The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

An Adventurer's Daily Grind at Age 29

Hajime Shinonome is an adventurer and experienced dungeon delver. When he saves a girl named Rirui from being devoured by a slime monster, he finds out that the girl has been abandoned by her parents and has nowhere else to go. Unable to abandon the girl himself, he decides to take her in, and finds out that she is no normal girl.

An Adventurer's Daily Grind at Age 29 is based on Ippei Nara's The Daily Life of a Single 29-Year-Old Adventurer (29-Sai Dokushin Chūken Bōkensha no Nichijō) manga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

God damn it, I knew it, I just knew it. Ever since Usagi Drop tainted the well forever, I've cast a suspicious glance at any anime trying to present a simple “found family” story between an older guy and his adorable-and-precocious-but-conveniently-not-related-by-blood little girl sidekick. To damn An Adventurer's Daily Grind at Age 29 with faint praise, I suppose I have to give it credit for only stringing its audience along for a single episode for whipping its kink out for all the world to see. That's right, everyone, the irresistibly cute tyke that our hero Hajime takes in is actually a curvaceous succubus!

This “twist” is going to obviously divide the show's audience into two very distinct camps: The kind that can't get over the assumed plan to pair our 29-year-old hero with a pants-pissing little girl who clearly looks and acts like human child, and the audience that is willing to look past all of that because Rirui is technically a monster who turns into an adult at night. I'm not even being judgemental when I say that; if the subject matter truly doesn't bother you, then by all means, go for it. I'm just saying that, when a show makes a choice like this, the intent is obviously to at least play up the salacious aspects as much as possible for the sake of…I don't know? Comedy? Sex appeal? The end result isn't quite so clear by the time this premiere is up.

I've seen enough anime by now that An Adventurer's Daily Grind at Age 29 could go a couple of different ways. This first premiere focuses almost entirely on the wacky parent-child antics that Hajime and Rirui get into, which are admittedly pretty cute. When we do learn initially learn about Rirui's, er, “special powers” the show still mostly plays the situation for laughs, and Hajime's jokes about boob-size don't actually make it seem like he, himself, is treating the situation as anything other than a bizarre lark. So, the remainder of the show could still be focused on the sitcom angle for the most part, with Hajime being a crude but still fundamentally decent weirdo who wants to take care of Rirui without, you know, “taking care” of her. Then again, I don't really know why the show would make Rirui a succubus if it didn't have some kind of freak-ass intentions lurking under the surface. I can only pray that we end up with, like, a reverse Lupin/Fujiko Mine dynamic, where Rirui keeps trying to jump into bed with Hajime, only to be pummeled in the face by the giant boxing-glove springtrap that explodes from his nethers.

Actually, when the gender-roles are reversed, that gag somehow ends up being even more sexual…you know what I mean, at any rate. Granted, I don't think that would make the show any more tolerable for most folks, but I'm reaching for whatever I can, here. The concept of a nearly middle-aged guy trying to raise his deranged little gremlin-child in a fantasy world has a lot of potential, and this premiere isn't half-bad, but everything about Rirui's surprise character traits just makes it impossible to know what An Adventurer's Daily Grind at Age 29 is even going for. Maybe it will worth risking one more episode to see how things shake out, but man, we could have avoided this messiness entirely if we just avoided the damned Usagi Drop curse altogether.

When an anime prominently features a small child, one of my primary metrics as an early childhood educator is just how realistically that child is written. While a series can have a believable child and still be deficient in other ways, that kid better act at least somewhat like a kid or I'm not going to be willing to give it a single inch. If it's too saccharine, too docile, too precocious… just in any way designed to indulge the fantasy of parenthood without any of the ups and downs, you better believe I'm going to call it out. I've seen every crummy way to idealize children.

At least, that's what I thought, until today. An Adventurer's Daily Grind at Age 29 is a new one. But we'll get to that in a moment.

Until that moment, it was merely middle-of-the-road. I didn't believe Rirui as a child who could show up in one of my classes or anything, but she had an antsiness to her that was appropriate for her age, as well as a desire to do things for herself. She was as realistic a character as anyone else in this world, which is to say not very, but at least it was appropriate. Even if I was put off by how she was shown peeing her pants and had the proportions of a bobble-head. I actually liked Sayumi Suzushiro's performance as Rirui more than her as Kinme, despite the latter being an adult woman in a grounded slice-of-life and the former being, well, a small child.

But then we get to the midpoint, when she wakes up in a fully-grown adult body. Her newfound foster dad's response? To point out she had huge boobs in that form, and use that fact to sexually harass their waitress. Classy! I hadn't had any strong feelings about Hajime before that point, but from that point on I found him repulsive. I don't care whether or not he's actually trying to have sex with his daughter; just the way he talked about her body made me gross. Fun fact: if I heard a parent talking about their child that way, I'd be legally required to report them to Child Protective Services!

If you like children, don't watch An Adventurer's Daily Grind at Age 29. If you like cute things overall, don't watch it then either. Instead, volunteer at your local animal shelter.

Over the years, I've found one of the most helpful exercises for writing a review is distilling what I watched into a single sentence. Sometimes, this addresses the plot, and other times the themes. Either way, it gives clarity not only about what the show is trying to impart to viewers but also what I personally got out of it. So let's try it with this show:

An Adventurer's Daily Grind at Age 29 is the story of a man who adopts a prepubescent girl in a fantasy world and struggles not to have sex with her when she turns into an adult succubus at night.

So…. A show where the core dilemma/joke/titillation is centered around pseudo-incest pedophilia…. Yeah. That's getting zero stars from me, dog.

And honestly, it's a shame. I like a lot of the single-father raising-a-daughter anime we've gotten over the past decade—whether set in a fantasy world or the real one. It shows the more emotional side of being a man and a father—promoting a form of positive masculinity. And this anime does a lot right on that front.

We have Hajime, a man who grew up on the streets, trying to help out someone in the same situation. He never had parents to care for him, so he has no idea what he's doing. However, he knows what it took for him to survive—what he cared about and what he wishes others had done for him. In this way, he's able to connect with Rirui in a way that no one else can—and in the way that will help her grow up into a strong, self-sufficient adventurer in the future.

Would this be a great anime without the Sword a Damocles mentioned above? No. But it would have been a perfectly average one—a fine but forgettable watch for anyone who wanted some silly father/daughter relationship stuff with a mix of fantasy action. But with its twists, that's not what this show is, and I am 100% out.

Quick, what's the fastest way to make a wholesome-sounding plot take a nose-dive into skeevy territory? If you said, “make it so that the little girl staying with single twenty-nine-year-old adventurer Hajime takes on the form of a full-grown woman at night,” congratulations! You've probably read the source material for this series. And now you probably know whether you want to spend time on this show, because that absolutely happens in this episode.

While that's not a great plot development for a variety of reasons, the issue is less that it happens than how it happens and how it's handled. 99% of the episode is actually devoted to Hajime finding, saving, and committing to raising Rirui, a plucky young orphan. He's not sure this is the best plan and doesn't really want to raise a child, but if he doesn't do it, she'll be on her own – since she's not from the village where he finds her, the local orphanage won't take her in, and her parents have abandoned her. She's catastrophically bad at taking care of herself to boot, so Hajime is aware that leaving her on her own will likely spell her death or a terrible childhood like he apparently had. I'd hesitate to say he's doing it out of the goodness of his heart, but that may be the closest explanation.

That's all well and good, but the narrative falters with Rirui in ways unrelated to her suddenly becoming a buxom woman. She is, in a word, obnoxious. Someone writing this story appears never to have interacted with a child and instead portrays her as the worst combination of cutesy and gutsy I've seen in a long time. (She makes Doux look like a paragon.) Her every line is screeched, her “no da” affectation is grating, and her attempts to look competent make her instead look like she's lacking in brainpower. Hajime spends much of the episode frustrated with her, and that's probably the most relatable part of the whole thing.

To make matters even worse, she's not treated with even a modicum of respect. In the course of twenty-three minutes, she's reduced to her adult breast size and wets herself, the latter at least being when she's in her child form. Hajime is a twit who thinks it's funny to describe her transformation by her boobs and decides that the best thing to do the first night he's in charge of a child is to get wasted. It's all meant to be funny, but it falls far short of the mark. Add to this some lackluster visuals and zero explanation for why Hajime has a Japanese name (is this isekai?), and you have what is easily the least impressive premiere thus far. No, thank you.