When you just wind up scrolling and not sure what show to start you need to simply pick one and see where it leads. That was how I ended up watching A Nobody’s Way Up To An Exploration Hero. This is a story about Kaito an individual who has low stats and earns a living hunting slimes, until a rare slime drops a rare servant card that gives him a powerful ally to explore further into the dungeon with.

So right away the story is one that has a lot of good ideas but its got some execution problems. Kaito’s motivation is to become a hero by exploring the dungeon. However the season doesn’t really explain why Kaito is a hero for doing so or even why he wants to be a hero in the first place. The season gives plenty of opportunity to give that context but fails every single time. So really most of the season is spent between random dungeon exploration and then normal life outside of the dungeon. This life mainly involves Kaito lying to his childhood friend about going into the dungeon in such a repetitive fashion that it feels more like a running gag than a critical story moment.

The story alludes to some kind of significance in dungeon exploration. However, it spends almost the entire time between the exploration itself and slice of life moments till the end of the season. Then around episodes 11 -12 it suddenly wants to tackle key story moments by providing some lore, character development, motivation and more. These moments are all great ideas but never had the time needed to be fleshed out to be the incredible story moments they should have been. Some of these moments also feel so rushed I genuinely don’t know what is going on with them.

I will say the moments inside the dungeon itself are very entertaining. I enjoy watching Kaito and the various characters he travels the dungeon with tackle the problems they face. I had a great time watching the fighting and exploration. Everything inside the dungeon operates like a video game with levels, skills and stats. So it really appealed to the gamer in me. Outside of the dungeon the slice of life moments are bland because of the lack of substance behind it but really the biggest problem of them all is Kaito himself.

I just don’t like Kaito at all. He has all kinds of reasons he could use for his lying that would actually make him a selfless character, but his expressed motivations always seem self centered. Any motivation he has for being a hero seems overshadowed by him simply being cheap and wanting money. He is so self centered most of the time that I honestly do not understand why any of the other characters like the guy. He’s not a particularly bad guy by any means but a lack of complex motivations, captivating personality or flashy powers means he’s not fun to watch. The rest of the characters are entertaining enough and I like them all. The servants are the real stars here as they are all unique and have great chemistry with each other and have amazing powers to compensate for Kaito, but they only appear in the dungeon. All of the dungeon scenes are the best parts of the show and outside of the dungeon it was dull, repetitive and lifeless.

With that I found a show that really had interesting ideas that I think it tried to tackle, but failed. The story doesn’t provide the right context for moments and is too dependent on running gags to have any real significance all while it centers around a character that has nothing substantial to offer viewers. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the show it’s just boring and I’m not going to bother continuing if it gets another season.