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.

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.