I Parry Everything – Talentlessly Talented to the Extreme (FAP-378)

Producers: Mainichi Broadcasting System JR Higashi Nihon Kikaku NetEase Games Earth Star Entertainment MAGNET TOKYO MX Bandai Namco Filmworks BS11
Studio: OLM OLM AQUA ARIS
Source: Light Novel
Aired: July 2024 to September 2024
Genres: Action Adventure Fantasy
Number of Episodes: 12
Jack's Score: 9 / 10
Rick's Score: 9 / 10

Rick's pick of “I Parry Everything" this week ended up being a good one, and honestly he was done with it two days after they agreed to watch it. He came into it on guard, and had admitted he'd been burned out from a stretch of shows where the main character is secretly unstoppable but too humble to notice, and half-expected more of the same. But what ended up winning him over is that the humility here isn't just an act. Noor genuinely believes he's the least capable guy in every room, and Jack and Rick spend a good chunk of the conversation on why that gap between how Noor sees himself and how everyone around him quietly loses their mind stays funny instead of getting old. The moments they kept coming back to were the ones that make that contrast land: vomiting blood mid-fight because he'd gotten too comfortable with the poison, producing what amounts to a small sun while trying to demonstrate how weak his magic is. The one knock they both had is that by the end, with enough people visibly amazed around him, you'd think he'd start connecting some dots.

Set in the medieval fantasy Kingdom of Clays, I Parry Everything follows Noor, a socially oblivious young man who spent years training alone in the mountains with nothing but "useless" skills like parrying and he does this not because he wants to but rather he has to. Noor has an unbreakable dream of becoming an adventurer and the biggest road block for him is that he has only “useless” skills. And when he finally arrives at the royal capital, he stumbles headfirst into a kingdom on the brink of war, an assassination attempt on Princess Lynneburg, and neighboring nations circling like vultures waiting for the right moment to strike. And Noor has absolutely no clue about any of it. He's too busy taking odd jobs like cleaning gutters, chasing runaway pets, basically doing whatever grunt work an F-rank adventurer can find and all just to inch closer to his dream. Along the way, he crosses paths with Lynne, a princess just as out of touch with the real world as he is, and Ines, a battle-hardened prodigy who can't quite figure out if she respects him or resents him. The story tries to balance the chaos of kingdom-scale conflict with the smaller, almost comedic moments of three wildly mismatched people stumbling through life together. But underneath all the laughs and misunderstandings sits a harder truth of that the most dangerous person in the kingdom genuinely believes he's the weakest man in the room.