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 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 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.