Born blind, Kunon aims to be the first person to use water magic to create new eyes for himself. After five months of study, he has already surpassed his teacher and continues to grow his talents. Not only can his magic help him sense color, but he can also use it to make handy items and even conjure a whole cat. Word of his skills and ingenuity soon reached the court and earned him a spot as disciple to the most powerful magician in the land.

Kunon the Sorcerer Can See is based onUmikaze Minamino 'sKunon the Sorcerer Can See (Majutsu-shi Kunon wa Mieteiru) light novel series. The anime series is streaming onCrunchyroll on Sundays.

I'm happy we got to see two episodes of this anime because it let me really get a feel for how this series will go. With the first episode, I was afraid that Kunon had already overcome his blindness completely, and it would be dropped from the plot. After all, he could even distinguish the color of the items around him as well as sense their shape. However, the point of these episodes is to show us that what Kunon longs for is not the ability to see but rather the ability to see the world as everyone else does.

With his water magic, what Kunon perceives is different. Rather than light reflecting off objects, he sees the magic in all things. Thus, he can see through walls or over distances beyond that of the human eye. He sees people as circles of magic, pulsing in tune with their heartbeats. So even with this “sight,” his goal remains the same.

Beyond that, I also enjoyed the little differences between this story and other overpowered magic user tales. Kunon has trained himself to be the ultimate flirt with smooth (yet shallow) pick-up lines for every situation. However, it's clear that he knows this is a game of sorts—one he plays with both his maid and his fiancée, in which they respond in kind.

He also uses it as an icebreaker—he is clearly playing the fool to make himself not look like a threat. This is also why he subtly dispatches the prince instead of showing off his own power—and likewise pretends he's just a boy hungry for hamburgers in the aftermath. He's far more aware of the social nature of the school than he lets on—and knows that what he says and does affects the reputation of both his fiancée and his brother.

All in all, while I wouldn't call this a show to write home about, it is perfectly watchable. If you're looking for a lighthearted power fantasy with some well-realized personal interactions, there's nothing wrong with givingKunon the Sorcerer Can See a try.

At first, I thoughtKunon the Sorcerer Can See was going to go in a much weirder direction. When the young protagonist held his hand up to his eyes and whispered, “I might be able to create them with magic,” I took it to mean he was planning to literally replace his eyeballs with magic. That must be why he's wearing a blindfold in all of the promotional materials, right? He has orbs of magic water where his eyes should be, and that would freak people out to see?

However, it turned out he only wanted to use magic to see, rather than creating some kind of off-putting enchanted prosthesis. The two episodes that came out today are riddled with similarly odd translation errors, such as him referring to needing a new cane to attend school, then being shown gripping a new wand instead. At times it's hard to tell what's poor writing, and what's being obfuscated and rendered nonsensical by poor translation. The show has enough wit to make me believe that quite a bit is being lost in translation, but not enough that I'm ready to chalk its clunkiness entirely up to the English version being a hack job.

While it doesn't have a single reference to stats or reincarnation, Kunon the Sorcerer still carries the stink of amateurish light novel fantasy. There's an incuriosity to the writing that grated at me throughout, a lining up of circumstances that never quite made sense. Even if Kunon has been blind since birth and raised to believe he was utterly helpless, I have a hard time buying that he's never been curious about exploring the world with his other senses, to the extent that he doesn't know what the ingredients in his sandwich are. His family seems very nice, but their young disabled son is living apart from them on the other side of some woods, with only his nanny (who may or may not be a sexual predator) to care for him? How is he using magic to see? There's so much that doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds, because web novels so rarely have care put into their world, instead dashed off one chapter at a time as quickly as possible.

At the same time, it has a sense of humor that's rare among its ilk. While Iko makes some remarks that would get you fired from any respectable childcare job, her teasing relationship with Kunon made it come across that the two of them have an actual bond, instead of a servant one-sidedly fawning over her master. When Kunon is threatened at school by the bullying prince, he doesn't dominate him with a show of power, but uses his control of water to make him look like he peed his pants. Juvenile? Sure. But it wasn't what I expected, and that counts for a lot.

I have a confession to make: when I clicked on the link for this show, I didn't notice thatCrunchyroll inexplicably played episode two instead of episode one. So I watched these out of order…and you know what?I didn't notice until the episode ended. And while I did go back and watch episode one after episode two, I can't say it made much difference. Yes, I understood where Kunon was coming from a bit better, but it didn't make Iko less annoying or add substantially to the plot or characters. The only thing I was truly left with was a question about why Kunon kept saying he was going to “create eyeballs” with his magic when what hereally meant was that he was going to create vision. He alreadyhas eyeballs, and he's fully aware of that fact, as a scene in episode one amply demonstrates.

The preceding paragraph may give you an idea of how cold this left me. Kunon himself isn't a particularly interesting character – he's a fairly standard child prodigy. His motivation, to cure his blindness by means of mastering magic, is mildly interesting, but he learns it so quickly in episode one that it really doesn't feel like he's worked for it. Very possibly, this is an adaptation issue; eager to get to the meat of the story, it feels likely that the anime condensed a large chunk of the source novels, a supposition supported by the fact that he's apparently going to spend all of one, maybe one and a half, episodes at magic school. This show has a place it's trying to reach.

Sadly, I don't really care about where that is. Everyone is depressingly one-note, from overly perky and mildly avaricious Iko (Kunon's personal maid) to concerned big brother Ixio to fiancée Princess Mirika, who only seems okay with Kunon once he becomes a magical prodigy. (Although in her defense, he was pretty gloomy before.) Prince Lyle is nothing more than a bully, and the one semi-decent thing I can say about Kunon's face-off with him is that making it look like the prince wet himself is in line with Kunon's age and maturity. The visuals are bland, the animation stilted, and the plot negligible given its speed. Iko's jokes about how cute Mirika is are tasteless even though they're meant to be funny, and overall, this just isn't an enjoyable viewing experience. Hopefully, the better material is yet to come, but I'm not sticking around to find out.

I really like the foundation thatKunon the Sorcerer Can See is building on. Here we have a fairly generic fantasy world, sure, but the show is at least using the setting as a pretext to craft a fairly unique premise for its hero. Kunon is a boy who is blind in a world where many other people born with the “Hero's Scar” are left without sight, mobility, or other such faculties that most others take for granted. It is also a world where magic is very real, though, so Kunon dedicates his life to becoming a powerful enough sorcerer that his magic will give him the ability to see. It is hardly a subtle premise on its own - the parallels to how disabled people in our reality use technology and other societal accommodations to access the world around them are obvious - but it is a fresh enough take for this most familiar and overexposed of anime genres.

So, after a worryingly dour opening few minutes, the rest of Kunon the Sorcerer's first two episodes focus on showing how the titular character's newfound optimism and drive change his life and bring him closer to the other characters in the cast. His devoted servant is behind him from Day 1, of course, and he has a faithful professor who is becoming alarmed at the pace of his learning. Still, Princess Mirika isn't entirely won over until she experiences Kunon's new outlook and confidence firsthand. For any novice light novel authors reading this review, this is called “Developing characters and establishing likeable dynamics between them.” It is a critical, yet often ignored, building block of any halfway decent story.

Of course, it is one thing to find yourself and gain some confidence surrounded by supportive friends in the only home you've ever known, but what about the rest of the world? The second episode of the series sends Kunon to school, where, despite his older brother's watchful eyes, he must figure out how to navigate a much more complicated and precarious environment. While I could nitpick how most of society's prejudices have been foisted upon the cliche bully character and his cronies, I think it's smart of the series to focus more on Kunon's growth instead of fetishizing his suffering. Viewers looking for a sophisticated, emotionally nuanced take on living in a fantasy society with a disability like blindness might be disappointed by how low-key Kunon is with its stakes and conflicts, but it nonetheless makes for pleasant viewing.

More than anything, I just wish the show, well, looked better. It's far from a disaster, butKunon the Sorcerer Can See is remarkably plain and unambitious with its presentation. This is a real shame, since I can imagine all sorts of creative and visually expressive ways to communicate Kunon's different perspective and the like, but this anime is content to merely point the metaphorical camera at the most obvious spot and roll out simple back-and-forth conversations until the scene is up. Maybe this is a case where the light novel is the best way to experience Kunon's story, unburdened as it is by the pesky limitations of the visual medium.