So I Left My A-Rank Party To Help My Former Students Reach The Dungeon Depths! was a show that had my attention from the trailers, but I wanted all of the episodes to be out before watching it. This is a show that stars Yuke Feldio, an A-ranked adventurer in the group Thunder Pike. He plays a vital supporting role for the group, but they fail to appreciate his contributions, and he leaves. Soon after leaving, he is invited to join a group composed of his former students, and they became known as Clover.

The story is something I really enjoyed here. It starts off by showing another party sealing off something clearly evil and threatening, leaving it for someone in the future to find a solution for. It clearly alludes to it being Yuke’s party, but the pacing takes a nice, long route to get there. Because Yuke’s new party is formed of new adventurers, they essentially have to work their way up by completing quests. One of the interesting elements of the quests is that they are live-streamed. So it appeals to the content creator side of me, but there are a surprisingly high number of practical applications to this. I won’t go over all of them as they are spoilery, but one that fascinated me was how they used it for dungeon mapping.

So, as Clover gains in popularity due to their streams gaining attention, they steadily do more and more high-profile quests. As the difficulty increases, these challenges become a catalyst to do some world-building. There’s a surprising amount of depth to the world around Yuke. For example, the dungeons have an array of complexity to them in their design and how they function. We also get to explore a wide variety of locations throughout the season, which further adds to the world-building. Now I will admit the season ends on a bit of a bittersweet note, and I was pleasantly shocked by that. Tonally, this show tends to be upbeat, so a surprise ending was very welcome, and I initially thought it wrapped up everything rather well till I saw the to be continued logo.

As for the characters, I love Yuke. He’s a red mage, and he really goes into dungeon quests prepared. He plans for traps, damages, and teaches the importance of preparing for each floor of a dungeon. Where the pacing of the story is intentionally slow, it mirrors Yuke’s approach to missions. With careful planning, he keeps the members of his party safe. Plus, he has a lot of useful support skills such as buffs, defuffs, powerful magic, and melee abilities. He’s a very skilled character, and those skills are on full display.

His party is mostly great with one drawback, but a minor one. Within the dungeons, every member of Clover is unique and has a clear and unique role to play. It makes the combat and the conflicts so entertaining to watch. Plus, the banter they have with each other shows their great chemistry and constantly entertains. Outside of the dungeons, they are less unique. It’s a harem of women, and while you have a couple of standout characters, it falls into the trap of a harem of characters functioning more as a hive mind. They tend to think and act similarly to one another outside of conflict, making most of them forgettable in these moments. Normally, I would have more of an issue with this, but where the season devotes a lot of time to show off their individual skills in combat, I think that severely lessens my issue with this.

Combat is also more fun than I expected. For one thing, I love magic circles in anime combat. I don’t have a particular reason for this; I just get excited at their usage, and I got that here. You also have a nice mixture of quick, easy fights for our party and more drawn-out, difficult battles. So it doesn’t fall into a rinse and repeat format, and the fights never fail to entertain.

So, overall, this was a very nice show with a story full of world lore, characters that were fun to watch, and entertaining combat. I originally felt like the end of the show would have been a solid place to end the story, but the to be continued teaser shows there’s more to tell. So, I’m very interested in seeing where the story goes from here.