I just brought up Naruto because I don't understand how Grimgar is any different than other shows in that regard@Krayz - It doesn't help your point about musical scenes when the series you bring up is Naruto.
I'm actually okay with musical scenes if they are done for a reason, not including padding of course. Those scenes are ideally added to modify pacing. When things are going too fast, you add them to tone things down. When things are going slow, you add them to cram a lot of content in a minute or so of no-dialog music.
Grimgar, an already slow show, used them to... well... do nothing much. You can literally take them all out and the show wouldn't be any worse. Well, except for the first one because we knew nothing about the characters back then, so any info was welcome.
Also take note that this show was made to air weekly. While I agree with you that watching it in one go would alleviate the slowness, that doesn't make it okay for it to feel really slow in the airing schedule it was originally created for. In short, while it isn't a deal breaker, the criticism is valid.
And I'd actually say the show would get worse without them. I'm trying to understand what you dislike about them, they don't really make the show "slower" either. The statement that these scenes didn't do anything is objectively false.
Let's take a look if we are actually talking about the same scenes:
Ep2 for example after they killed their first goblin:
Haru walks around in town, it shows us how things work, if you refuse to earn money, you'll end on the streets as failed soldiers, probably starving to death. Ranta is clearly shaken from what he did, he can finally eat though, the girls can finally spend money and Manato is finally able to relax as a party-leader, because they earned money for the first time. It also tells us something about how each member is able to cope with the situation. And they didn't have to use a single line of Voice acting for this and since they showed us so many different angles, how would you put that in a scene without music that is both "beautiful" to look at and make sense. I think it's a bit unfair, maybe even a bit deriding when people expect so little of Anime directors/writers/authors that they assume that these scenes don't tell a story on their own and/or is pure coincidence. (Not only talking about Grimgar, and I'm not saying you do that - I don't know)
I'm well aware that shit-tier animes exist where this stuff makes no sense at all, but it seemed rather obvious to me that this show actually utilized them very well and the staff actually knew what they were doing.
As for the pace:
I think "slow" might even be the wrong word in the first place. They didn't progress as much in terms of solving mysteries, which means that the "plot" doesn't really advance, which is why I brought up the "goblin hunting for 4 weeks"-part, but it's not like nothing important happened in these 4 episodes. People might expect the "level up!" part to come with every week, but it really was more of a coming-of-age story where the "level up" meant that the characters themselve grew up and started to see things differently.
Take Haru's character progression as an example and then take a look at how the anime ended and what was said when he visited Manato's grave once more...and I'm not talking about the part *after* Manato's ghost disappeared all of a sudden. The words and dialogue itself have been carefully chosen imo.
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