The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon

When Light is kicked out of the Concord of the Tribes, his former comrades instantly turn on him. Light escapes this diabolical act of betrayal by the skin of his teeth...only to find himself in the deepest part of the Abyss, the most dangerous dungeon in the realm. To avoid being eaten by carnivorous monsters, he uses the Unlimited Gacha, his sole magical skill. But where it previously only produced junk items, this time Mei—a gorgeous Level 9999 fighter in a maid outfit—springs forth. Fast forward three years, and Light has carved out his own kingdom in this backwater dungeon, summoning more beautiful Level 9999 warriors who swear absolute fealty to him. Now a powerful Level 9999 Overlord himself, Light plans to ascend to the surface and take revenge on his betrayers one by one.

Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, But Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out For Revenge on My Former Party Members is based on the Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, But Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out For Revenge on My Former Party Members light novel series by writer Shisui Meikyou and illustrator tef. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Fridays.

Everything that sucks about this anime is laid painfully and embarrassingly bare in its title. I mean, Jesus, just look at it: Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, But Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out For Revenge on My Former Party Members. It's equal parts insipid, pathetic, insulting, and shamelessly on-the-nose. It proudly broadcasts the kind of petulant perspective that could only come ripped straight from the hastily scribbled journal entries of a maladapted, myopic teenager who refuses to even try and master the most basic of social skills. That queasy, sinking feeling that lodged into the pit of your gut when you read that title? That's exactly what watching the show is like—with the one difference being that reading the title doesn't steal an entire half-hour of your life away just to chuck it into a gaping maw of apathetic pandering.

Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon exists in diametric opposition to the actually fun and thrilling revenge fantasies out there, like May I Ask for One Final Thing? Instead of offering a main character that is inspiring and cool, we get Light, an oblivious and pathetic dweeb whose entire personality has been precision engineered to require Maximum Mommy Coddling from a gaggle of literal gacha summon waifus. Instead of a creative and compelling fantasy world, we're stuck with the same old MMORPG bullshit, watered down and recycled like so much stale piss from those suits that Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya wear in the Dune movies. Instead of a cast of villains that are at least compellingly evil and stupid, Light's titular backstabbers are just a bunch of human-hating monsters and elves whose personalities begin and end at “We're the baddies, yep yep yep.” The character designs are bargain-bin generic. The direction is completely phoned in. There is so little effort on display here that I'm shocked they even managed to work in a word as inspired as “Backwater” in the title.

Actually, you know what? I just thought of an even better and more needlessly wordy title, right this second. I hereby rechristen this anime as I Got My Yakisoba-Pan Stolen By The Popular Kids One Too Many Times, and the Skank I Have a Secret Crush on Had the Nerve to Get a Boyfriend Who is Taller Than Me, But Someday They're All Going to Pay, and Also Think I'm a Total Badass, But Still Want to Be My Best Friends: Instead of Learning to Stand Up for Myself and Maybe Make Some Actual Human Connections That Are Worth a Damn, I Simply Retreated to the Mind Palace of My Lazy Fantasy Stories (Which I Ripped Off by Copying the Manuscript of a Different But Still Equally Crappy Light Novel and Changing the Names of the Proper Nouns Just Enough to Avoid Getting Sued) Where I Have the Totally Sick and Not-At-All-Cringeworthy Power to Summon All of the Sexy Women I Want Like From The Gacha Games I Pleasure Myself To When My Parents Think I'm Studying for Cram School, and the Babes Will Totally Fawn Over Me and Call Me Special and Cute, and I Won't Even Have to Do Anything to Be Entitled to Their Adoration and Also Their Boobies, Which Are, Like, So Freakin' Huge By the Way, I'm Talking Massive Milk-Maid Gazongadonks The Size of My Tiny Anime-Boy Skull.

Crap, I forgot to reference how many levels and skills the sexy gacha-waifus have. Ah, well, who the hell cares. Just shove something about "MAX LEVEL CHEAT SKILLZ" somewhere into the middle of all those other words. We all know that it doesn't matter. None of it matters.

To be engaging, a revenge narrative must give us a compelling reason for the protagonist to seek vengeance. The classic example is, of course, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, and it works because not only does Edmond Dantes have a very good reason for his actions, but because the cruelty of them and the tragedy of his transformation are also acknowledged. Is this a long preface to me saying that Backstabbed in a Backwater lacks those defining traits? Sort of. It's really too early to tell, but that's almost ancillary to the other issues plaguing this episode.

The major one is the sudden arrival of a maid on the scene. Mei the Ever Seeking Maid is something of a pet peeve of mine, a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a specific household servant – maids aren't unfailingly loyal as part of their job description; they're people you pay to perform a service. But even if we discount that as a “Rebecca Problem,” the way she presents herself feels more than a little goofy. I understand what the idea is: she's the antithesis of Light's party, the backstabbing Concord of Tribes who pretended to care for him before deciding to kill him for being useless. Mei is utterly devoted to him in a way that Sasha and the others only pretended to be, but Light is now jaded by his experiences. Instead of taking her as a friend, he decides to use her as an instrument of vengeance, which she's completely fine with. Again, it makes sense on a conceptual level, but in practice, it all feels very abrupt. It's not that Light doesn't deserve his revenge, but that it comes on so suddenly, and Mei is more egging him on than agreeing to follow his directives.

There's also the issue of this just feeling mean. Light being so sweet and pure of heart only to be taken advantage of and then tortured onscreen isn't fun to watch, and while the villains are allowed to be cartoonish (this is, after all, a cartoon), it all feels very over the top. I do like the thought that went into Light's gacha skill; having it work better the more mana there is in the air makes sense. But he didn't try to use it at all before he was betrayed? It would have prevented his betrayal in the first place, so again, from a basic understanding, it makes sense, but it doesn't work in the larger narrative and just feels lazy. There's some potential here, but it's also not really grabbing me.

God, what a muddy, ugly, mean-spirited, miserable time of a show. I often wonder how much the people producing these cynical light novel stories actually like these genres or the conventions they embody. Even the video game elements can feel tacked-on out of obligation, to the point of forcing in mechanics that most people don't even like. So sure, the special power this week is gacha. Leading lad Light gets the power of "Unlimited Gacha", and seemingly never thinks to roll it more than two or three times at once. It produces useless trash and limits his options, but at least a multiracial party of encouraging adventures is here to welcome him into their fold anyway! Considering the title of this show is Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon, it's pretty easy to guess that things aren't going to go well.

Stories of vengeful vindication can be engaging. Just look at May I Ask for One Final Thing?, which premiered this same day—that show made its case effectively, and seeing said vengeance was a hoot. The problem with Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon is that it has zero interest in context. The concepts and tone driving them exist purely for their own sake: Light feels useless and discriminated against because it appeals to the author and target audience…for some reason. "Humans" as the oppressed race in a fantasy setting could be a fine, functional idea, but the story virtually skips over all of Light's time with his false-friend party, jumping straight from being brought in to being betrayed for this exhaustingly detailed, cruel contrivance of a plot.

Getting the means to that vengeance is just as dirt-simple as setting up the circumstances in Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon. Everyone betrays you because of how dumb and smelly you are? What if you could just summon girlfriends? What if you could just summon a bang-maid who could fight for you and loved you and thought you were the specialest boy and would never betray you? The contrivance of Light's "gift" is so transparent because the story doesn't even bother to detail the system under which other "gifts" in this world function. What do regularly "good" gifts look like? How do their users come into them? Seriously, is there any reason Light never thought to roll the dang thing more than a couple times when he knew, from its name, that it was "unlimited"? Who cares! It's gacha. You know how gacha works. Look, it's got card rarities just like in that mobile game you sunk a bunch of time and money into with waifus who would never betray you like those kids on the kickball team!

There's not even any good action in this, the fantasy world design and backgrounds are murky exercises in genericisms, and the character designs are a mishmash of forgettable flailings of flair that make me go, "Yeah, that's what I'd expect from a C-tier gacha game that just doomed itself with a Persona 5 collab." This show is begging for a pity roll from anyone it can appeal to, and the best thing for both it and the viewers is to just let it go dark.