The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Noble Reincarnation: Born Blessed, So I'll Obtain Ultimate Power

Noah, the world's strongest six-year-old, holds the fortunate position of being the Thirteenth Prince of the emperor. Born with an infinite level cap and a cheat skill that allows him to add the abilities of those he commands to his own, he is unmatched. Reincarnated into a noble family, Noah thrives in an environment enriched with exceptional education and abundant resources, allowing his talents to blossom. However, behind the glamorous facade of aristocratic society lurks a world of conspiracies and power struggles.

Noble Reincarnation: Born Blessed, So I'll Obtain Ultimate Power is based on Nazuna Miki's Noble Reincarnation: Born Blessed, So I'll Obtain Ultimate Power (Kizoku Tensei: Megumareta Umare kara Saikyō no Chikara o Eru) light novel series. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

This is the story of a boy reincarnated as a noble with the ability to see status windows. As he grows, he gathers the loyalty of others thanks to his good acts. With each person to join him, he grows stronger—appealing to the common man and blazing his own path towards sitting on the throne.

Oh, wait… no, I got my notes mixed up. That was a summary for As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World. Let's try this again.

This is the story of a boy reincarnated as a noble with the ability to see status windows. As he grows, he gathers the loyalty of others thanks to his good acts. With each person to join him, he grows stronger—appealing to the common man and blazing his own path towards sitting on the throne.

Huh… I guess everything I wrote also applies to Noble Reincarnation: Born Blessed, So I'll Obtain Ultimate Power as well... So we're all good after all!

Glib sarcasm about the originality of this anime aside, there are a few aspects of it I liked. I found that the show has a surprisingly strong sense of danger permeating through it. Despite his overpowered status, Noah is in the worst possible position. By choosing the second prince as the crown prince, the king has already shown he will give the throne not to the eldest but to the one he feels will lead the kingdom the best. This means that the more Noah accomplishes—i.e., the closer he gets to being named heir—the more his brothers will see him as a threat to their own claims on the throne.

At the same time, as the thirteenth prince, he has little real influence or power—he has to sell his holdings just to afford to buy a small village ruined by flooding. It's only by achieving things that he will gain the power he needs to survive. Thus, Noah must walk the fine line of being useful to his siblings while not overshadowing them to the point that they see him as a threat.

Then there is the fact that he alone knows of his weakness. While everyone else can only see his final stats. He can see his base stats as well as the modifier he gets from having people loyal to him. Thus, to get stronger, he has to widen his influence. However, at the same time, should his people lose faith in him, he grows weaker as a result. Thus, he has no choice but to rule for the people in this world of cutthroat nobles vying for the throne.

Now, is all that enough to make the show worth watching? I think that's up to how much you enjoy the reincarnated as a noble sub-genre. But even as someone who loves the aforementioned As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World, I doubt I'll come back to watch this show next week—though writing up a review for it once the season is over doesn't seem too unpleasant a prospect.

I swore I'd save the one-star rating for an entertainingly trainwrecky series, but I just can't wait anymore. Noble Reincarnation: Born Blessed, So I'll Obtain Ultimate Power is such utter dreck, so much worse than the already-trashy Jack of All Trades, Party of None that I feel obligated to give it the lowest rating possible. The quality ranking is hotly debated in my household, but I'll stand firm in my convictions. After all, this one has a stat screen just seconds into the episode.

I have some questions here about this, actually. Was Noah supposed to have been just-born in that scene? If so, why is his mother upright, slender, and fully dressed with her hair and makeup done? Does vaginal birth exist in the world? Magic caesareans? Do babies just appear fully formed, like in The Sims? Or maybe it's been a few days. But in that case, why is he just meeting his father now? Not to mention how Noah is fully cognizant of the stat screen, which implies an adult level of processing, but other than that, there's no mention of him being reincarnated.

I'm fixating here because there's just nothing to say about this show. It's at least as generic as the aforementioned Jack of All Trades, repeating LitRPG conventions without anything original. Hell, I feel like I've already written these sentences at least a dozen times because I am out of things to say. I suppose Noble Reincarnation is a bit unusual in how seriously it takes itself; the entire premiere is utterly humorless as six-year-old Prince Noah marches about his poorly-lit castle with the dour gravity of an adult man. He has an army of maids, because the more “subordinates” he has, the more powerful he is, and they're all identical from the neck down. My only chuckle was at how poorly drawn the cursed sword Leviathan was, with its garish hilt and wobbly lines running down its length.

The dialogue's audio quality was weirdly blown out for me. I at first watched the episode on my smart TV with a soundbar, but checked the browser version on my computer to make sure the issue was with the upload and not with my hardware. It's most noticeable when Noah confronts the episode's one-off cartoonishly evil noble villain, but it persists throughout the episode. I genuinely don't know who to blame here, whether it's poor quality control from Crunchyroll or a bad recording by CompTown.

But it doesn't really matter, because if you're watching Noble Reincarnation, you probably don't actually care that much about quality. Instead, consider going through your dresser and closet and donating all the clothes you don't wear anymore. Get rid of your floordrobe.

I spent a good, long time trying to find the review I was sure I'd written about the manga or light novel version of this series, but in vain. By all accounts – the site, my reading lists – I have never encountered this particular story before. And yet, it feels so unpleasantly familiar that I feel like I must have, and it wasn't until the underdressed pink-haired performer was introduced in the last moments of the episode that I finally came to terms with the fact that no, I haven't read this – but I have read and seen so many iterations of the same plot that it feels like I have.

Originality isn't necessarily a must when crafting a story, but it really does help. This first episode is, sadly, lacking in it in almost every aspect. Noah Ararat opens his eyes as an infant and is immediately greeted by a status screen. Are these my stats? he wonders. Soon, he's having his Lion King moment as his father presents him to his people as the thirteenth prince of the empire, and wouldn't you know it, he has insane magical powers. By the time he's living in his manor with his army of uniformly buxom maids, it feels like it's time to admit that this is just the latest in a series of similarly derivative power fantasies. I hesitate to say that you'll probably like it if you've enjoyed others, though, because there's just so little here that even tries to distinguish itself. I guess maybe Noah's weirdly biblical name? Or his heterochromia?

It does have a soundtrack that feels like it wants to sell the show as being darker and edgier than it is. Soaring orchestral chords and intense music when Noah spends all of two minutes mastering his hell blade are really trying their absolute best to make up for the deficiencies in storytelling, and the ending song is kind of pretty. It doesn't work to offset the blandness of the plot, but I appreciate the effort. I also appreciate that the story doesn't spend the first episode going into exhaustive detail about Noah's past life. We know he was reincarnated, probably within the same world, and that's about it. His drive to help the peasants speaks to his past while also helping him to stand out from his inexplicably shark-toothed brother, Albert. I can't say that this episode isn't trying at least a little. But it's also nothing that hasn't been done before. If you enjoy a feeling of déjà vu, this should give it to you. Otherwise, I'd only pick this up after exhausting the other possibilities.

It takes exactly 23 seconds for Noble Reincarnation to present its barely-even-reborn protagonist with a diegetic RPG statistics menu, which may well be a new record for one of these things. No, I will not be perusing through the Fanta-Slop™ archives to double-check my awarding of this most dubious honor. I just finished the episode a couple of minutes ago, and to look away from this writeup for even a second would risk the entirety of Noble Reincarnation vanishing from my memory entirely. Crap, I'm already forgetting what our pointless main character's name was…

Ah, that's right, “Noah Ararat.” In another time, I might have assumed that this ludicrously heavy-handed name was foreshadowing some kind of Biblical allusion or narrative device that would play some role in the show's larger story and themes. It is 2025, though, and we're dealing with a show whose title is literally composed of nothing but a combination of verbs and nouns pulled straight from the “Most Overused Light Novel Bullshit” word cloud. There is no story here. There are no themes. Here, in the slopvoid from which no light or hope can ever escape, there can only exist a nonsensical escalation of random RPG skills and interminable cycles of inane, useless yammering flowing from the mouths of soulless sycophants.

So, it should hardly surprise you to learn that the entirety of Noah Ararat's being, every iota of personality and humanity that the creators of this crummy show could muster, has already been conveniently summed up for you by the title of the show. Noah was indeed Reincarnated as a Noble; he was Born Blessed with S-rank skills and an infinity-symbol where his “Level Cap” is supposed to be; he does, in fact, wish to Obtain Ultimate Power. The only other detail that I could possibly think to include is that Noah has heterochromia, which is how you know he's a special widdle Big Boy Heropants who isn't like all of the other Big Boy Heropants whose mommies don't love them nearly as much. Those losers' eyes are the same color, after all, and so they have been forsaken by God.

There is a moment in the final act of this episode where Noah goes out to see how the Empire has been treating a band of downtrodden refugees, and he calls out the gruel they're being served as “bland...almost like water…[and] already rotten.” I couldn't help but laugh out loud, not because the moment was meant to be a joke, but at the ridiculous lack of self-awareness on display. Like two mirrors reflecting back onto each other, we've reached an infinite recursive loop of flavorless mush. Do yourselves a favor and stay far away from this trap, lest you be caught in its event horizon of dull mediocrity, never to escape.