Assassins Pride
アサシンズプライド
- Fantasy
- Episodes
- 12
- Duration
- 24 min per ep
- Aired
- Oct 10, 2019 to Dec 26, 2019
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
Humanity, pushed to the edge of extinction, now survives within the glass-domed city-state of Flandore. Outside the domes, lycanthropes rule the darkness, while inside, society is sharply divided between nobles and commoners. Noble blood grants access to mana—power that elevates its users beyond ordinary human limits and serves as a crucial weapon against the monsters beyond the walls.
Melida Angel, a 13-year-old noble, has yet to awaken her mana and endures scorn at her prestigious academy because of it. The Angel family assigns Kufa Vampir as her private tutor, but his appointment comes with a hidden condition: if he determines she truly lacks mana, he is to kill her. As Kufa grows moved by Melida’s resolve after seeing her fight, he abandons the order and instead helps her draw out her power—then risks everything to conceal the truth from the Angel family and his own guild, even as new complications begin to close in.
Otaku Consensus
Assassins Pride lands as a divisive single-cour fantasy: its strongest approval comes from viewers who buy into its underdog-growth appeal, assassin-tutor tension, and late-episode action animation from EMT Squared. The verdict against it is consistent and hard to ignore: the adaptation tries to carry too many rules, social conflicts, and character threads in 12 episodes, leaving the serialized script feeling rushed, scattered, and less impactful than its premise promises.
Why You Should Watch
Watch Assassins Pride if you want a magic-academy fantasy built around class pressure, sword training, and a dangerous mentor-student dynamic without committing to a long franchise. It scratches part of the same itch as The Irregular at Magic High School in its obsession with bloodline status and institutional ranking, while its assassin angle gives the classroom drama a sharper edge than a standard tournament-school setup. The appeal is not airtight worldbuilding; it is seeing a polished gothic-steampunk setting filter bullying, aristocratic politics, and mana-based combat through a compact 12-episode run. Viewers who enjoy flawed but stylish light-novel adaptations, especially ones with a primarily female cast and a guarded male lead, will get the most out of it.
Key Characters
- KKufa Vampir
Kufa is the show’s hook in human form: a character whose assassin profession, formal tutoring role, and increasingly personal investment create the moral tension fans remember most.
- MMelida Angel
Melida anchors the series as a bullied noble girl whose persistence makes the otherwise busy fantasy politics work best when the story narrows its focus to her growth.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
EMT Squared produced Assassins Pride as a 12-episode Fall 2019 TV anime, a format that gives it a fast, concentrated pace but also fuels the most common criticism that the source material’s moving parts feel compressed.
- 2
The AniList tag profile is unusually specific for a fantasy academy show: Magic at 87%, Assassins at 80%, Swordplay at 73%, Steampunk at 69%, Bullying at 69%, and Battle Royale at 65%, signaling a hybrid of school hierarchy, covert violence, and duel-driven spectacle.
- 3
The production separates source and anime visual authorship clearly: Kei Amagi is credited for the original story, Nino Ninomoto for the original character designs, and Maho Yoshikawa for the anime character designs.
- 4
Its reception footprint is bigger than its score suggests: on MyAnimeList it holds a 5.92/10 from 184,933 votes while still ranking #745 in popularity, making it a widely sampled title rather than an obscure low-rated fantasy.
- 5
The series uses a split-protagonist appeal reflected in its tags: Male Protagonist at 74%, Female Protagonist at 55%, Primarily Female Cast at 79%, and Female Harem at 56%, positioning it between mentor-led action fantasy and character-driven academy drama.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- Assassins Pride aired from October 10, 2019 to December 26, 2019, placing its entire run inside the Fall 2019 season with a clean one-cour broadcast window.
- Fun fact 2
- Hitomi Mieno handled series composition, a key credit given how much of the anime’s mixed reception centers on pacing, compression, and how the serialized plot is organized.
- Fun fact 3
- The anime’s digital production pipeline had named leads for both photography and CG: Ryouhei Miyasaka served as Director of Photography, while Wataru Shibata was credited as CG Director.
- Fun fact 4
- AniList’s 57/100 score closely mirrors the MyAnimeList 5.92/10 average, showing that the show’s mixed reputation is consistent across major anime database audiences.
- Fun fact 5
- Web criticism is sharply polarized: one review framed it as a worthwhile basic growth story, another praised the late episodes’ animation and gave it 7/10, while harsher reviews called it a mess that squandered a strong premise.
Studios
- EMT Squared
