Anime Spotlight #53: I May Be A Guild Receptionist, But I'll Solo Any Boss To Clock Out On Time

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

I May Be The Animeister,

But I'll Do AniMonday On A Tuesday To Clear My BAWklog On Time.

Yesterday, I reviewed an anime with a long title that happened before the anime started, where a middle-aged male guild receptionist dreamed of punching a mythical beast really hard, and today, I'm reviewing an anime with a long title that's the running joke of the anime where a young female guild receptionist beats monsters into fountains of blood and viscera with a giant bunny-girl hammer because she dreams of not being stuck at work her entire life.

I May Be A Guild Receptionist, But I'll Solo Any Boss To Clock Out On Time is the latter anime, based on a still-ongoing light-novel-turned-manga by Mato Kosaka and illustrated by Gaou and Suzu Yūki, and animated by Rascal and Shadows' House studio Clover Works.

In the static JRPG world of Girumasu (as it is known to those who don't want to say the entire title more than once), Adventurers are blessed with Skills of varying levels (though only two are ever mentioned by name in the anime: Sigurd and Dia, with Sigurd Skills being the more common type) that they use to complete Quests and clear Dungeons. Meanwhile, every request, resource, reward, victory, loss, damage, injury, and death means more paperwork for the Guild's understaffed reception desk, especially for the once-enthusiastic Alina Clover (whose last name has nothing to do with the animation studio, I'm sure...), who is constantly stuck with logistically impossible amounts of overtime on days that she could otherwise be having a life, and I wholeheartedly sympathize with her plight and the incredibly accurate depictions of customer service experiences applied to a fantasy setting.

On the day of the town's biggest annual festival, Alina prays with fanatical, maniacal gusto for a way to never have overtime again, and is granted a Dia Skill (the rarer, more powerful of the named types, because God): a giant hammer that can one-shot almost any monster.

But because there's a conflict of interest rule about guild receptionists not being allowed to be Adventurers, Alina creates the identity of The Executioner: a hooded edgelord who shows up in Dungeons to bail out incompetent Adventuring Parties during Boss fights because title reasons. Also, her co-worker thinks The Executioner is a guy and she has a massive, otaku crush on "him," and the leader of the most famous Party in town finds out Alina's secret identity and has a proper, repressed crush on her that gets harder to repress (I said what I said) when her house is destroyed and she has to move in with him until the Guild pays to have it repaired.

Throw in a serialized plot where someone is posting fake Quests to lure Adventurers into being sacrifices for Dark Gods with false promises that those who complete the Quest will earn Dia Skills, a few cliché harem anime episodes, the recurring joke that Alina will never escape overtime (including an episode where Alina goes through HR training to learn how to reduce overtime and learns that the secret is loving your job so much that you willingly take all of the overtime because work technically isn't work if you enjoy it).

The fights are spectacular enough, and the aforementioned leader of the Silver Sword (because famous Adventuring Parties are always Silver Something in anime) helping Alina do paperwork and learning to combine his Sigurd Skills to match a Dia Skill at the cost of his own body is pretty good character work. Even Girumasu being an anime with adult language and an edgy amount of gore that also has an OP this Celtic and chill

and an ED this happy and adorable

is a memorable feat of comedy. But the series' one joke wears thin quickly and its efforts to pivot away from formula amount to uses of other genres' tropes (that waste time which could have been put to better use in other ways that actually move the plot forward instead of providing more circumstances to execute the joke) and an easily solved mystery punctuated by a small handful of "use The Power Of Friendship to hit the broken, regenerating god harder-er with a vengeance when Alina shows up" boss fights.

There's honestly not much else to say about Girumasu without repeating myself. It's a juxtaposition-reliant, one-joke, two-act, inoffensively cute but offensively edgy action-comedy with charming music that I wouldn't expect much more or different from if there was a second season to be had.

If I were to compare it to its brother series from yesterday, Girumasu has a slight lead in originality (being another static JRPG fantasy world series, but as seen through the eyes of a downtrodden customer service grunt, whereas Ossan Newbie Adventurer is just Sol Ragna the BadEdge beating Terry Bogard at Tekken so he can collect the Dragon Balls and punch Shenron in the face and make a FullMetal Alchemist wish someday) and music (it's one of those open-and-shut Anime Banger series, while the other is too macho-goofy to be Banging either open or shut). But I feel like Ossan Newbie Adventurer, despite introducing a subplot or two that goes nowhere, handles its jokes better (they are tropes to be sure, but there are more jokes than one, and they only recur for as long as they are needed and welcome) and has more story of substance to tell beyond the one season we have so far. I know I was pretty savage about Ossan Newbie Adventurer yesterday, calling it easily forgettable, but if I had to choose which anime I'd be glad to see a second season of, I would pick the derivative punchfest with a clear, unachieved goal over the cute girl getting angry and turning monsters into hammer-ketchup twelve-to-twenty-four more times because she has to do paperwork every night instead of almost not kissing the valiant hot guy she doesn't not pretend to hate. Then again, an anime about a rich kid with a death curse being teased by his hot older maid multiple times per episode got three seasons, so maybe the world hates me more than my American citizenship and daily exposure to the news would suggest?

I've decided that tomorrow, I'd rather go back to 2012 and read about fictional people telling horror stories on Halloween that didn't actually happen because 2025, like moving in a horror movie, is truly the greatest terror. So please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can buy a time machine and/or giant, magic hammer, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

I May Be The Animeister,
But I'm Out.