Ha, I haven't been checking this thread too much this season, I guess it doesn't get much love around here.
I like the sorts of things in Grimgar that you mention - the silence, the contemplative scenes - and I think Ryosuke Nakamura has some good ideas in where he wants to take this series. But the pervy scenes centered around Ranta, Ranta's whole obnoxious hammy personality, and the awful music conspire to drag the show down from what it could be.
I'm really not a fan of fanservice in anime, but I don't think that Grimgar's been too much of an offender there. The first episode had them sitting around eating lunch while on their way to hunt goblins, and Ranta starts making all these lewd comments about the girls in the group, but I thought that actually had some relevance to the story as well. It was able to show how unfamiliar and uncomfortable everyone in the group was with each other. Ranta's basically going "Hey, we're all guys here, check out these women in front of us", looking for some encouragement and justification from the other guys in the group, and everyone finds it weird and creepy. I'm not sure if this was the intention, but I thought that paired up well with the action scenes where they botch killing their first goblin(s), to show how unharmonious and unnatural their group initially was. I think this is the only scene that has the camera focusing on ass/cleavage for uncomfortable lengths of time.
I think the only other fanservicey scene was when Ranta wants to peek on them taking a bath, but I don't remember it actually having much fanservice, and just chalked it up to anime trope. I see Ranta's character as someone trying really hard to be seen as a badass outsider to the group, but completely failing and just being a total ass overall. But I don't think that he really has any ill-intentions, and nobody else in the group takes him very seriously. He's also more sensitive than his exterior-persona lets on, because he gets upset at Haru that nobody in the group takes him seriously and that they've all gotten into the habit of dismissing everything he says.
The music hasn't been very memorable to me, but it's never been offensively bad. The OP sounds something straight from an early-2000's DDR game, which I think is pretty corny but nowhere near as bad as the intro to Parasyte. The only other song I can think of is the "Scenes from the next episode" music, which I like. Nothing else has stuck with me.
Story-wise, I really like how it's been going so far. I enjoy the low stake/short-term/personal goals of "We need money for food" or "We need more than one pair of clothes", etc. compared to the usual "We need to figure out how to get save everyone in this game and get them back to the real world" that every other show in the genre has. I also like the little things like showing the goblins as sentient and having their own culture.
Honestly as much as I pretend like I hate Grimgar to be cool with the rest of the guys here, I'm really enjoying it. It'll be a shame when it's over.
Gobis 4 life
m'Man
