The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party, Is, in Fact, the Strongest

As time es, we've gotten more and more of these “super powerful guy kicked out of the adventurer party” stories. It's enough that it's a sub-genre of its own. However, this show does something the others do not: turn its cliché setup into a mystery.

This entire episode is told through Narsena's point of view. We only know what she knows, if even that. Because of this, Laust seems kind but detached. It's like he's not interested in being friends with Narsena but is still more than cordial. But while Narsena is a newbie to this town and the adventurer life, she can see the same disconnect that we can.

Everyone treats Laust like he's useless. However, even a day spent with him shows that he has the eyes of a thief and the sword-fighting skill of a warrior. His class may be a healer but he is a jack of all trades. More than that, there is a rift between him and his old party. He won't talk about it but it was not an amicable split—especially considering that they were stealing much of his share of the profits.

Thus we're left with two main mysteries: why was Laust kicked out of his old party and why does no one seem to know how special he is? Add to this the question of why Narsena looks and acts nothing like the blond noble girl she was as a child and we have several solid plot hooks to keep the story going.

Now, is this some groundbreaking fantasy anime? No. But it is one I am interested in enough to come back for next week. And frankly, when it comes to anime premieres, that's exactly what the creators are aiming for.

Okay, time to think of something interesting or unique about The Healer Banished From the Party Is, In Fact, the Strongest. Well, it was actually pretty fun when Amherst and Narsena talked to each other. It was nicely physical, as the two were prone to grabbing each other's shoulders and throwing each other around. It gave the scene more energy than average for shows of this ilk.

The Healer Banished from the Party Is, In Fact, the Strongest is, in fact, probably the strongest of the LitRPG premieres this season. I liked Narsena immediately, with her demonstration of her martial arts skills. A female melee fighter who isn't a Saber-faced lady is something of a novelty for the genre, and the way that Narsena jumps and leaps around is a lot more visually engaging than a fighter who stands stock still and swings a sword or shouts technique names. The story and setting aren't going to blow any minds; while nobody starts going on about stats or levels, the logic is plain to see, as Amherst the guild receptionist recommends Laust take Narsena to the plains with the implication that the monsters there are lower level. The locations are totally pulled straight out of the genre playbook, with an adventurer's guild with a receptionist and signboard and a dungeon made up of bland stone hallways and green lighting.

But there's just enough to it that watching it wasn't a totally miserable experience. The direction has some genuine oomph to it. There were a couple stylistic flourishes that I didn't think were totally necessary, since as far as I can tell they didn't really convey anything other than adding a touch of visual interest. What really stuck out to me is that the episode didn't completely show its hand straight off the bat. They don't narrate every single little thing, instead having enough faith in its audience to understand the function of an adventurer's guild. There are some mysteries too, like why is Narsena's hair a different color? Assuming it's not just dyed, of course. Is that guy supposed to look just like Laust, or is it lazy character design? Why is Laust such a crappy healer?

Find the answers to these questions and more somewhere else! Because I'm not watching more! But if you have a soft spot for LitRPG series, this is probably the best option of the season.

Even as I write this, I genuinely can't decide if I appreciate the fact that The Healer Who Was Banished from His Blah Blah Blah Blah actually tries to be a real television show or if it just makes me mad that I had to take an anime with the words “Banished” and “Strongest” in its title seriously enough to think even this hard about it for my preview. Check the score up top, and if the stars fall past the 2.5 mark, then I have clearly been swayed by this premiere—which has the gall to care somewhat about telling an interesting story, even if the premise its working with is as bog standard as it can possibly get.

As I always say, though, execution matters more than most things in this business, and I'm sure even a turd would sell at auction if it got encased in actual 24-karat gold. Now, I don't want to oversell what The Healer Who Was Banished is doing, here—the show is just fine, okay? But hot damn, “just fine” feels like manna in the desert to us poor wanderers of the Crappy Light Novel Wastes. It looks halfway decent, it's paced just well enough to keep even the likes of me paying attention, and it clearly is attempting to do something interesting with our heroine Narsena and her almost obsessive need to pay the healer Laust back for saving her life many years earlier.

A couple of good characters and a script that functions as a basic narrative: That's all I usually ask for from these light novel toons! Thankfully, The Healer Who Was Banished has those two qualities—and that's enough for me to excuse the nonexistent world building and the fact that we are, at the end of the day, dealing with the ten-thousandth anime about a guy living in an RPG World who is picked on by everyone but is secretly the super-duper strongest badass of them all. To the poor middle-aged man who presumably got kidnapped at the age of fourteen and was then held in a basement for the proceeding twenty years so that he could churn out endless copies of his middle-school self-insert DnD fanfiction, all I can say is: Don't worry, pal. I'm sure all of your classmates and teachers and parents and the girls who never looked at you during lunch are all totally feeling owned by now.

What I am curious to see more of is the way that this premiere treats Narsena and Laust like real, honest-to-God characters that have nuanced personalities and hidden facets and junk. Am I curious enough to watch the next episode of my own free will? Probably not! But I am curious enough to say that I could imagine myself watching the next episode and not completely hating it—and isn't that just as good?

There's an old saying that you should never meet your heroes, but that doesn't appear to hold true for Narsena. Her hero was Laust, who saved her as a child and then clumsily healed her wounds. Now she's all (or at least more) grown up and determined to be in an adventuring party with him, despite everyone calling him Laust the Ignoramus. And thus, a flimsy plot is born. Although it may be at least marginally more intelligent than I'm giving it credit for since it turns out that his name is the singular form of a Norwegian word meaning “not fastened down” or “loose,” both of which perfectly describe Laust's state when Narsena is reunited with him.

The reason is right there in the title: he's been let go from his previous party and all earlier parties he ed for being a terrible healer. Apparently, this comes from his inability to cast powerful healing spells, and it's true that when we see him healing Narsena's scratch, it seems to take a long time as these things go. That was true of his healing in the distant past, too, and the fact that he doesn't seem to have improved suggests that maybe his reputation as a healer is earned. But as we have seen twice demonstrated, he's a lot better with a sword (or a big stick), so the truly odd thing is that he's determined to be a healer at all.

That's about as deep into things as this episode gets. From guild guy Hanzam's careful comments about Narsena, and the fact that she was blonde as a child, there's probably more to her than meets the eye; she's almost definitely someone highborn. Laust not ing her also could not be entirely the truth, although she has done a lot of growing up since they last met. (He looks about the same, so qualms about any romantic subplot are hereby ed.)

But the besetting sin of this episode is that it just isn't very interesting. There's a dungeon, a small adventuring party, magic stones, a guild, and female armor that doesn't cover the important bits…it's pretty basic. It could easily be the sort of show you put on in the background for mild noise, a low-key fantasy adventure that's happy staying that way. I could be horribly wrong, and this will descend into depths of depravity heretofore unseen by humankind, but…I kind of doubt it. This is bland, and that's okay.