Before getting into what the show is about, let’s talk about the technical value of this anime. Oh, that’s right! It’s non existent. The animation is extremely bad, even in the moments where its quality should be the highest (the first and the last episode). The characters’ faces are inconsistent and often look ugly because of their distortion. The character designs are forgettable: the protagonist has the generic evil face, clothing is dull, and female characters are only sexy thanks to their over-sized breasts. The backgrounds and background characters are badly drawn, and the design of the landscapes and buildings is the generic stuff you can find in a crappy isekai hentai. There is little actual animation, as most of the fight scenes – which are ridiculously gore, by the way – consist for the most part in static images with movements lines. The art style is also very ugly. I would go as far as saying that there isn’t a single frame that looks good in the entire show. The sound isn’t much better. The sound effects are ridiculous: blades cutting through flesh sounds like a goddamn kitchen knife slicing a tomato. The background music is shitty and repetitive. The voice acting isn’t particularly good either, with exaggerated evil laughs and the like.
So, what’s this anime about? Simply put: it’s a revenge story and a rape fantasy. The protagonist, Keyaru (later called Keyaruga), the healing magician of a team of “heroes”, uses magic to go back in time to redo everything and get his revenge on the “heroes” who mistreated him and raped him for four years. How does he get revenge on them? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth: he rapes them and tortures them one by one, along with rewriting the memories of some of them to turn them into his sex slaves. Keyaruga doesn’t hesitate to be more cruel than his enemies: gang rape, rape by monsters, psychological torture… As the show progresses, it gets trashier and edgier. In this anime, sexual abuse fixes everything and is the solution to all problems.
Luckily for Keyaruga, his ability allows him to copy the abilities of other people, making him overpowered and pretty much unbeatable. Every time a fight starts, you just know Keyaruga is going to win without an effort, and then do horrible things to his enemy. He is also lucky that two of his former abusers are sexy young women with huge breasts. What’s interesting about him, though, is that he went as far as to go through torture and sexual abuse a second time – which includes pretty funny stuff like CBT, being ass-raped by a strong man, and being forced to suck his own dick, among other things – in order to get his revenge.
There are many flaws in the plot but I will mainly talk about the two major ones. The first major flaw in the plot is the fact that Keyaruga’s revenge starts too early. “Revenge is a dish best served cold” says the proverb, in other words: revenge needs preparation. The show would have been far less shit if there were more episodes focused on the preparation of his revenge. It would have helped create complicity between the viewer and the protagonist as he plans his revenge while suffering from the mistreatment, the torture and the sexual abuse. But no, this show wants to provide immediate “justice porn”, so we don’t get to see much planning, as the revenge starts as early as episode 2, with Keyaru raping Flare, one his former abusers, which brings me to the second major flaw of the plot: the glorification of rape.
As I said earlier, Keyaru / Keyaruga gets revenge on his former abusers mostly by raping them, which means that there are many rape scenes in this series. Granted, this is not the first time that an anime has rape scenes. But contrary to series like Berserk, where rape is clearly shown as an evil act made by degenerates, and contributes to making the series dark, in this series rape is also done by the protagonist. This wouldn’t be a problem if the protagonist was portrayed as evil, but that’s not really the case. Keyaru / Keyaruga doesn’t act evil for the sake of being evil, but to achieve his revenge, and his revenge is legitimate, given how badly he was mistreated. When he rapes one his former abusers, the viewer is supposed to enjoy the scene since they are “getting what they deserve”. Not only is rape shown in an almost positive light, the protagonist isn’t even portrayed as evil for committing rape and torture, in fact in many instances he is presented as some sort of anime Batman, much like Zero in Code Geass, because he fights against a corrupt power and sides with the oppressed – at some point there’s even a cheesy anti-racist message, something nobody would expect from the incel fantasy that this series is.
Regarding the other problems of the plot, there’s little actual world-building, and most of it is the stereotypical stuff you can find in any garbage isekai: a European-looking country, video game classes, heroes, magic, monsters, and demons, with male demons looking like orcs and female demons looking like… normal human women with slightly different ears. The names of characters and places are also pretty bad: Jioral kingdom, Keyaru / Keyaruga, Flare, Trist Organ, Kureha Crylet… Someone should tell the author that putting random letters one after another isn’t an efficient way to create good names.
Coming back to the characters, they can be separated into three categories: the protagonist, the bad guys, and the female characters who make up the protagonist’s harem.
The protagonist, Keyaruga, is by far the “least worst” character since he is the only one that has an actual objective, namely revenge, and each of his actions is done to achieve this objective. He is also the only one who gets some development, through flashbacks and such. Even so, that isn’t enough to make him a good protagonist. While it is pretty obvious that he is crazy, the anime still tries to portray his actions as justified.
The bad guys are cartoonishly evil. They are all psychopaths and degenerates who love to torture, rape, kill and plunder on a daily basis and for no apparent reason. Some people say that this anime is realistic, it is not. In the real world, people don’t do evil things for the sake of being evil, they do it to obtain certain things, such as money and power. This is not the case in this anime, where the bad guys are all sadists and perverts who hate the protagonist for no valid reason, which makes them shitty villains.
The female characters aren’t better. Once they join the protagonist’s harem, they are deprived or their personality and turned into sex dolls who only appear on the screen to have sex with the protagonist.
Not only are the characters and the plot bad, this series isn’t even good as a porn. As I said earlier, the animation in this anime looks like shit. This also applies to the sex scenes, and there are many of them. Seriously, even low quality hentai performs better than this. I ended up skipping most of them since they were ugly, ridiculous and didn’t add anything to the plot. On a positive note, it does have a lot of different fetishes: femdom, gender bender, wolf girl, monsters, strangulation, humiliation, slavery, CBT, etc…
In conclusion, Kaifuku Jutsushi no Yarinaoshi doesn’t bring anything new to the medium. It’s one these shows that try to appeal to the teenagers by having a lot of violence, rape and torture, so that they can feel like they’re watching something mature – spoiler: violence doesn’t equate maturity. If you’ve been bullied by girls in high school or hate women because they won’t date you, this anime was made for you. Otherwise if you have good taste in anime you should avoid this show.
SUB-SCORE EXPLANATION:
Animation: little actual animation; inconsistent and ugly faces; ugly art-style; ugly backgrounds and background characters; forgettable character designs; not a single frame looks good→ 2/10
Sound: ridiculous SFX; bad BGM; very average VA → 3/10
Story: just a rape fantasy; bad revenge story; no world-building → 2/10
Character: OP protagonist; bad villains; little character development or character evolution; female characters are sex dolls → 2/10
Enjoyment: no historical or sentimental value whatsoever; zero re-watch value; it is sometimes so bad it can be enjoyable, but not much → 1/10
Overall: 2/10
