The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System

During the Divine Blessing Ceremony of the 15-year-old Elma, who came from a lineage of Sword Saints, he had manifested a commonly deemed defective class known as the Heavy Knight. He had been deprived of his position as the next head of the Edvan Household and was then exiled. The Heavy Knight class had an unbalanced status and useless skills; to top it off, it was even said to be a class for cowardly, indolent people. But Elma knew better—that this world was the world of the game he had used to play before—and that the Heavy Knight class was the strongest class to exist. Elma made full use of the knowledge he had gained in his previous life and began his efficient exploration of the world he had been reincarnated into.

The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System is based on the light novel series by author Necoco and illustrator Jaian. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Note: The reviews below are based on an early screener provided by Crunchyroll. The anime series will premiere on July 2 at 12pm EDT.

Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. GoHands, can you explain to me why every strand of hair has what can only be described as low-gravity jiggle physics, and every loose piece of cloth billows in the non-existent wind? Why are the first five minutes of the anime a string of disjointed action scenes of 1) characters we don't know, 2) fighting things we have no context for, and 3) in places we've not been introduced to?

I fear I know why: because, like every GoHands production I've seen, this first episode is basically a demo reel for the studio—the studio acting like a young child screaming “look what I can do” to any potential investors that may coincidentally come across this series. But just like the scientists at Jurassic Park, GoHands is more interested in what they can do rather than what they should do.

The art of filmmaking has a visual language—one that anyone who watches TV or film is well acquainted with, even if only on a subconscious level. Tilting the camera at a Dutch angle is used to denote something being “wrong” with the situation. A fisheye lens is often used to suggest viewing something from within an electronic screen, through a security camera, or in a similar context. A shaky cam makes action feel more real and chaotic. A super low-angle shot is used to emphasize size.

However, just as important as using these techniques is not using them—you must first establish a sense of normality before you upset it. If you don't follow these long-established guidelines, you end up blasting the audience with the equivalent of visual gibberish instead of conveying your story and themes.

And that's exactly what this episode is. Rather than supporting the story being told, the visuals distract from it. The plot and dialogue honestly go in one ear and out the other as nearly every moment is an assault on the eyes, where you're bludgeoned by one abnormal shot after another. But what kills me—what drives me really insane—is that, if used sparingly, GoHands' technology for recreating real-world camera shots and lenses could elevate an otherwise humdrum production.

Maybe next week, the anime will have gotten its need for chaotic visual insanity out of its system, and I can focus on what the anime is actually about—but given GoHands' track record, I severely doubt it.

I have a very complicated relationship with Studio GoHands. On the one hand, their talented but supremely misguided artists are responsible for some of the worst anime I have ever endured, with their house style being a mess of poorly composited digital assets and overanimated dreck that can be genuinely offensive to look at. On the other hand, our adversarial relationship has produced some of my favorite writing of my career. My efforts to explain the truly unholy depths of GoHands' aesthetic butcheries have led me through some wild and unforgettable capers. For anyone lucky enough to have avoided the torment of actually watching a GoHands joint, just take a look at this low-resolution clip of legendary film hack Neil Breen fighting a hilariously fake CGI tiger against a cheap green-screen background. Now, imagine watching dozens of hours of this with a greasy puke-green color filter slapped on top of half the scenes for no reason, with several of those hours being devoted to watching the main character's hair flop around psychotically in the wind. That's the gist of any given show the studio has produced in the last decade.

For any of my fellow recovering victims of the patented GoHands Method, I am deeply sorry to inform you that the studio has shown no remorse for its prior crimes and is indeed doubling down on its commitment to making the tackiest cartoons ever produced. The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System briefly gave me hope that we would at least see the studio's worst instincts reigned in to a more-or-less watchable degree, like that one show about the cat they did a while back that almost looked like a proper television show. Alas.

Right away, we are thrust into a fight scene that lasts several minutes and is completely incomprehensible to behold. All of GoHands' trademark blunderings are on full display, at least in the cuts that your brain has enough time to process through all of the visual noise and manic editing. The camera moves pointlessly and dramatically through ugly computer-generated backgrounds that look like they were ripped from a PlayStation 3 game and passed through a series of broken aliasing filters. The characters are all obnoxious smirks and silly poses as they flip and jump through action beats that are quite literally impossible to make spatial sense of. The characters' hair writhes atop their skulls like colonies of possessed worms. It's just so goddamned ugly in motion, to the point where I honestly have a hard time even following what anyone is saying or doing on screen.

The fundamental problem with Studio GoHands is that they are staffed by a bunch of obviously talented animators who have not demonstrated any knowledge of the visual language of actual filmmaking. This is what makes it so hard to focus on whatever stories their shows are trying to tell (even when those stories are also usually pretty terrible). To the credit of The Exiled Heavy Knight, GoHands is at least being guided by source material produced outside of the studio, so there's a chance that this anime will at least have a functional narrative. I lie to you and say that the melodramatic story of Elymas being ruthlessly cast out of society for being assigned an RPG class that comes standard in pretty much every MMORPG is great, but whatever. The clown girl that he teams up with seems nice, I guess. It's just a shame that, with GoHands at the helm, there is virtually no chance that the animated version of The Exiled Heavy Knight will end up being preferable over literally any other medium. I'd take the summary of the story scribbled by some drunk guy on a cocktail napkin over this.

It's not a GoHands show without me saying “what the hell am I looking at” and “my eyes are burning, please make it stop” at least once during the premiere. Every time I see that studio's name, I think to myself, “Maybe this will be the show where they finally take all of that clear talent behind the scenes and focus it into something that is somehow comprehensible to my eyes,” but it looks like today is not that day.

On paper, this is probably one of the more generic isekai this season, and that is saying a lot. It's about a guy who reincarnates into a video game, where he can manipulate the busted stats and abilities of a class that other people have looked down upon. However, the show even struggles narratively to communicate such a basic, bare-bones plot. That entire scene in the ritual hall, moments before he gets his class, where he goes from vaguely talking about “seeing all of this before” as a child to straight up telling the audience that he is trapped in a video game as an adult, feels so clunky and laid out. Just start with him being open about the fact that he has been reincarnated and that he had been looking forward to this day. I can't tell if he suddenly remembered that he got reincarnated or if he was just withholding that information from the audience to maximize shock value in one of the most forced ways possible. The funny thing is, of all the trapped-within-a-video-game isekai stories, this sub-genre is actually one of my favorites because I like breaking down game mechanics and finding loopholes in combat systems. So the idea of taking a heavy defensive character and utilizing that defense creatively could be fun. The one moment when I felt a drop of enjoyment in this episode was at the very end, when the lead explained how his busted defense could be used offensively.

But I can't even fully enjoy that because the presentation is just so bad. I won't say anything here that my constituents or anybody else online will say, but it needs to be hammered home until GoHands finally wakes up and stops doing this. This is one of the most needlessly over-animated shows I have seen. Thank God it's not filled with obsessive bloom and obnoxious colors like previous GoHands outings, but it still has many of the typical trappings you find in other shows from this studio. Over-the-top and weird camera angles that serve no legitimate purpose outside of just being “unique,” weirdly rendered art styles that sometimes clash in a way that doesn't always feel intentional, scenes feeling like they were arranged at random without smooth transitions, perspectives that make the characters sometimes look like they're breaking their bones over the most basic of movements, etc.

The first five minutes of the episode had some of the most nonsensical editing and action framing I had seen in quite some time. It was just a slideshow of characters running down hallways and fighting things, as if it were a flash-forward to what is to come. It also just felt like random scenes being shown off without any real narrative tissue tying it all together. Again, combining that with the protagonist's vague voice about having seen all this before really did paint a different picture of exactly what he was trying to communicate to the audience.

The character design seemed nice, and I even liked the jester girl's design, who looks like she's going to be the poster child for the show, but even the way the characters are drawn and rendered muddies this. How many individual hair layers do all of these characters have? Every time they move, their hair is in a completely different position, as if it were drawn differently in every single frame. Is this a new technology that I don't know about, or did they really want the hair of all things to stand out on these characters?

Once again, we have another show that is the definition of style over substance. You can have one of the most flashy, over-the-top things ever, but if it doesn't match the story being told or has any actual artistic direction behind it, then all it becomes is visual noise. My eyes hurt, my head hurts, and I doubt I'm going to feel much better when I have to watch episode two next week.

The new season of The Amazing Digital Circus sucks. None of the original cast is in it except for Pomni, who barely shows up, and the animation is a huge downgrade.

Jokes aside, we all knew this wouldn't be any good, right? While GoHands is the eternal enemy of anyone with motion sickness, photosensitivity, or good taste, their series has at least been interesting historically. Momentary Lily? A complete trainwreck that pushed my colleague James closer to madness with each passing week, but at least it was weird. Hand Shakers and W'z? Hideously ugly and nonsensical, but filled with fascinating, inexplicable artistic decisions. The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System is just another LitRPG isekai light novel with a hackneyed setup and an obsession with stats and levels.

I mean, it almost kind of works at first. “Works,” I mean. This is one of GoHands' more restrained productions, but their typically unhinged camerawork and ugly, greyish color palette had something of a defamiliarizing effect as the story went through its motions. Does it make sense to have a camera literally under the solid floor for extremely low-angle shots? Not a whit, but it sure is a choice. Elymas and not-Pomni's too-defined hair strands that wiggle like rubber hoses every time they move? Definitely not what you get in most series like this.

But then it turns out this is actually one of GoHands' more restrained productions. After a long tracking shot zooming around the PlayStation 2 cutscene graphics town, the camera settles down a bit. From that point on, all we get is Elymas tromping around a forest that looks like it's in another plane of existence, muttering to himself about stats and levels and how the Heavy Knight is actually the strongest class. He obliterates a huge frog, the poor thing, and then a lot of frogs. Thrilling stuff.

It's just the same crap with a slightly different, uglier animation style.