First of all: I watched the twelve episodes in one go. How rare that has become. And yes, a second season would have been cool. It's incomprehensible why it wasn't produced.
In contrast to the usual Isekai anime, the protagonists of "Grimgar Ashes and Illusions" (not the original title, just the international title) wake up in a new medieval country without any special knowledge -- and are immediately asked to train as soldiers in order to earn money to survive. In practice, this means that they have to go orc hunting from day one, so to speak, to make a living -- and at the same time, in parallel, they have to train their special skills and knowledge in guilds that they have chosen themselves. And so they go into battles fairly inexperienced and naive -- and in the first few episodes an important character dies, whom they mourn for a long time.
The orcs are not stupid monsters, as is often the case in fantasy series... they play chess, sit around the fire together, eat and laugh together... and they develop their own strategies and plan raids. So they seem very human. The moral dimension of killing orcs is addressed in one of the later episodes.
The backgrounds of the protagonists remain a mystery, only that they come from a more modern time in which there are cell phones is obvious. But they cannot think more deeply about the fragments of their previous existence because they are in the precarious situation described and have to expect death every day -- and are forced to constantly develop and adapt to new things.
So much for the positive things.
What distinguishes the anime from really good anime: the characters are completely uninteresting. Just three weeks after watching it, I can no longer remember the main characters... so I am not mentioning them by name in this review. The Internet also seems to have largely forgotten the series.
