The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - The Rising of the Shield Hero Season 4

At the end of last season, it was revealed that Raphtalia was secretly being targeted and observed by assassins sent from the beast folk kingdom of Q'ten Lo. Hoping to stop the assasination attempts before the Phoenix arrives, Naofumi and his crew make plans to travel to Q'ten Lo to express that Raphtalia has no intention of taking the throne. However, in an attempt to pass through Siltvelt along the way, they are stopped as the Shield Hero is revered as a savior here by many and leaving might not be that easy of an option.

The Rising of the Shield Hero Season 4 is based on the light novel series by author Yusagi Aneko and illustrator Seira Minami. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

I'm actually kind of shocked at Naofumi's reaction this episode. If you remember, the whole inciting action for his distrusting personality was being framed for sexual assault. This episode, he is on the receiving end of such an assault (he is drugged and attacked by a horde of women trying to rape him), yet he doesn't seem to connect the dots. Instead, he's more annoyed than angry—which seems like a massive underreaction.

That aside, this whole episode is Naofumi half-heartedly being pulled into the politics of the Siltvelt Kingdom. All he wants is a boat to go deal with the assassins coming after Raphtalia. However, the two major factions of the kingdom have their own plans for him. One faction wants for him to be a figurehead ruler—to maintain the status quo and fight for their kingdom against the waves. The other faction wants revolution—and sending Naofumi on his way is the easiest way to do this.

Siltvelt is a country with a strict cast system. At the top is the Shield Hero and the four great races. Below them is everyone else. This means that no matter how smart or powerful a person in the lower cast becomes, they can never rise to a ruling position. But if the Shield Hero were to abandon his post—to decide that the country wasn't worth ruling—wouldn't that send a clear message to the people about the state of their society? I mean, if your god is disgusted with your government, that surely means a revolution is needed, no?

Of course, should Siltvelt fall into civil war at this time, when the world is facing the Waves and possible annihilation, Naofumi's job isn't exactly going to get any easier. Worse still, he's on a time crunch so settling things gradually isn't going to be possible either. Now how will Naofumi poisoning everyone fix things? I have no idea but we'll find out next week.

I was shocked when I realized that I was up to date on Shield Hero and thus able to review this season premiere. After all, I disliked the last two seasons (despite loving the first) and could have sworn I dropped the show, which is when I remembered I watched season 3 to completion just to put it in the worst anime of the season article.

So obviously, I was not coming into this one with high hopes. That said, this episode feels like a solid new beginning. The stakes for this season are personal: keeping Raphtalia safe. Due to something as simple as a mistaken choice of wardrobe, she has been put at the center of a major diplomatic incident that has assassins after their life. Naturally, Naofumi wants to clear things up before the phoenix revives and the next big battle for the fate of the world begins, but this is easier said than done. To reach the offended country, his party must first travel through the beastman-populated Kingdom of Siltvelt, where the Shield Hero is revered as a living god.

This puts Naofumi in a position he's never been in before, and with a new party composition containing only his beastman companions. Not only is he revered in a way he hasn't been in the human lands, but he is throwing himself into a complicated political situation he knows nothing about. Worse still, he knows he is being used but doesn't know how or to what end.

However, through his first experience in Siltvelt, we do see his continued growth as a character. While he wants nothing more than to ignore this country—simply get a boat out of them and move on—he can overcome his self-centered personality enough to look to his companions for guidance. He may not trust the world at large, but those he travels with have proven themselves to him, and so he listens to their advice.

It just unfortunate he doesn't count Fitoria among that number. He can't get past the fact that she is blackmailing him—even if it's to save the world—and so doesn't even listen to her request. This is clearly something that is going to come back and bite him in the butt—if not this season then sometime in the future—and it's painful to watch him make such a stupid decision due to his own lingering trust issues. It feels like he should have grown past that at this point.

In the end, for this arc of the story Naofumi looks to be a stranger in a strange land. All sides seek to use him for their own goals and all he wants is to get out of there. However, he at least realizes that even inaction is an action and is determined to figure out what the various sides want before he chooses the wrong one (or none at all)—and inadvertently does something like start a civil war.

This might be one of the first times that I've ever been legitimately interested in the political intrigue of this show. Maybe it's because, after all of the angst that this series is usually known for, this episode and set up felt a little bit more self-aware. Everything from Naofumi needing to use magic to prevent himself from being attacked by a harem of women to the absurdity of the armor that he had to wear at the banquet created a very humorous atmosphere. Don't get me wrong, I still empathize a lot with Naofumi's frustration because he definitely did not ask for any of this, but it almost feels like the show is downplaying how important this detour is compared to everything else that we had gotten up to this point.

The gaslighting is real here with these politicians trying desperately to just make it seem like Naofumi is casually gonna go along with everything that's happening no matter how many times he tries to shut it down. The funny thing is that he would probably be willing to help if they didn't keep jerking him around and wasting his time. At this point, I wonder if there are maybe other ports or other other means of transporting them across the sea in order to get to their intended destination. Ultimately, I did find myself passively entertained with everything that was executed. Even the poison situation felt like it had an air of humor to it.

I had a feeling the White Tiger siblings would play more of an important role, but I wasn't expecting us to get into it immediately. It's really convenient that they just happened to run into the person who helped look after them after their mother passed away—and he just happens to be aware of a lot of the political infighting that's going on. I assume that is gonna be something to get fleshed out more but I hope it's something that actually goes somewhere and not just backstory for the sake of backstory. I still think the characters are OK in my mind but they do sort of need to prove why they're here.

Who's ready for furry politics? I've been noticing a pattern with Shield Hero ever since season two started. Why does it feel like every time we're about to get one major plot point going, we have to take some big explicit detour that distracts us from our main goal? Before, the main issue Naofumi had to deal with was the waves of monsters, but that's put on hold because of the spirit creatures. Then the spirit creatures were put on hold because we had to gather the rest of the heroes. Then, at the end of last season, we find out randomly that Raphtalia is actually a really important political figure who runs the risk of being assassinated, but before we can visit her home country to get that settled, Naofumi now needs to deal with all of this hero worship in the nation of Siltvelt. We're probably not leaving this area for a while based on the opening and the very apparent rising political tensions going on, and I can't help feeling a little bit frustrated.

It's almost like Shield Hero has trouble just finding a goal and sticking to it. I know it wants to flesh out the world and the longer a light novel adaptation goes on, the more likely it will eventually hit the realm of political discussions. However, I've yet to really watch a good isekai that establishes its politics in an interesting way because it's either so complicated to the point where I'm just dealing with walls of exposition or it's overly simplified to the point where it barely feels like politics at all. It's a bit too early for me to determine what camp this season is going to be falling into.

We've known for a while that the beast folk have revered the Shield Hero as a God and this is before Naofumi even established his own nation to look after them. I don't recall us ever getting into the specifics though of why the Shield Hero specifically is so revered, so I'm hoping we at least get that much and like most other religious cities, I'm sure there're going to be detractors. But at the end of the day, this is just the show doing the thing that it's always done, putting Naofumi in a situation where he has to deal with the whims of other people when he's trying to do his job and look after his group.

Probably the most interesting thing about this premiere is the inclusion of the white tiger siblings. I do like them as characters and I actually like their connection to the former king, because as we found out last season, they are actually related. In season 3, the marketing really pushed that the king was going to be a more important character than he was due to the fact that he was once a hero who rose to power. But we didn't really do anything with him last season outside of just establishing his backstory, so I'm hoping that with the inclusion of the tiger children and the images in the opening, he will actually play a more important role in the story. The bar for this show is in hell for me considering that the last two seasons were not great, so I will latch onto anything that I can at this point.