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.

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.

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.