The World's Strongest Witch ‒ Episode 4
Well, The World's Strongest Witch was bound to level out sooner or later, right? While by no means a fall into the usual, barely narratively coherent slop that makes up most LitRPG series, episode four of feels just a bit less special and a bit less fun than its predecessors. I'm hopeful that this anime can right itself and get back to being a fun, low-stakes RPG romp with genuinely funny winks towards gamer culture, because I really don't want it to become indistinguishable from the half-dozen or so rinse and repeat formulaic LitRPGs that drop every season.
Fresh off of defeating a dragon, Lorna heads to a nearby forest to farm (both in the literal sense and the RPG sense) herbs that she can flip for cash. She discovered this money grinding trick after making the jump from forum lurker to forum poster and, while a cynical gag, I did get a laugh out of the immediately unhelpful and terminally online the responses to her post. While in the forest, she runs into an elf girl in need of help and she then triggers a quest where she has to save a hidden elf village from a doctor who's secretly poisoning them.
It's here that this episode really starts to fall off for me. Lorna both uncovers the doctor's plot and addresses every obstacle she faces in defeating her through some kind of overpowered macguffin. There's no second layer or bigger gag happening in the back half of this episode either, so it just feels like this storyline could have been dragged and dropped from any “my numbers are way bigger than yours” anime into this one. If I had to reach, I'd say that it's a little interesting that Lorna's former family was connected to the doctor's plot and that it would be a good thematic arc if the people who abandoned her became persistent antagonists in this story, but that wouldn't exactly be novel either.
While the final moment in this episode where the doctor realizes just how hilariously out of her depth she is in trying to fight Lorna was fun, this episode did not live up to the standard set by past The World's Strongest Witch installments. I know that this work can engage deeper gaming mechanics and why people love playing these kinds of video games, and hope it gets back to engaging with those ideas soon. I don't need The World's Strongest Witch to be the best anime of the season to enjoy it, but I need it to start being more distinctly itself again as quickly as possible.
Rating:
Lucas DeRuyter has more games that he wants to play than he does free time to play them, which makes him the ultimate gamer in 2026! However, you can catch his forays into gaming by following him on Bluesky and checking out his writing portfolio. You can also see the most frequent application of his sick gamer skillz (typing quickly) by checking out ANN's This Week in Anime column.
The World's Strongest Witch is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
discuss this in the forum (7 posts) |
back to The World's Strongest Witch
Episode Review homepage / archives
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.