The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer!

One day, Lloyd, a white mage, is banished from the hero's party. Lloyd, who has lost his job, happens to accompany an S-rank party on a quest by chance. At that time, no one knew that the hero's party would collapse and Lloyd would gain fame... yet. He is an extraordinary support magic user who thinks he is normal and becomes an adventurer, while he is unaware of how he eventually becomes peerless.

Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! is based on the Yūsha Party o Tsuihō Sareta Shiro Madōshi light novel series by author Sora Suigetsu and illustrator DeeCHA. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

There is a subset of anime guardians who all fall into the same trap: in the course of training their pupils harshly, they give said students a sense of self-worth that's in the negative numbers. I understand what this is meant to show: they don't want their pupils to develop outsize egos and end up like the villains of their stories. But it often backfires on them, as we see with poor Lloyd. His master never gave him the ability to believe in his own skills to the point where he didn't fight back against being kicked out of Allen's party and now he feels he's not good enough to join Yui's, even though everything is screaming that he's out of their league, not the other way around.

Or maybe that's overstating the matter, because when Lloyd hears that Yui's group needs to replace their white mage because her sister is ill, Lloyd doesn't hesitate to ask if he can try to help her. Of course, he's doing it because he firmly believes that Klum coming back to the party would be better than him joining it due to those aforementioned self-esteem issues, so that might negate the entire line of argument. Ah well. Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! isn't trying to break any molds, so it probably doesn't matter – the main point here is that Lloyd is amazing, doesn't know it, and is going to help Yui's party in ways none of them can imagine, which is presumably what he was trained for. How nice.

As with other series I've damned with faint praise, this is, in its second episode, just fine. It has some nice touches, like how the genders are decently balanced in Yui's party, which I believe is meant to contrast with Allen's gang, where, now that Lloyd is gone, Allen is the only man. Kicking Lloyd out gave him a little harem, which may be yet another sign of his shortsightedness, whereas Yui's party is made up of people who all have the requisite strength and skills; with Lloyd joining them, there are more men than women, which is relatively unusual for this type of story. The spells are all pretty basic, but care has been taken to give them all magic circles, each just unique enough to notice. The character designs are pleasant, even if Yui's party has totally-not-Madoka and totally-not-Link in their midst. It's just…fine.

That means that this is heading towards being the sort of series you could just put on when you don't want to think. Familiar story beats and just enough that's different from other similar tales make it easy to watch. It's not exciting, but it's not dreadful, either. Sometimes you need that in your seasonal lineup. I can't say with any certainty that I won't come back for more of this very bland but pleasant enough show.

This is the story of that time Madoka from Puella Magi Madoka Magica was reincarnated as an adventurer in another world. Well, not really, but I can't be the only one who thinks the pink lady looks just like her? I just hope I didn't just write that cursed isekai into existence.

In any event, Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! is another in the ever-increasing subgenre of “kicked out of my party by an idiot.” Lloyd, a white mage, is unceremoniously removed from his party by Allen, a hero who thinks much too highly of himself. Only part of the episode is about Lloyd's adventures with Allen's group, however, most of it is actually focused on Lloyd being trained by his mentor, a woman who seems to mean well but is also from the “tough love” school. By the time Lloyd runs away to the city, he's more than earned the respite, and I'm frankly a bit surprised he didn't do it sooner. Of course, this all seems to be part of his mentor's plan, because she's got a guy reporting back to her that he's hooked Lloyd up with Allen's party. That makes it seem like the pamphlet about the city that Lloyd just “happened” to find was a plant, and that she'd intended for him to leave at about this point all along.

Still, the scenes of her training him are unnecessarily mean. She gingerly doles out praise before cruelly demonstrating how much more powerful she is than Lloyd, and it's no surprise that his self-esteem is so low that he believes Allen's poppycock about Lloyd doing nothing. We can see that Lloyd is buffing the other members for all he's worth, but Allen and most of the rest of the party can't be bothered to notice something so understated. And since Lloyd's mentor barely ever told him he was doing a good job in a meaningful way, he's got no sense of his true strength. Is this an attempt to paint being humble as preferable to egotistical? Possibly, but it doesn't make the episode any more engaging.

Now that Lloyd's teamed up with Not Madoka and her gang, the second episode may up the ante significantly. We know that his mentor was afraid that he'd fall prey to the same sense of self-sacrifice that someone named Sybil (a potential Chosen One, though that might be the mentor herself) did in the past, so there is some backstory that could help inform the plot. Since this isn't immediately dreadful, I'm tentatively hopeful that things will improve next week.

I completely forgot this show existed. Even in an average season, it would be impossible for a show as terminally disinterested in being interesting to stand out. This summer is jam-packed with hits to the point where I can only imagine someone adding Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! to their watchlist as an act of masochistic self-sabotage. The show itself seems convinced that you forgot about it, seeing as it begins with a painfully drawn-out flashback that reminds us of how those big meanies in the hero's party kicked Lloyd out for being so ugly and stupid. Ironically, this narrows the description of the show down by such a tiny margin that it does not contribute in any way to making it more memorable, but still.

I will give Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! this: Many anime have made me incredibly annoyed at their insipid protagonists, but this is one of the first shows that made me verbalize that annoyance to my computer screen. It was about halfway through this second episode that I genuinely could not keep myself from groaning, “Oh my God, just shut the hell up, already!” I try to maintain a cool head during the Preview Guide, readers, but this Lloyd guy…he's just so pathetic, and it drives me mad. He spends the entire episode pouting and whining about not being good enough to join up with Yui and her gang of randos when their original white mage had to abandon their quest to take care of her ill sister. His entire personality here boils down to him whimpering, “Ummmm, I'm so sowwy, I know I'm just such a dummy-wummy stupid idiot, and I bet you guys are just sooooooo disappointed that I can cast several incredibly strong buff spells at once before I miraculously heal that one girl's sister like I'm Anime Jesus. I'm just gonna go wander off and spit in my coffee for being such a loser dingus…”

I've seen plenty of spooky anime about would-be Draculas and Draculettes in my time, but this might be the first time that a cartoon starred an energy vampire who uses his soul-sucking powers on the audience themselves. It doesn't help that, outside of the fact that its main character actively makes the show less watchable with every second that he takes up screen space, every other element of the show is subpar as well. The action is poorly animated, every character looks like they were traced from the pages of those old How to Draw Anime books, and the plot of the episode is nothing but characters lauding Lloyd for his talents and coolness, when they should be finding the nearest locker to shove him into instead. I know you're usually supposed to give an anime three episodes to prove itself, but Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! will send most viewers running for the hills before its second episode is even halfway done.

Watching a premiere like Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! is an exercise in consistent but infuriatingly vague irritation. The show is so bland, so unoriginal, and so fundamentally lacking in any meaningful artistic perspective that all one's brain can do is play “Spot the Plagiarism!” and try to figure out where, exactly, you have seen these exact same character designs before. Or these exact same worldbuilding details. Or these exact same story beats. Or these exact same abilities. Or these exact same musical cues. Or—

You see? There I go, doing it again. It's almost an automatic response at this point. Of course, the worst part of the whole ordeal is that the elements being so flagrantly borrowed in Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! are themselves terribly faded and warped photocopies of original elements that may as well be ancient history, by now. I don't care if this isn't literally the fiftieth anime that I've seen where some nothingburger protagonist specifically named Lloyd is given superhuman abilities and the self-awareness of a sea-cucumber. So far as I'm concerned, they're all named Lloyd, and they all got kicked out of their adventuring party after being trained in the art of heroing by a sexy Merlin. Even the completely different series in this same Preview Guide that I reviewed just the other day, where I went out of my way to make fun of the main guy for being Dennis? He, too, is Lloyd. They're the same dude. Crazy how that turned out, huh?

In a case like this, where the show isn't even pretending to give a shit about bringing anything new to the table with its characters, or setting, or big-picture story, the only way you can attempt to measure its quality is by the entertainment value of its individual episodes. So, is this single episode of Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer! worth your finite time on this planet Earth? I don't know, maybe? This Lloyd variant has bluish hair instead of straight black hair, so there's something you might not have seen recently! Oh, and they fight a minotaur in this one, instead of, like, a dragon, or a goblin. Minotaurs are kind of fun, right? Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there's a Waifu Girl with pink pigtails, and The Blonde One With a ponytail has, like, a faint trace of pink highlights going on, I think? Even Lloyd has little pink dooblydoos in his eyes, so if you like the color pink, you've got maybe… ten to fifteen percent more of it here than the average random light-novel thing.

Yeah, I've got nothing, folks. This is the animated equivalent of a saltine cracker that's been dunked in tap water and fed to you through a pastry bag. Pure, flavorless mush. I'll be moving right along to the next new show, thank you very much.