The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Tales of Wedding Rings

When Satou's best friend, Hime, tells him that she's moving, he decides to follow. After crashing her wedding in another world, he ends up as the groom when she suddenly kisses him. Prophecy states that her husband is destined to be the Ring King: a hero of immense power who will save the world from the Abyssal King.

Tales of Wedding Rings is based on a manga of the same name by Maybe. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

In the most general sense, Tales of Wedding Rings is nothing we haven't seen before. We have a high school boy from our world who travels to a fantasy world and finds himself forced into the role of the hero destined to save mankind from the demons. That said, there are two things I enjoyed about this one.

The first is that this anime does a great job on the motivation front. Satou's deep connection with (and attraction to) Hime is obvious even after spending a mere few minutes with him. It makes it more than believable that Satou would choose to isekai himself for her. Likewise, in the fantasy world, his actions make sense. He knows he is in way over his head but does not regret the choice he made. It's great to have a protagonist so honest with himself about what's going on but who is still determined to overcome the challenges regardless.

The other great thing about the episode is Hime herself. While at first, she appears to be nothing but the newest in an endless line of tsundere characters, she is far more complex than that. Hime has been in love with Satou for years. However, she kept him at arm's length emotionally because she knew that she'd have to leave him behind one day. That may all be pointless now that he's with her in the fantasy world but that doesn't mean years of habit just go away.

And then there's the second layer to the whole situation: guilt. Hime has dragged the person she loves most into an impossible situation. It's not his fight and not his world. He is highly underqualified and her choice to name him Ring King has put him in mortal danger—not just from the demons but also from jealous humans in the fantasy world. In a moment of crisis, her deepest desires overrode her logic. Even though she truly loves him, how can she accept the relationship she's always dreamed of when she's derailed his entire life to get it?

It's a good moral dilemma for the character to struggle with and one I wouldn't mind spending some time seeing unraveled—especially once the harem implied in the credits starts forming. I can't imagine either Satou or Hime being too accepting of that.

I confess, part of what I enjoyed about this premiere has nothing to do with the show's content. You see, one of the central Capital Letter Proper Nouns of this show is the term "Ring King," and for reasons beyond my explanation, some broken synapse in my brain kept automatically replacing the phrase with "Rizz King." So, I started laughing every time our hero proudly proclaimed that he would protect his love interest and her magical kingdom. To be fair to myself, it did spice up what is otherwise just an OK premiere.

The biggest rock around its neck is the production. While there's some decent background work in the back half, rendering the stone halls of the fantasy castle pretty well, and they put some effort into the cheesecake shots, everything else looks like it's a couple of degrees from melting. Character models border on mishmashes of geometric shapes during mid and distance shots – especially Hime's goofy hair – and I don't think they ever draw Satou's face the same way twice across the entire episode. What little actions we get is pretty weak, and I don't have much confidence that things will pick up from here. This is clearly a threadbare project, and I suspect the only things that will move with consistent detail and fluidity are the various heroines' Ts and As.

The main strength is that much like the original creator's other work, Dusk Maiden of Amnesia, this premiere is pretty good at presenting an indulgent teenage fantasy without feeling like a teenager also wrote it. Hime is blatantly designed as a dream girlfriend for the target audience of teen boys but still has personality and charm outside of her royal assets. The hook of Satou becoming Hime's husband to unlock a special magic power – and by the looks of the OP, collecting at least four more royal consorts – is pretty standard, but works well enough to push along the vague magic plot and pour plenty of fuel on their smoldering will-they-won't-they romance. Satou and Hime aren't exactly a romantic powerhouse, but they're cute enough together and are largely free of the most annoying hangups with anime couples. There's an interesting tension where they both clearly like one another, but their now obligatory marriage makes both feel wary about confessing, because they don't want the other to feel pressured into a relationship that is, on paper, just a means to defeating the bad guys.

If the story can capitalize on that tension while giving the leads more development, this might turn out to be a good time. It will quickly become a chore if it relies on stock harem drama and dull fantasy lore. I'm reasonably confident we'll get the former, and this is a weak enough season that I'll probably stick around just to sate my curiosity.

I remember sort of liking the first volume of the manga this is based on, but not enjoying where it went from there. This episode bears out that feeling: I think some elements are fun, but I don't love where things appear to be headed. The baseline, however, is engagingly solid. Satou and Hime are almost archetypical childhood friends nursing not-so-quiet crushes on each other, with the key difference being that Hime is an isekai princess who has been hiding out in our world. Satou witnessed her arrival but managed to forget about it (with the help of "grandpa's" magic), and when she announces that she's moving, he realizes that she doesn't mean to the next prefecture. Satou, therefore, is an isekai protagonist who chooses to go to another world by himself to follow his reverse-isekai love interest. That's not a bad hook, especially when their meeting in Hime's world turns into a spur-of-the-moment wedding so that he can fight abyssal monsters.

It also isn't all that exciting in its execution, unfortunately. There are some very solid elements like the prince Hime (real name: Krystal) was supposed to marry being fine with her switching to Satou instead, and the fact that it doesn't appear to be censored, at least in terms of the female bodies. But otherwise, things are pretty darn by the numbers, with a bath scene, a monster fight, and the generic look of the fantasy world. Explanations are also fairly thin on the ground, with Satou just being rushed into things and the episode's pacing feeling a bit disjointed. Not that I want long explanations or info dumps, but towards the middle things just happen mechanically: Satou faints, he's on a bed with Hime, he's on a balcony, he's in the bath. There are no transitions between them, which doesn't make the story feel like it's progressing naturally.

Satou's confusion is done well, however. His squeaky yell to the people when he's told to say something as the newly anointed Ring King does an excellent job of portraying his panic, and he's also shown having some difficulty figuring out what his relationship with Hime is now, which makes a lot of sense, given that he went from thinking she'd confess to seeing her jump into a portal to fighting a monster for her after she kissed him. The messages may not be so much mixed as jumbled. This also does a decent job on the fanservice front. However, I admit to finding the ending theme's image of Satou's presumptive harem gratuitous as it pans slowly over the ladies' most sexualized bits. But it's also less prurient than some other shows this season, so there's that. All in all, if you're looking for a good harem story in the isekai genre, I think this is a safe bet because that seems to be what genre it aims to cover.

Now here is a show that I can imagine ending up in one of the piles of anime DVDs I used to scrounge from my local library back in the day: We've got a mostly generic but still decently likable hero who's been unwittingly roped into an engagement with his longtime friend because of one of those childhood proposals that are seemingly a mandatory right of passage in Japan, and all of it is wrapped up in a magical twist that ensures our boy Satou is going to end up fighting monsters and saving his magical betrothed's kingdom just as much as he'll be dealing with romcom shenanigans. Also, it's a harem anime, which fourteen-year-old James would have had no compunctions with whatsoever.

So far as these kinds of shows go, I'd say that Tale of Wedding Rings makes an alright first impression. Its visuals are a bit washed out, but otherwise okay to look at; the pacing keeps things moving along at a brisk enough pace that you never lose interest; the fantasy elements are being used in such a way that they don't bore you to tears, despite being the usual tropes and archetypes that we've seen a thousand times before. The romance angle of the show is also—say it with me now—perfectly fine. Satou and Hime don't exhibit the same natural chemistry that made The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic such a breath of fresh air, but they fit well enough within their stereotypical romantic roles. Satou is well-meaning but also kind of an idiot. Hime is the affectionate but not-completely-open-with-her-feelings friend/love interest that gets Satou roped into these otherworldly shenanigans. The only part of the show's formula that we can't evaluate is the harem aspect, since none of the other girls from the OP and ED show up to make themselves known here, but the "Rings" in the title is plural for a reason.

Weirdly enough, it's the silly harem stuff that I am both the wariest about and the most interested in. I would love it if Tale of Wedding Rings just ended up as a straightforward romance that used its magically contrived premise to develop a genuinely complex and interesting relationship between Satou and Hime. I'm not so naïve to think that will happen, though, so I can only hope that all of the goofy harem stuff ends up being fun and charming, instead of tired and irritating. It can quickly go either way in this genre.