The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Villainess Level 99

Yumiella Dolkness is your run-of-the-mill villainess in an otome RPG—except that she's also secretly the overpowered hidden boss. But Yumiella wasn't always Yumiella. In her past life, she was nothing more than an introverted college student and devout gamer. When she realizes that she's been reincarnated as a hidden boss, she's determined to steer clear of the protagonists and avoid her demise at their hands. All she wants is a nice, quiet life. Too bad when her gamer instincts kick in, Yumiella can't just ignore her awesome stats... A girl's gotta grind. So, with plenty of time on her hands before starting life at the academy, she gets a little carried away and maxes out her level at 99. And when everyone else finds out, they get the wrong idea about her power—now they think she's the Demon Lord.

Villainess Level 99 is based on a light novel series of the same name by the author Satori Tanabata and illustrator Tea. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

To be frank, I respect any anime willing to commit to a bit—and if anything, Villianess Level 99 does that to the extreme. Not only does the first half of the episode adapt what is basically a different anime from the show we are actually watching, it goes so far as to give it its' own visual novel-style title sequence and theme song. I can't tell you how hard I was laughing at that opening—or how much I smiled every time the actual main character shows up in the background.

Of course, committing to the bit is also a double edged sword of sorts. Light and Hero has the most bog standard fantasy otome game story in existence. Now, I am well aware that's the point—it has to be like this to create the comedy that comes from Yumiella massively derailing the archetypal story with her overpowered existence. However, that doesn't make it any less boring to watch Alicia and her cookie-cutter love interests go through the motions.

Luckily, before the bit outstays its welcome too badly, we get to the real story. This is also a bit of a cliché. We have a girl reincarnated as the villainess in the world of an otome game after being killed by Truck-kun. Then comes the twist: She's a hardcore powergamer.

While she doesn't intend to interfere with the plot directly (other than to remove her self from it as best she can), she realizes that doing so might allow the Demon King to win—so it's only logical to make sure she can take him down if needed. Thus, using her knowledge of the game the world is based on, she spends her young life leveling in the most efficient way possible.

The result: she is level 99 in a world where people are impressed by someone being level 10. That's the comedic base the series is built upon. It's unfortunate we don't get a real sense of what being level 99 means this episode but it works as an okay hook to bring you back in next week. In the end, while it was a bit of a gamble to spend so much time on Light and Hero, it seems to have worked out alright.

If you didn't really register the title, it would be very easy to be thrown off by the bait-and-switch of the first half of this episode. It may not be the most interesting thing to watch, but it's also not supposed to be, and I love how hard they committed to that. Not only are Alicia's adventures starting at the Royal Academy as cookie-cutter as possible, but there's also a tangible effort to lean into the blandness of the whole thing. From the stupid skirts on the girls' uniforms – noticeably more modern than virtually every other outfit in the show – to the cut-and-paste lines spouted by the three obvious love interests, the start of this episode is deliberate otome game-style garbage, and it's amazing. Throwing in a fake opening theme is just the icing on the cake.

It's all in service of making Yumiella's story feel more innovative than it perhaps is. Here, too, we have a pretty basic retread of genre norms, with our old pal Truck-kun returning to the isekai scene and Yumiella reborn into a game she played back in Japan, but as the bad guy. At least this time, the use of "villainess" works better than in 99% of shows; the original game was an otome/RPG hybrid, and Yumiella was, in fact, a hidden boss. (Amusingly, a more standard villainess character appears to be indicated by the false opening.) Since Yumiella has zero desire to steal away the romantic leads from perky pink-haired Alicia, she decides just to lay low and have a regular life. If she doesn't interact with them, she figures she may avoid the plot altogether. This is relatively standard fare, perhaps more akin to the light novel series I Refuse to Be Your Enemy! than anything that's been animated, but still within the realm of what we expect.

The hook here is that in her zeal to avoid being destroyed by the heroes in the future, Yumiella has overdone her training, bringing us back to the title. When she's declared level 99 in front of the entire school, she realizes that she can kiss her under-the-radar life goodbye, so the meat of the story will likely be her attempt to present herself as nothing like a threat while being a very known and potentially suspicious person. It feels fair to say that the series may live and die with Yumiella's character – the others are busy living out the game plot beat-for-beat, and that looks like it means being very wary of Little Miss 99, which could try to force her back into the main plot. So far, I'm not sold that the anime will pull that off. Still, the source material (both original novels and manga adaptation) is quite good, so this merits a second episode. It's not the best-looking show this season, but it has potential.

This episode starts pretty great. Sure, beginning with a fake out of this being a straightforward dating sim show isn't the most original gag, but it's the kind that gets funnier the more you commit to it. By the time we got to the full-length OP sequence, complete with character title cards and sprite art, I had a pretty good laugh. The longer we went before pulling the rug out, the more I anticipated the swerve, where we'd reveal what this show was actually about – I mean, we can all see what the show's title is, let's be real. If they were going to devote so much time to this intro, surely it would be worth the payoff, right?

Yet, just past the halfway mark, the show completely fumbles that punchline. The transition from following Alicia, the archetypal otome game heroine, to our isekai'd villainess lead is so sloppy and jarring that it takes a while to realize it's happened. What follows is the exact opposite of a good punchline, treating us to a speed-run of Yumiella's boring life of level grinding, narrated by our purposefully deadpan heroine in what has to be the biggest waste of Fairouz Ai's vocal talent I've heard. It's a total misfire, dropping us into the exact kind of dull, boring isekai world-building that's been stinking up the subgenre for damn near a decade. After going through all this trouble of a bait and switch, we get yet another overpowered, charisma-devoid lead who's defined by a single joke, and is somehow less interesting than the purposefully one-note love interest characters.

It leaves the premiere floundering for identity, ending on a joke that's as predictable as it is overdone. It's akin to watching somebody confidently strut up to home plate, dust off their shoulders, take a couple of practice swings, and then whiff while swinging at a batting tee. The worst part is that this weird half-measure approach means we don't know what this show will be like. Is the premise that the heroine and her suitors will pre-judiciously pursue Yumiella Dolkness, as the OP suggests? Is she going to be trying to avoid drama over her now-public over-leveling? More importantly, why should I care when Yumelia herself has exhibited 0 interesting personality traits and shared no dialogue with anyone else?

That's the risk when you face you try this kind of intro. If what you bait is comparably more interesting than what you switch to, all people are left with is that they lost something they might have been interested in. If we had just started this episode from Yumelia's perspective, it still wouldn't be great, but it would give us more time to get to know our central character and what this show is trying to do. Here, it's a collection of half-measures that don't pay off and left me with virtually no interest in watching more.

On the one hand, the idea of Villainess Level 99 presenting a large chunk of its premiere as an episode of "Light Magic and Hero" is cute, at least on paper. The main character that we eventually do meet even describes the whole affair as a "cliché story," so giving us a peek at the unadulterated "Light Magic and Hero" experience is an opportunity ripe for gentle parody and satire of a genre that this anime itself fully admits is chock-full of these kinds of paint-by-numbers snoozefests. True to form, the story of Alicia Ehnleit and the dull-as-dishwater boys she ends up befriending is almost entirely devoid of charm or personality…but this is where the problems with Villainess Level 99 arrive. There aren't any jokes or seemingly any interesting storytelling decisions of any kind to heighten the experience of watching this fake episode of anime or make it different from just…watching "Light Magic and Hero." It's just exactly what it says on the tin: A really boring story about bland characters who live in a dull setting and get into, I don't know, whatever kinds of adventures you can even have in a world where the very concept of having something interesting to do or say seems to be punishable by the pain of death.

Now, you'd think this is where the "twist" of Villainess Level 99 would come in. Surely, the arrival of the actual protagonist, who is explicitly being framed as an overpowered villain capable of destroying the world or whatever, will have to add some flavor to the proceedings? Alas, it isn't to be, because the show's decision to dedicate so much time to telling a painfully boring and cliché fake version of the story means that it must rush through the equally boring and cliché real version. The sad truth is that the sole trait of our true heroine that could come even remotely close to being described as any variety of fun or compelling is her name: Yumiella Dolkness. Just…just say it out loud with me. "Yumiella Dolkness." It has to be a Top 10 Contender for one of the goofiest names of anything this side of the Gundam franchise, and yet this doesn't even seem to be an intentional joke on the show's part. Other than her ridiculous name, Yumiella Dolkness is such a bland and featureless protagonist that the episode doesn't even lose anything by speed-running the Wikipedia summary of her life up to this point: she got hit by a truck; she was reborn as the villain of her…favorite (???) RPG doesn't want to make a fuss or die; they ended up overpowered anyway.

I'm honestly at a loss for what else to even say about this show. This premiere's lopsided pacing and focus come across as a half-assed attempt to find a different spin on presenting a story that everyone involved seems to recognize as being about as entertaining as an overlong appointment at the DMV. I genuinely cannot point to a single thing Villainess Level 99 tries to do that can't be found in other shows that seem to be putting in at least a tiny bit of effort by comparison. Steer clear of this one unless you have, for some reason, been dying to watch a premiere that manages to cram two equally terrible anime into a single half-hour of your precious time on this Earth.