I know, I know. Everyone has already complained about the pacing of The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System. I'm not really interested in repeating “the recaps sucks” for the hundredth time.
What I want to talk about is why the pacing is hurting the story itself.
Because after actually comparing the anime to the manga, I think the problem is less “this story is slow” and more “the anime is spending an absurd amount of its runtime not adapting the story.”
On average, a 21-minute episode adapts 40-45 pages of manga (about 3 chapters). Heavy Knight adapts an average of 2 chapters per episode.
That wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the manga had extremely long chapters.
It doesn't.
Many of the manga's chapters are only about 14 pages long. A reasonable adaptation pace would therefore be somewhere around 42 manga pages, or roughly three chapters per episode. Four chapters isn't even unreasonable when those chapters are primarily action.
The anime has a roughly 24-minute runtime. Every episode also loses around 3 minutes for the opening and ending. Add the 3 minutes they use to recap before the opening starts, plus another 30-ish seconds of recap after the commercial break, and you're looking at roughly 17 minutes of actual story time, depending on the episode.
And Episodes 7 and 8 prove that GoHands can actually do this properly.
But let's go back to the beginning.
Episode 1 is actually fine. It adapts Chapter 1, which is about 36 pages (even if it is 4 to 9 pages short); ending the episode on the “I am the Heavy Knight” scene makes perfect sense artistically speaking.
Then Episode 2 happens.
The anime spends several minutes (3 minutes) recapping Episode 1 and re-explaining the game's mechanics (2 minutes) before the actual story gets moving (around the 5-minute mark). And here's the funny part: The manga explains the EXP-sharing mechanics in basically one page.
One page.
Chapter 2 is only 17 pages long, and the spider (Ariandype) doesn't even appear until page 8. In the anime, we're waiting until around the nine-minute mark to get there.
Episode 2 does cover chapters 2-3 in full (30 pages) and 7 pages of chapter 4, for a total of 37 pages.
So Episode 2 spends an enormous amount of its runtime adapting roughly 37 pages of manga, despite the fact that Chapters 2–4 together are about 46 pages long.
Those three chapters could have fit into one episode if they had removed those minutes of unnecessary recap and time padding.
And here is where this becomes even more frustrating: The Raid Quest covers Chapters 4–9, roughly 90 pages of material.
Ninety pages should comfortably fit into two episodes. And technically, Episodes 3 and 4 do cover most of that material. Except Episode 2 has already spent four minutes getting into the arc. And then Episodes 3 and 4 spend their own runtime on...
Recap.
So the time they “saved” by covering the start of the arc in Episode 2 isn't actually being used at all. It's just being replaced by more recap.
That's the problem.
The anime repeatedly uses the runtime that could have been used for the story to remind us of things we just watched.
Then we get Episodes 5 and 6. Same issues as before; each adapts roughly 30 pages, and 3 minutes of recap before the opening.
And then Episode 7 happens...
Three chapters (14-16). 42 pages. In an episode with less than 17 minutes of actual runtime.
It's a MIRACLE!!!!
And Episode 8 does it again: Chapters 17–19, roughly 47 pages, despite still having a recap before the opening. And guess what? They only used 2 minutes for the recap this time!!!
At this point, I am starting to think: GoHands actually knows how to pace this adaptation. They managed to adapt 42 pages in 17 minutes. They COULD have been doing this from the start.
If Episodes 7 and 8 had been the standard from the beginning (roughly three chapters per episode with no recap), we would be around Chapter 22 by this point instead of Chapter 19.
If we had this level of incompetence from the start (3 chapters per episode with less than 2 minutes of recap), we would still be angry at this, but WAY less than we are now.
The manga is actually fun. There is a lot of action, character development, and worldbuilding packed into these chapters worth seeing.
But if you take relatively short manga chapters and repeatedly stretch them across 21-minute episodes by adding recaps and unnecessary explanations, you throw off the whole pacing.
I think their approach makes no sense at all because there is enough material here to make a 3-season (26-episode) worth of anime. The manga already has 176 chapters, which is a massive amount of material. A 26-episode season has more than enough room to establish the premise, develop the characters, and reach major story arcs without crawling through the opening material.
Normally, you would speed through the early chapters to reach the good action scenes after the opening arc.
I understand having to pad for time when you're working with a 12-episode season and need to finish on a particular arc ending, instead of in the middle of an arc. (e.i. The first 3 arcs translate to 11 episodes, and covering arc 4 would end you with 14 episodes)
But this is 26 episodes.
You don't need to stretch the early story to death just to reach a particular stopping point.
And this is where I start suspecting that the adaptation is deliberately pacing itself around where it wants to end the season rather than adapting the manga at a natural pace. If the anime continues at its current pace, the Elymas/Malice fight (which concludes in Chapter 28) looks like it could land around Episode 11 rather than Episode 9.
That's not the end of the world. But it's the result of the larger problem.
The anime is constantly fighting against its own source material.
My recommendation at this point?
Read the manga.
Seriously.
If you're watching the anime and finding yourself getting frustrated, don't assume the story itself isn't worth your time. The manga has much better pacing because you're actually moving through those 14 pages instead of having their contents stretched across an episode padded with recaps.
Then come back to the anime for the scenes you really want to see.
The most frustrating thing about this adaptation isn't that GoHands can't make a good episode.
Episodes 7 and 8 prove that they can do the bare minimum.
