The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - A Wild Last Boss Appeared!

The year is 2800, and Lufas Maphaahl – The Black-Winged Tyrant, Great Conqueror, and leader of the Twelve Heavenly Stars – has returned. A man wakes up in the body of his MMO character 200 years after her defeat during a player-made event in the game, Exgate Online. Now, he's stuck in her body. But this isn't a game, it's real. With her reign long over, and her legacy one of fear, Lufas must journey through the world of Exgate, looking for answers, possible comrades, and all the monsters her “death” unleashed upon the world.

A Wild Last Boss Appeared! is based on the light novel series by Firehead and YahaKo. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

I had A Wild Last Boss Appeared! earmarked as a potential choice for my worst of the season; the trailer promised something bad, but maybe in a way that's wild or fun to watch. This was entirely predicated on the existence of a robot maid whose head and body spin independently as she shoots lasers from her eyes, bullets from her fingers, and missiles from under her skirt. A series with that could be just stupid enough to… well, not work, but fall apart entertainingly.

After watching the first episode, I don't know if I'm going to make it to the end, because that was a pretty rough 20-odd minutes. The premise has potential to do something slightly outside the norm, combining and remixing MMORPG isekai tropes with reincarnated Demon Lord tropes. And hey, maybe it will. Much like how robot maids are a standard trope, and missiles flying from under the skirt is a standard trope, but put them together with a little spin – by which I mean a spinning head – and you get something bonkers. But there's no sign of that yet as the episode bounces through all the beats one would expect for an isekai where a player is reincarnated as their opposite-sex MMO avatar, boob-grab and overly devoted servant included.

Plus, it outright hurts to look at. Instead of good animation and compositing, Wao World has opted to slap on filters and particle effects and crank the brightness way, way up. It features some cool lighting effects, such as colored light filtering through stained glass windows with dust motes floating through the air, as well as contrast between dim and brightly lit areas in a room. However, poor execution makes it feel more like sitting in a dark room when someone shines their phone screen with the brightness all the way up in your eyes, then turns it back off. Your eyes can't figure out how to adjust.

Now, I will give it this: it is always a goddamn delight to hear Ami Koshimizu, without exception. She's working in her lower register here as Lufas, and she has the gravitas to pull off her involuntarily arrogant speech patterns. Not that this is going to be a particularly challenging or complex role for her to pull off; I just like her voice, and it's nice to hear it.

A Wild Last Boss Appeared! did not provide me with the brainless good time I wanted, at least as of episode one. Episode 2 better have that robot maid.

This is one of those episode 2 entries where I go back and check what I gave the premiere, because I want to make sure it's marginally higher, because this episode was marginally better. But I have to make sure it's not too high, lest I deceive my dear readers into thinking the episode was anything approaching good.

A Wild Last Boss is not good. However, this episode was marginally better than the first one. You see, modern-day isekai are proof against the common wisdom that you want to pack a pilot with things that will set your story apart before settling into a comfortable groove. A Wild Last Boss, like so many series of its ilk, shies away from doing anything interesting in the first episode, lest it scare and confuse its core audience seeking the artistic equivalent of fast food. Doing something different would be like going to a different McDonald's from your usual one, and their Big Mac sauce tasted slightly different.

And thus, it's in the second episode that most isekai distinguish themselves, if they ever do. Now that it has gone through all the generic tutorial content, it can start to explore its ideas. I will give its writers credit – instead of an incurious repetition of tropes, they thought some of the world's elements through. When Lufas and Dina rescue some women from a group of orcs that had kidnapped them, Dina explains that orcs' warlike nature means that their tenderloin is rarely intact, which is a decent explanation for the in-game mechanic of them being a rare drop. People have levels and stats, but almost nobody ever hits the level cap because they're leading actual lives.

Extra brownie points: the women they rescued weren't being threatened with sexual assault by the orcs. It was more of a Bowser kidnapping Peach situation.

It's still not good, exactly. Dina grated on my nerves almost continuously, and for all that there were some actual ideas going on, I never found myself interested or drawn in. If you're not completely burned out on isekai and you're hoping for a series that actually has a thought in its head, A Wild Last Boss could be what you need.

This premiere felt like I was watching a twenty-minute advertisement for a game that doesn't exist. Was anyone else getting that vibe? Despite the really solid direction and impressive opening animated fight, a majority of this premiere was the protagonist talking about the game that he's trapped in at breakneck speed. There can be a lot of appeal in watching a show revolving around an overpowered main character. However, aside from One-Punch Man, those setups rarely win me over because overpowered characters seldom make for an interesting story.

There are some hints and glimmers of character development to latch onto in the larger narrative. This world presents interesting questions to the main character, Lufas Maphaahl, such as how the NPCs ' processing of events affects different characters and the general perception of time. I am also curious about the other heroes reappearing after that major confrontation at the beginning of the episode. There's a lot here that's most likely to be revealed to the audience as the show progresses. The problem is that this premiere didn't do much to get me to care.

Outside of just being an unstoppable monster whose powers apparently rival the demon king, I don't know anything about Lufas' new reincarnated form. The episode focuses so much on recreating a video game's tutorial mode, establishing stats, abilities, and background lore that the characters are left by the wayside. This is a pure power fantasy show in every sense of the word, and it's banking on riding that rule of cool. I like how bright and colorful everything looks, and there's a lot of potential in the action sequences, but life is too short to sit down and watch twenty minutes of flashing colors. I need a little bit more than that, and this premiere didn't even get my hopes up that there will be any in the future.

This is a slight step in the right direction, but unfortunately, it's not by much. The problem with this show is that it is more or less completely devoid of any stakes or genuine tension. Our main character is still an overpowered badass who can seemingly get stronger with access to numerous forms of broken magic. We don't even need to get the full breadth of her abilities because her assistant, who is definitely weaker than her, has access to magic and abilities that could genuinely break whatever game this is supposed to be. However, there are hints and seeds of interesting conversations going on in this overblown slop of wish fulfillment.

I like the idea that after two hundred years, the entire political and social landscape of everything has shifted. I wish the show leaned more into that angle of seeing the world after the supposedly happily ever after, when the heroes killed villains, because realistically, not everything should be wrapped up in such a tight bow. Our main character wasn't even the main villain, so the fact that there was somebody beyond her that the heroes couldn't immediately beat is interesting, although I am a little mixed on the idea that she wasn't as evil as the stories originally claimed. The protagonist calls themselves a villain, so the fact that there's all of this information now available about how apparently being ruled under her wasn't that bad feels like the show is trying to soften the blow of who our protagonist was trying to role-play as. After all, if all of these NPCs are now suddenly real people and our protagonist acted as a genuine villain in the game, he would have to deal with the moral repercussions of potentially ruining the lives of hundreds, if not millions, of people.

Only two episodes in, and it feels like the show is trying to retcon itself, despite barely even establishing its own sense of lore or scale. Maybe the show is trying to go for this idea about how nothing is ever as it seems or how the events of history can alter when you look back on it versus when you're living it in the moment. I am genuinely curious as to what happened during those two hundred years, so it's a shame that the episode skimmed over it. Maybe I'll get more context for what happens as our protagonist runs into some of the other heroes, or maybe even some other players. There are seeds of something more than what this show really advertises itself, but I hope those seeds don't get drowned in all the flashing lights and pretty colors.

This is far from the first anime where a person has been reincarnated as their game character in a fantasy world. This is also not the first anime to have that character be an evil overlord-type character. However, as with all genre fiction, it is the twists made upon the common formula where all the fun comes from.

In this case, we have our nameless main character. He awakens to find himself in the body of his female character, Lufas. This leads to the old trope of a man in a woman's body—but that's just the start. Unlike many of these tales, our nameless hero is not only affected by the body of Lufas but her mind as well. Throughout the episode, he finds himself doing things like speaking in her royal cadence (despite his best efforts to stop) and being able to fly despite never having wings before.

But the subtly terrifying bit is that, when he lets his guard down, he gets flashes of her memories. In a real way, his personality is under attack by the body he is in. Each memory or subconscious action erodes who he is. By the end of the episode, he finds that killing living, thinking beings doesn't affect him—even when he knows it should. And when he massacres a tribe of orcs, he does so with a sense of disdain at how weak they are—something clearly out of character for a normal gamer dude.

And beyond Lufas, we have the mystery of the world itself. Has he truly been pulled into the game? Or is this a fantasy world that happens to resemble it? Are there other “players” like himself? How much can he trust his in-game knowledge, and how much of it is a potentially dangerous misconception? Add to these mysteries some above-average animation, and you have a show that feels right up my alley. I'm excited to see where it will go.

On one hand, this episode looks like the simple continuation of Lufas' story as she and Dina finish up their orc extermination and travel to Svel—the location of another potential player character and one of her 12 monster generals. Along the way, we learn a bit about the setting—including important bits like how the non-demon races have become drastically weaker compared to the setting of the game, and now only occupy a small corner of the world. However, it's on the other hand where things get interesting. Has there ever been a character as suspicious as Dina? She has teleportation magic that Lufas has never seen before (despite being the best player of the game), isn't taken aback when Lufas asks about things that she absolutely should know (like what mana looks like), and is seemingly fine when Lufas expresses knowledge she shouldn't have—i.e., knowledge from our world.

But the most suspicious bit of all, her self-admitted mind-altering magic powers. Regarding the orc-captured women, Dina explains that she can not only wipe their memories of the last few days, but she could also give them new memories if she wanted. While this is said in passing, it suddenly calls her own identity into question if you stop and think about it. Did Lufas' player really create a forgotten NPC advisor character when he built his tower in the game? Or did she add that memory to ingratiate herself with Lufas?

Then there's the even more extreme possibility that the player from our world never actually existed. He could just be a creation of Dina, put in Lafus' head to make her more pliable—to make her less sure of herself and her goals by making her think she was actually a guy isekai'd from another world where the whole fantasy world was just a video game. Of course, this isn't super likely, as that would mean that Dina can either A) fabricate our world out of her own imagination, or B) has direct knowledge of our world, which, in turn, brings up another giant string of wild implications. And so all this adds a compelling background puzzle to the more immediate adventure. Who is Dina? What are her goals? How much does she know? Has she tampered with Lufas's mind? Is what we're seeing on screen even reliable information? Or are we too seeing things through the filter of Lufas's altered mind? I don't know, but it certainly makes this show engaging enough for me to keep watching.