The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest

Alec Yugret is a magician who dedicated himself to support magic to help out the crown prince and his efforts to clear out dungeons in their earlier days. The prince suddenly fires Alec as the court magician one day, declaring that someone who only knows how to cast support magic is useless. Now jobless, Alec is contacted by an old friend named Yorha, who asks his help to once again venture into dungeons.

The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest is based on the light novel series by writer Alto and illustrator Yuunagi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

How many times must we do this again? How many more stories like this does the world need? How many billions of yen have been poured into writing, animating, performing, scoring, and directing anime with this exact story? How many more before we move on? Is there any reason for A Court Magician, Who Was Focused on Supportive Magic Because His Allies Were too Weak, Aims to Become the Strongest After Being Banished, Story of Lasting Period to exist?

A guy who does support magic is kicked out of a party by cartoonishly offensive fighters and finds a new party. Okay. We've all been here before, unless you are very, very new. In which case, welcome! I promise anime gets so much better than this. While I no longer have it in me to claim it's unrealistic after watching a bunch of cartoonishly evil dunderheads demolish my country's federal government, I still don't get any joy or catharsis out of watching it happen again. You know you're in trouble when even the MyAnimeList forum members are complaining about being redundant.

There's just nothing even slightly new or interesting here. If I were still doing that gimmick where I find something unique to say about every generic fantasy series I had to suffer through, I would be hard-pressed here. The episode rushes through its opening scenes, jumping around in time to the point that it's barely coherent. When Yorha said it was “exciting” to take Alec Ygret, a tall drink of plain yogurt, to the adventurer's guild, I nearly choked on my drink, because I could not conceive of a less exciting turn for the story to take. Later, Yogurt does use offensive magic, so… I don't even know what the issue is. Nothing happens for a reason, but because that's what the plot beats demand.

And thus, I spent the entire episode being sooooooo booooooooooored. I had to wait several episodes for Crunchyroll to even add English subtitles to the Roku app, and this is what I get? The episode was downright soporific. There wasn't anything for me to make fun of other than its lack of originality! I couldn't muster up enough investment to be annoyed. Please make better use of your time.

Okay, you know how I said last episode that I would be hard-pressed to find something unique about the first episode? Turns out I have to eat a bit of crow on this one, because in the second episode, it starts to show a modicum of personality. I didn't think that was possible when the pre-credits cold open depicted Last Period as super-prodigy students setting records before even graduating from magic school, but once the story gets rolling, I found it shockingly relatable.

That isn't to say that Yogurt has personality; he's just as bland and unflavored as ever. However, the rest of the cast seems to be unusually textured for this sort of show. Take the guild leader; he's a big, burly dude who wanders onscreen with a bottle of alcohol in his hand and challenges Yogurt to a fight to show off his magic skills. Despite his abrasiveness, he's not an antagonist; he's just a more interesting character than you usually get in this kind of role, whose personalities, more often than not, are inversely proportional to how flat their chests are. Having a male party member, similarly, keeps things from feeling like the secondary characters are there to act as a fawning harem who wants nothing more than to slurp up Yogurt's yogurt.

I also found it weirdly relatable. Yogurt may not have a personality, but he has context. His friends are furious on his behalf for how he was treated as a court magician, and the trauma of it continues to dictate his actions. He was told to act only as support, and then kicked out for not doing enough offensive duties; four years of that have set patterns in his brain and behavior that will be hard to change, even if he knows intellectually that things are different now. Having worked my share of bad jobs where admin repeatedly set me up for failure (any aspiring early childhood teachers out there: avoid for-profit chain schools at all costs), I know exactly how it feels.

It's still a middling series, of course. It suffers from the same failings as many LitRPG anime: battles where the characters stand still and shout their attack names rather than engage in any interesting action, a world obsessed with dungeon-crawling and adventurer “levels,” and weaker writing of the female cast. These issues are ingrained and would require some radical shifts in storytelling style than I wouldn't expect from this caliber of show. Still, if you somehow still crave this kind of story, A Court Magician, Who Was Focused on Supportive Magic Because His Allies Were too Weak, Aims to Become the Strongest After Being Banished, Story of Lasting Period could be much worse.

You know, I actually like the idea of the “kicked out of the party” trope as the start to a story. After all, there are so many routes to go down. Yet, the problem with the sub-genre (as far as anime goes) is that it always seems to take the same route.

Is it ever about a guy who quits the party because he realizes he truly is a liability—who then goes on to find new and creative ways to help his friends without being on the front lines? Nope. Is it ever about someone who is an arrogant ass and is rightfully banished from the party—only for his subsequent story to teach him the error of his ways and help him find redemption? No again. It's always about a guy who is overpowered, helping his party in unseen or underappreciated ways, but his companions see him as useless and give him the boot. Then he finds a new group who sees his true worth and gets his revenge indirectly on his old party when they start to fail and realize all he actually did for them… and that's, of course, what The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest is as well.

Yet, despite being about as bog-standard a “kicked out of the party” tale as it can be, the story itself isn't told well. Important details are constantly withheld from us. Why was Alec only using support magic in the prince's party? What information was Alec trying to pass on to the king? Why does Alec refuse to use his true power even after becoming an adventurer? And what the hell is “You haven't found your original state, have you?” supposed to mean? It's like I understand the shape of the story, but the specifics are nonsensical.

This makes the episode's climactic battle a total mess. Yorha makes it seem like Alec using magic is a big deal, a huge character moment for him—and that them being in a party together is a big thing. The music swells and the animation gets flashy… and I have no idea why I should care about any of it. I don't know how Alec feels about the prince—don't really know if he feels emotionally betrayed or just let down because he failed to reform the royal court like he had hoped. I don't know how he feels about magic or his magic school companions (other than that they seemed to get along). It's just a mess from top to bottom, and I would drop it in a heartbeat if I were allowed to.

One of the coolest things about creating a fantasy world is that you can change the very building blocks of what it means to be human. In the case of this anime, with no shedding of the uterine lining on a monthly cycle—and with all the associated pain non-existent—the women of this world must live much happier lives.

...What? You're wondering how I came to this conclusion? Isn't it obvious? Only in a world without the menstrual cycle would someone call their adventuring party: “Lasting Period.”

Jokes about over-relying on Google Translate and the subsequent homonym confusion aside, this episode is a step up from its first. I had a lot of questions about Alec's time as a court magician and, to the show's credit, it answered them this week. Basically, Alec has spent 4 years making himself small. By royal order, he was told never to outshine the prince or the other members of his party. To ensure this, he was also ordered only to use support magic—something he didn't even specialize in. This was done simply because he was a commoner, and it would be an affront to noble society if he were able to do things better than someone of high breeding.

This has left Alec more than a little traumatized—though he's only beginning to realize how much. While he may be free and now surrounded by those who love and support him, he's still stuck in the same old mental patterns. Without ever realizing it, he's holding himself back—it's just too deeply ingrained to flip off like a switch.

Honestly, it's a good dilemma for a protagonist to have—especially one as overpowered as Alec. Going forward, he will need to learn to recognize the problem and overcome it gradually. Meanwhile, his friends will have to be supportive—reminding themselves that he is not the man they used to know and that it will take some time and hard work before he's even back to the level he was at school.

I'm also happy that the anime chose to have Alec lose the big fight of the episode. Calling the guildmaster an S-Rank hero (even if a retired one) and having Alec stomp him would have devalued pretty much every other character we encounter going forward. With his loss, we can see Alec as very strong but with room for improvement. Moreover, his party's upcoming mission to rescue a defeated group of S-Rankers actually comes with a fair bit of tension built in because the dungeon seems to be on an equal level to him.

Now, is this a show I'm going to keep watching? No. There's plenty out there that's better this season. However, when it comes time for a full-season review, I wouldn't dread having to watch it.

The whole point of the godforsaken free market is that competition, demand, and the ever-present threat of market oversaturation are supposed to force people into developing a variety of unique and high-quality products that customers can be satisfied with. If you ever needed more proof that capitalism is a doomed construct, look no further than anime like The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest. In a sane and compassionate world, we would get maybe two or three of these things every year or two, and fans would be constantly demanding that each new iteration work its ass off to earn their time and their money. Instead, we have had to sift through a glut of damned near dozens of nearly identical copycats, season after season, for what feels like the last twenty years. There is only one way out of this quagmire. We've got to regulate the crap out of the anime industry. I'm talking massive fines on any production committee that funds anything with the words “Banished” or “Become the Strongest” in the title. Obviously, any craven fool who dares to throw in a reference to RPG levels or character classes will get jail time.

Maybe a ruthless, bureaucratic dystopia isn't the best solution to the stale state of the anime industry, especially given all of the…well, everything happening in 2025. Still, the world deserves better than The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest, but I don't think we'll be getting any better until we raise our pitchforks and march into the streets to at least mail some strongly worded (yet still fundamentally civil) letters to the studios that keep making this dreck.

Pardon me for going off on another tangent, but all know the drill at this point. The episode summary of this premiere is “Court magician Alec is banished by an angry prince,” and I promise you that I am not being hyperbolic when I say that there is literally nothing to be gained from actually sitting down and watching the first half of this episode that you didn't already experience by reading that sentence. The entire opening ten minutes of the episode could have been replaced with an old-timey title card that just pastes those nine words onto the screen, and the quality of the story would be functionally unchanged. Hell, if anything, the show would benefit from the trimmed-down runtime.

Once Alec meets up with the perky redhead, Yorha, the premiere…well, it doesn't exactly get “better”, but it at least contains story beats that aren't made entirely redundant by an episode summary that could fit on one side of a fortune cookie paper. They aren't good story beats, mind you, but they exist.

Just about the only compliment I will give to The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest is that the show has the decency to inject some pleasant, warm colors into the exterior shots that take place at sunset and in the evening. I guess I can also appreciate that the tone of the show is aiming for light and breezy, instead of noxiously edgy. I suppose I'd rather have a bland slice of plain, store-bought bread than some burnt-to-hell piece of molding mystery dough that a sleep-deprived college student left in the back of his mini-fridge for too long.

To give The Banished Court Magician credit where it is due, the show has discovered that a story is generally more interesting when you give your bland cliche of a protagonist more than one other person to speak to—with bonus points awarded for giving the new characters at least one to two identifiable personality traits apiece! There's Leviel, the buff and drunk guildmaster, and Ornest, who is generally an intense dude. When you combine these two with Yorha, who fulfills the integral role of…um, Girl™, I guess, then you have a cast that is, at the very least, functional. (There is another Girl™ who shows up later, but c'mon, let's allow Yorha this one thing. It's all she's got).

Good job, The Banished Court Magician. You have officially graduated to being worthy as background noise for folks who need something to fill the silence when they are home alone and, I don't know, finally taking the time to sort through their unopened moving boxes that have just been sitting there in the crawlspace for who knows how long.

The downside, of course, is that The Banished Court Magician is still not bothering to do anything exceptionally unique or interesting with these characters, and it isn't exactly blowing anybody away with the cliches it is choosing to stick with. I don't really begrudge the episode for putting Ygret and Leviel through the whole “become bros through the power of a sparring match,” but did it have to take place in a terribly boring underground coliseum where everything is the color of mud? I also don't think it is terrible for Ornest to get up to speed with what Ygret's life has been like since last they met, but does all of the exposition and banter of the second half of the episode have to get dropped all at once in some random back parlor that also is composed entirely of mud and mud-adjacent materials?

Why does every set in this show look so boring and half-baked? Why do the fights, as decently animated as they are, have to be staged with the same exact rhythms and visuals that we've seen a dozen times? Why was the most interesting part of this entire episode the portion where the main character was lying unconscious on a couch? These are the questions that The Banished Court Magician raises—and I think the only reasonable answer is that this is just a fundamentally mediocre show. It might be slightly more on the “watchable” end of the mediocrity spectrum than I thought based on that premiere, but I don't want to act like The Banished Court Magician has suddenly done a turnaround and become good, or something. It is most definitely not good. It is merely bad in an inoffensive and immediately forgettable manner. If you tried to quiz me about the characters or story of this show in even 48 hours, I can guarantee you that I wouldn't even be able to pick The Banished Court Magician out of a lineup of all the other lame light novel anime that fell off the back of the wagon this fall.

Have you ever watched an episode and feel like you're missing major context to what exactly is going on just for the sake of the narrative progressing forward? That's how I felt watching this premiere, because at almost every point, I felt like the show was deliberately withholding information from me just for the sake of getting to the next plot point. It starts simple enough with a rather interesting relationship between a young boy and an expert magician with some seeds of mystery there that could be interesting. However, not only is this done extremely quickly to the point where I don't get as emotionally invested in this relationship as I think the show wanted me to, but the disgrace that this magician feels ends up becoming the emotional crux of our main character's entire journey. That would be fine if the premiere actually bothered getting into any genuine worldbuilding, but it really doesn't.

Alec wants to become a magician in order to change the profession from the inside because he believes that his mentor was wrongfully banished. But we don't know exactly why he was banished, or what exactly is wrong with the magicians system. Alec gets banished from his party, but that comes off more as because his party being a bunch of dicks that were always sort of looking down on him. Maybe the message is supposed to be that firm divide between nobility and common folk? Maybe the scene where they kick him out of the party is supposed to feel forced and unnatural because they're just looking for an excuse to get rid of him and not actually give a genuine reason? I can't tell because the show isn't giving me a lot of information or context for how this works or how we're supposed to see our main character.

Alec is apparently one of the most skilled prodigies of the past couple of years and even seemingly broke a world record. But they get on his case because he only seems to use support magic, even though we clearly see he's able to do more than that. So why didn't he just use other types of magic when he was doing these intense dungeons? I think maybe it's implied that he was doing a lot more for the team than just supplying support magic, and therefore he couldn't go on the offense? Or maybe he didn't want to use offensive magic to upstage the prince? I don't know, because the show doesn't give me a lot to go off of.

Even the relationship that he has with his old friends and seemingly this new team doesn't have any real emotional weight behind it. There is this message at the end of the episode about trusting your teammates and really letting yourself go, but it doesn't feel like the episode earns it because it's starting a bunch of plot points while failing to follow through on any of them. Even if the idea is that these are supposed to be things that get developed throughout the show, the show still acts like it's coming to definitive emotional conclusions about them. If it wanted to be a setup episode, it could've spent more time establishing the world and these relationships. If it wanted to have an emotional payoff, then it should've just focused on one idea. Definitely a messy premiere to say the least.

OK, so, is it just me or was the exposition this episode extremely clunky? Last week I commented on how it felt like some exposition was missing and I couldn't tell if that was done intentionally. For example, I didn't fully know why the previous party kicked Alec out and I didn't fully understand the relationship between our protagonist and this new party. This episode technically answers both questions, but it's in such a clunky way to the point where I'm not even sure why that information was withheld from us in the first place. It's not treated as a reveal or even something that the main character gets to disclose, rather it's something that is talked about around him, so I'm not even sure what his overall thoughts are on the situation.

Turns out that our protagonist is much more of a combat wizard, not a support one. He was just forced into that role by the previous party. He was also the valedictorian at the Magic Academy, graduating at the top of his class, despite being a commoner. The reason why he was kicked out was because despite being very capable, he had a lot of really dumb restrictions put on him and he was forced to take up support magic despite him not specializing in it. If all of this is true, then I don't know why Alec didn't fight back more when he was first kicked out. The show framed it like it was something that he just couldn't help but in reality, it looks like he was intentionally set up to fail.

If that's true, then I think that's supposed to tie in with the whole idea of the prejudices and the problems with the Court Magicians that the protagonist was trying to overcome. But he hasn't really commented on it or made that correlation both in last episode or in this one. It feels like I have more information, but the show isn't emphasizing how important any of that information is outside of why our protagonist is now with this current party and not his old one. That's really weird because it makes it feel like the story should've just started here instead. There's no big reveal or lesson that needs to be overcome by our protagonist or this new rank party.

They're already friends and already get along. In fact, he was going to join their party as an adventurer and decided to join the Court because it was more consistent work and he could earn more money while also investigating the system. I would have liked to see exactly what he was trying to investigate or what he was trying to change. The show just didn't give us that information despite it arguably being the main inciting incident. Instead, it really wants to frontload the friendship message with this rank party, but I just don't really buy it because I'm too distracted by all of the plot points that got us here. Is it bad? Not really and the action this episode was actually really solid, especially when it came to the fight with the guild master. It's just really clunky and I hope it straightens out.