. This entire concept is actually rooted in Buddhist philosophy and Gaki (Hungry Ghost) lore. Even in the game Magic World, the exact conditions were not clear. In most isekai, the world operates under the same rules as the game. Here, it does not, and that gap nearly gets Elymas killed. The Mad Headder knocks him across the screen, and he has to spend his saved skill points on the fly—upgrading Swordsmanship and unlocking Vital Slice, which sacrifices blade reach for serious damage against targets with high defense. He buys three minutes until Gowtan recovers from the poison, and Gowtan finishes it with the Dragonslayer Split. These move names make me want to yell them out in my Tony Schiavone voice. If you watched WWE/WCW back in the day, you know who that is.
Gowtan is the arc that carries these two episodes. He starts as a careless leader who won’t look after his team, gets paralyzed by the Mad Headder’s poison, and has to watch a kid he dismissed hold the line for three minutes while he recovers. When Gowtan lands the killing blow, it is a team effort. Elymas softened up the boss; Gowtan delivered the finishing blow. Afterward, Gowtan does something I appreciated: he apologizes. He tells Elymas he was right about everything: the lack of clear instructions and the carelessness. He even checks the shield the boss dropped before handing it over, which is funny. The Daemonsrage Shield provides a bonus of 25 defense and has a market price of 3 million gold. Gowtan tells him it would be the guild’s loss if they didn’t promote him immediately, and if anyone opposes it, he will knock them out. When envious adventurers accuse Elymas of cheating, Gowtan slams his fist on the counter and shuts them all down. It is a full redemption in two episodes, and it works because Gowtan earned it. He got humbled on the battlefield.
Teal, who reminds me of Cristoforo from Wuthering Waves, is like Eddie Haskell. Many people won’t know who Eddie Haskell is unless they watched Leave It to Beaver, but I always describe it as a personality type: very polite, very treacherous. Teal tries to bring Elymas down regarding his class, which is considered defective. Elymas just says he likes his class, nullifying the psychological knife Teal was trying to use. When that doesn’t work, Teal tells him not to hold them back. He also reminds me of Kaa from The Jungle Book, the snake hypnotizing Mowgli—all smooth talk and dubious intentions. When the fighting starts, Teal talks a good game but freezes. He used his skill points to increase his attack abilities instead of learning Paralysis Heal, which would have actually been useful. Elymas calls it a half-assed build. After the battle, Teal has the nerve to claim it was his heal that got Gowtan back on his feet. Elymas tells him to train on quests he can handle. Teal is denied his promotion while Elymas gets his. There is satisfaction in that.
The theme of class prejudice runs through both episodes. Heavy Knight is just another way to say “useless,” someone said back at the guild. Even the receptionist looks at Elymas with an expression I can only describe as feeding off the room’s energy. When he drops 930,000 gold worth of quest rewards and magic stones on the counter—130,000 for completing the quest, 200,000 for 10 Wight stones, and 600,000 for the Mad Headder’s stone—everyone’s tune changes. But the skepticism never fully goes away. It just shifts from he’s useless” to “he must be cheating.”
One thing that has always interested me about this anime is why someone would become an adventurer if they are scared of being one. But I guess whatever is going on in the background, this is what you have to do. It is almost the equivalent of being poor and having to join the army. Not everyone has a choice.
This series is bloody. Episodes 3 and 4 do not hold back on the violence, and the Ghoul Head eating its own undead to power up is genuinely grotesque in the best way. The fight choreography during Elymas’s solo against the Wights is tight, and the technique names popping up in Japanese when skills activate continue to remind me of Fist of the North Star. The character designs are pretty good at this point too. Is it just me, or does Elymas sometimes favor Mikey from Tokyo Revengers at certain angles? I gave the opening theme a good listen this time around, and I like it.
The recap-reliant structure remains, and I finally realized why: those repeated scenes mark the spots for commercial breaks. This isn’t a complaint, merely an observation, so you’ll know what to expect if you watch the full series—especially given its two-cour runtime. To illustrate how they approach the situation, picture someone telling you five minutes beforehand that you’re going to the store for Neapolitan ice cream and that it will be incredible. Then, five minutes later, they turn around and repeat that same statement. That’s the formula here: an episode opens with a recap, builds up momentum toward a climax, hits another recap, and then builds up to the climax all over again. Once you recognize that pattern, the overall pacing and rhythm make much more sense.
I am also wondering whether every episode will close with a nod to the source material. The panels at the end are a nice touch, and at this point I am genuinely curious about reading the source material.
If I were gauging the show by the three- or four-episode rule, I would give this series a green light. I am thoroughly enjoying it. The raid quest arc delivers the first real test of Elymas’s leadership, and he passes it not through raw power but through knowledge and composure under pressure. The Existence Evolution twist—the world not playing by the game’s rules—adds a layer of genuine danger that most isekai skip. When the Mad Headder knocked Elymas across the screen, he reflected on the limits of his abilities but also got excited in that typical shonen way. I wouldn’t be a man if the thrill didn’t get my blood pumping, he says. Okay, Yusuke.
How do they keep the momentum up? When I first watched Season 1 of Let This Grieving Soul Retire!, it built up well through the first four episodes, but around episodes 5 and 6 it meandered a little. As of now, about eleven episodes are out, and the first cour conclusion is about to drop, so I’m working to catch up. The setup with the Fang of Smoldering Insanity skill book is a strong hook. Combined with the Oath of the Heavy Armor, this skill book completes the Heavy Knight, making him neither offensive nor defensive. He becomes a human weapon. That is the kind of progression that will keep me watching.
If you enjoyed this review, support Pinnedupink on Ko-fi. Every coffee keeps the blog independent and the anime deep dives coming. → ko-fi.com/pinnedupink
And… If you’ve made it this far, consider subscribing to the Pinned Up Ink newsletter; it’s where we go deeper, drop early takes, and keep the conversation going between posts.
