The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None

Orun is a swordsman who changed to a mage class for the sake of the "Hero's Party" that he belonged to. He even developed a unique style of magic to support the party. But Oliver, Orun's childhood friend and the leader of the party, kicked Orun out of the party due to a lack of ability. His party members mocked him for being a "jack of all trades but master of none," and the party already found his successor. Disappointed, he parts ways with the party and begins solo activities as an explorer. Orun's fate changes dramatically with new encounters, and to protect those who have become important to him, he aims to take his "jack of all trades" skills to become the "ultimate all-rounder."

Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None is based on the The Jack of All Trades Was Kicked Out of the Hero's Party light novel series by Itsuki Togami and Yuri Kisaragi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

Hear ye, O LitRPG Fans, for we hath found the One True Originator of the Party System! No, this anime isn't set in 1974, and no, it isn't Anime Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. But I do feel like I ought to give Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None at least a little credit for attempting to give a reason for its D&D stylings. According to this episode, parties used to just be groups of people who fought together without official roles, but then an enchanter named Selma decided that the best way for groups to function was for everyone to have an assigned role based on their skills. And while this does make sense (at least in this type of fantasy setting), it also spelled doom for our hero, Orhun.

He is, of course, the eponymous jack-of-all-trades, and you'll be unsurprised to learn that he's been kicked out of the hero's party. (In another mildly innovative turn, leader Oliver isn't an actual hero; the name was just given to the party as a whole for their exploits.) Nominally, this is because they don't think he's a good enough enchanter, a role he was made to take on after Selma's innovation. Truthfully? It looks like lone lady Anneli is just petty and doesn't like him, so she convinced the other two to kick him out. While it doesn't say anything good about Orhun's childhood pal and party leader Oliver, it's also clear that he's not entirely on board with this, even if he's too much of a weenie to say so.

As for Orhun? While he's hurt in the moment, the rest of the episode doesn't seem to have a clear idea about his feelings. He tells Selma and her sister Sophia that he's not looking to join any parties or larger clans and he's busy practicing in dungeons to go solo. But he also seems to be pretty over the whole thing, treating it more as an embarrassment than something he's actually hurt about. That could be good acting on his part, but right now it feels much more like he's fulfilling the role of Progtagonist Sans Personality. The most emotion we see from him is when Sophia's party members leave her to die via orc, and that's a fleeting moment.

Naturally it doesn't help that this isn't stunning visually. (Well, unless you find orcs with random patches of fur stunning.) Colors tend towards the brown, women are improbably dressed for dungeon delving, and there's barely any armor to be seen on anyone. Animation is stiff and stilted, and while I'm delighted by the lack of status screens, the countdown for Orhun's buffs essentially plays the same role. I'm not sold on this show based on this episode, and I'll be forming my seasonal party without it.

I feel like I've written this entire blurb before—right down to this sentence where I clarify that I actually like the “banished from the heroes' party” trope. As with villainess stories or any other sub-genre that builds upon a well-established formula, the most important aspect is how your story differentiates itself from all the others—what twist it has that sets it apart. Try as I might with this first episode of Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None, I can't seem to find it.

This is not the first anime of this type to feature a support magic user being kicked out of the party. Heck, last season we had The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest—and last winter we had I Left My A-Rank Party to Help My Former Students Reach the Dungeon Depths! (which was even more similar to this story as a large part of it was about training up some lower level adventurers in a deep dungeon).

But even this retreading would be tolerable if anything else at all stood out. The magic system is bog standard and uninspired. The animation is hovering right above average. And the characters… well, calling them one-note feels like an understatement.

To put it another way, this episode is exactly what you don't want to do when starting a series built upon an often-used foundation. Not only does watching this feel like the show is just going through the motions, there is literally nothing to make me want to come back for a second episode. If you've never seen a “banished from the heroes' party” anime before, this one is, admittedly, watchable, but I can recommend quite a few others that are more worthy of your time.

Curse the localization team that worked on bringing Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None to our shores. That silly title was just charming enough to give me hope that this show would at least make for an entertaining go-round on the old “cast out of the party” carousel that the industry has chosen as the new horse-corpse to pummel into a mush of coagulated, rotting paste. Alas, anything that is remotely clever or endearing about Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None begins and ends with that title. Every other element of the show congeals into the same flavorless, textureless mush that we've had forced down our gullets countless times, already.

You know the drill: Orhun Dura is a generic main character who even sports those generic McDonald's bangs that I think every single light-novel Potato-kun is contractually obligated to sport as their hairdo, these days. Orhun got kicked out of the generic RPG heroes' party that he used to go on generic RPG quests with, so now he must delve into the generic RPG dungeons on his own so he can level up his generic RPG skills and embark on a generic quest of revenge. Eventually, he will meet a cast of barely sentient, generic supporting characters, most of whom will be vaguely pretty but generically designed and written young women who exist mostly to fulfill the audience's generic power fantasies. The mage-girl will have red Wendy's pig-tails and will be a crybaby little-sister type. The blonde girl will probably be the one who is good at fighting with a sword. The ending credits show off girls with blue and green and pink hair, too, so go ahead and cross off any “two-dimensional harem archetypes” off of your BINGO card now. I promise you that you'll get a row filled out eventually.

This premiere included exactly one element that made my glazed-over eyes blink and adjust focus a little bit in order to acknowledge the bare minimum of external stimulus needed to generate brain function. The Wendy's girl has a sister whose is super famous and also does magic. I am not going to give Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None credit for having the wellspring of creative inspiration to add another generic waifu-type into its roster of gacha-game rejects, because it isn't like Sophia or Selma have enough personality between them to be considered even one human-being's worth of actual characterization. If anything, it should tell you everything you need to know about this show that literally the only thing I could muster up the energy to write about was the fact that there was one more lazy cliche that the show decided to indulge in than I expected.

Please, do not waste your time with Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None. No company should be rewarded for finding the least creative method possible to produce something that can be legally defined as “Technically, I guess, a television show that can be watched by human eyeballs long enough to fit in a couple of commercial breaks.” Even if you're a fiend for low-effort light-novel slop, you'd do better to just go back and enjoy another show that already pulled this trick before.

Let me be clear: I gave this one and a half stars because I want to save room for series that are bad in an entertaining way. That extra half-point is in no way meant to imply that Jack-of-All-Trades, Party of None is in any way better than the dreck scraped from the very bottom of the barrel. If I made a drinking game of it, I'd be on the floor before I even got to the New Year's Eve gathering I'm going to tonight.

One of the hardest things about doing preview guide is that as a critic, I don't want to say the same thing about this kind of series over and over. Apparently, this means I have more integrity as a writer than the person who created this slop, the publisher who selected it for a print release, and the production committee that chose it to adapt into an anime. There is absolutely nothing original happening here. Orhun wanders through a brown dungeon, alone after being kicked out of his party that follows the same exact format as every single other series like this, including the sole female member being weirdly and unnecessarily catty about it. He gets recruited by a member of a highly-respected party for a high-risk adventure, because she sees and can appreciate his talent. He tries to demur because his confidence is broken, but she insists until he accepts. The secondary characters gas up the protagonist for the smallest achievements. Same shit, different anime.

I think the breaking point for me was when Orhun sat down with the proprietor of the potion shop over a cup of coffee. He's feeling discouraged because of the rejection he's just faced, which is fair enough. The old man proceeds to comfort him with a torrent of tepid blandishments, the most pepless pep talk ever put to paper. I kept waiting for him to break out, “To thine own self be true;” though the translator never chose those exact words, they basically paraphrased it three times over. I got more interesting and useful advice from the fortune cookie I had with dinner a few nights ago.

It didn't even have the consideration to be interesting to look at. The studio, animation studio42, is brand new, with zero animation production credits to their name before this. I was really hoping for something melting, with ugly 3DCG or awful lighting effects. But much like the script, it was just dull. The dungeons are brown and blank, the fight scenes have zero eye for choreography or weight, and Orhun is Yet Another Kirito, clad in all black with slightly messy black hair. They're consistently on model, which I suppose is a plus, but with none expressiveness, left beef, what's even the point?

Why are you here? Why am I here? There are so many other ways we could be spending our time, like baking a loaf of delicious bread, or maybe some cookies.