Three weeks ago due to our electric provider's planned monthly maintenance, I was somewhat forced to download ALL the manga chapters of the "The Rising of the Shield Hero" (among others) in preparation for almost "a day" without electricity and internet.
I completely fell in love with this series after I watched it's anime version last month mainly because I am a sucker for the "main character vs the world" stories. Stories wherein the main character is underestimated and belittled by everyone but sooner or later he will emerged and proved his worth/value to the world proving them wrong. (You know those kind of cliche stories. XDv)
Anyway after finishing the manga chapters, I am still somewhat unsatisfied and decided to read the WEB NOVEL (main arc story) which took me over 3 weeks to finish 1 Web Novel. Lol
One thing that I noticed after reading my first ever web novel was that how lacking the anime version really is compared to the original source (although I'm not sure how different the Web Novel is from the original Light Novel).
For instance this scene from the latest episode of the anime:
In the web novel, you can really sense the urgency of the situation. Naofumi (the hero of the shield), his comrades and along with some soldiers has been fighting the wave for over 3 hours and you can really feel that they are now tired from the non-stop spawning of monsters.
The only way for the monsters to stop spawning is to defeat the boss monster to which the other 3 heroes have non-cooperatively fighting for. With their incompetence and the fact that they are still treating the whole thing as a game and not as a matter of life and death one could not help feel hating the other 3 heroes.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that that whole 3 hour fighting and Iwatani and co. exhausting their energy was quickly wrapped up in one frame in the anime version with him saying: "It's been three whole hours." The whole sense of urgency was not there which was honestly a little disappointing.
I know it's a very little detail but minor details like this helps us more to have a solid emotion (like a deep hate XD) towards some characters in a series.
Of course I also understand the need to cut unneunnecessarynes to fit the whole 24-25 episodes per Season or arc thing. Or to fit 1-3 chapters from the original source unto 1 18-minute episode but after reading 1 web novel I can now somewhat understand those people who often criticize the anime (or maybe the movie version of a book) because of the sudden and quick wrapped or even the cut-off of some important scenes.
