Overpowered anime protagonists are always in vogue and usually find themselves front and center of the anime zeitgeist. And yet, perhaps in part because of that, they've become dime-a-dozen, and it's a lot harder than it used to be for them to stand out, to say nothing of the exhaustion it leaves the audience with. And yet, The Unaware Atelier Meister's (UAM) protagonist, Kurt Rockhans, accomplishes exactly that by the seemingly simple way of being overpowered differently.

Kurt can't even take down a basic slime by himself—there's no sugarcoating just how completely and utterly useless he is when it comes to combat. The twist, of course, is that he's exceptionally good—SSS-rank—at literally everything else. Mining, cooking, cleaning, building—he's not only excellent at the tasks themselves, but in the process, he'll do something to magically enhance or fortify whatever it is he's working on or with to an incredible extent. When he's asked about it, his excuse is usually that it's no big deal, this is the way the people from his village do things (and for some reason, nobody ever thinks to just ask him where he's from; even by the end, specific details Kurt has offered about his home village are extremely few and far-between). But Kurt is the type who has zero self-confidence, to the extent that it makes him overly apologetic. Combined with his aforementioned “This is how everyone does this where I'm from” mantra, Kurt just isn't convinced that he's anyone special. Everyone around him, however, quickly realizes how incredibly untrue that is, and he's soon made the leader (the meister) of his own atelier. He doesn't realize he's the one in charge, of course, but that's neither here nor there.

Simply put, Kurt is the best. Or at least, that's what everyone around him says all the time—emphatically so. As though the characters are being forced to reach a Kurt compliment quota each episode, or the show itself is either insecure about whether or not he's actually a great protagonist, or afraid that if it goes more than 30 seconds without highlighting it then the audience will forget how gosh darn lovable he is. Kurt's not necessarily a terrible protagonist. I'd say he has a certain charm to him. But the gimmick of Kurt having all these overpowered skills and being unaware of it is only all that cute the first time you see it. So when it starts to dawn on you that this anime revolves entirely around that single joke, and it doesn't even find particularly creative or interesting ways to keep telling that lone joke despite how it makes up the series core and how often it's reused, the show gets stale, and then it becomes downright frustrating.

This grating repetition might have been alleviated with something—anything—else to focus on other than Kurt. The most obvious contenders are easily another interesting character or a story. But all this anime's stock in character creation went into Kurt, at the expense of literally every other character, who all range from being generic to uninteresting. What precious little fragments of personality they're given—if they're given any at all (not everyone gets to have one)—exist solely concerning Kurt. For example, their reactions to Kurt, the way(s) they're impressed by Kurt, or in some cases, having romantic feelings for Kurt.

To make things worse, there's not much in the way of storytelling going on in UAM either. For the most part, it's just Kurt taking on various odd jobs, and then the atelier soon opens up. And then Kurt acquires a daughter for no reason (and yes, this is just as random and out-of-place as it sounds). There are hints sprinkled around that something greater may be at play than what's being let on, but this never amounts to anything substantial.

As far as production value goes, there's nothing of note going on here. Visuals-wise, I've seen worse, and it generally at least looks competent, but this anime goes off-model so often that I'm not even sure there's an on-model. My heart goes out to any poor souls who would want to cosplay a character from this series—you're going to be fighting a very uphill battle. The soundtrack is middling and unimpactful, which makes it fine for what it is, if a bit vanilla. The dub is fine, but I found myself preferring the sub. No performances in either stand out as being especially good or bad (although if I had to pick a favorite, I'd go with Mikako Komatsu as Kurt in Japanese), the overall ensemble in the Japanese version brought a bit more energy into their performances.

The massive potential this anime had in its concept makes it all the more disappointing that it turned out to be such a letdown. Still, if you're craving any kind of shake-up on the standard-issue overpowered anime protagonist, you might nonetheless find some enjoyment in watching UAM just for its unique take on the formula. For all its shortcomings, it's really hard to overstate how starved we've been for something like UAM, which dares to take the fatigued trope in an interesting new direction. It's a textbook example of an anime with a brilliant idea, but flawed execution.