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.

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.

If you'd asked me last week how Backstabbed in a Backwater could get worse, I probably would have suggested something about the inherent cruelty of the premise or its failings as a revenge narrative. I would not have come up with “stultifyingly bland pabulum with summoned maids,” and yet, that is the correct answer. Yes, after taking pains to establish itself as a low-rent Count of Monte Cristo, this week the show chooses to jettison all of that (until the last thirty seconds) in favor of showing us that, now that Light has spent three years in the Abyss, he has managed to summon scads of overpowered maids, all of whom both worship and lust after him. It's like the story switched genres.

It is not, I feel, an improvement. Light himself spends his time this week mostly off-screen, sparring with Jack, his lone male summon, and then taking a platonic bath with him. (I specify because some implied BL would at least have made this marginally interesting.) The rest of the episode is Mei being a tyrant to the other maids, who also enjoys rubbing herself on Light's bedclothes, Ellie being The Thirsty One who lusts after her hopefully-teenage master, Aoyuki being The Cat One (no explanation needed), and Nazuna being The Kind of Dumb One who…struts around singing? And then breaks a piece of Light's throne? I'm not sure what her function is, honestly, and I find myself unwilling to take pains to care.

The only highlight here is the various maid character designs, though even that feels like a fairly low bar. Mei is a classic French maid, Nazuna is an armor maid, Ellie is a witch maid, and Aoyuki is (of course) a cat maid, while the rest of the crew is in standard anime maid gear. Ellie's outfit is the most interesting, but none are all that groundbreaking in terms of design, although I might use the word “backbreaking” to describe their bosoms.

It does look like the story may get back to that whole vengeance angle next week. But this episode has proved definitively that the plot is all over the place and that I simply do not care. If you like maids, your mileage may vary.

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.

Astonishingly, watching Light's amazing life in the second episode of Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon might actually be more aggravating than following his stupid sob story in the first. In the latter, there was at least a baseline sense of momentum. What was happening was still rooted in a meaningless nerd fantasy, but at least a fantasy of persecution lends itself to tricking the audience into thinking something is actually happening. This second episode of the show trades all of that, two weeks into its run, to mill about on the sorts of disposable sidebars that kill time between dailies in a gacha game, except this is also meant to be the introduction to all these new character jpegs, so there's even less established reason to give a shit about any of their milling about.

What Backwater Dungeon is basically doing here is, as it seemed out of the gate, a shite version of The Count of Monte Cristo, where the lead in Light got to skip over any humbling character-building in prison and take viewers straight to seeing the super-awesome new life he built for himself down in this hole, now with a whole army of bang-maids at his beck and call. It means there's, as I said, no sense of narrative momentum or progression, so much as the writing going, "Look at all my stuff," and that stuff is pretty basic. Light pointedly hardly interacts with his harem of hanger-ons; it's all his orbiting sycophants bantering amongst themselves about how much they want to smooch him, tied in with their one (1) other character trait. Never mind that there's no chemistry or engaging relationship writing because all the gacha-gals are simply programmed to love Light from the start. At least the Count had rizz.

The show doesn't even seem fully invested in its own setup or how it fits together. Little enough explanation is given for how Light pulled particular parts of this society out of his ass to put together a whole fiefdom, complete with capitalism, down in this stupid hole. Remember how Light's sole motivation was to provide for his family? If he brought them down here to live in his magical luxury, it hasn't been shown or mentioned yet. The closest the show gets to going into any detail is some throw-away comments within one of the multiple scenes of the maids sitting around talking about how much they love Light and want to do stuff with him, and it just goes on and on and on—

Look, I'm gonna bump the grade I would've given this thing up by half a pity point purely because Nazuna, the character followed for most of the faffing about in this episode, could be a mildly amusing dipshit who actually got a cute snort-laugh out of me once or twice. Then again, I know her character type is going to be annoying as sin to plenty of other viewers. And the fight animation glimpsed between Light and Jack during their training session (does Jack also want to kiss Light like all his summoned ladies?) looked halfway decent. Maybe that'll pay off, since the show barely works up to the actual plot kicking off properly next week. But what Backwater Dungeon showed off this week was an infuriating waste of time that was just as sad as the persecution-complex indulgences of last week, just in a different way. I pray that anybody finding any of the feelings in this relatable reach into their gacha and try to pull out some proper self-reflection and awareness, since you deserve to build yourself up better than this show is. We all deserve better.

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.

Okay, now this is just insufferable. The first episode of Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon was already terrible, mostly on account of how it so flatly and earnestly regurgitated the betrayal-RPG subgenre's most noxious tropes. Now that our protagonist Light has summoned his gacha waifus and proceeded with his mission of vengeance—at least, that's what the episode description promises is happening here—the show has taken on an entirely new flavor of godawful. It has become the very worst possible iteration of itself: A terrible comedy.

The thing that sucks the most about bad comedies is that there is absolutely no reprieve from the misery. Every other genre can inadvertently become a great comedy when they drop the ball. Still, there is no such thing as a So-Bad-It's-Good comedy, because jokes that do not land only inspire Awkward Silence or outright hostility. The problem with Backstabbed's second episode is that the show seems just self-aware enough to play up its premise as trite and silly intentionally, but it's too damned enamored with the wish-fulfillment garbage to actually make any jokes. We've got the doofy background music that tells us that we're supposed to find the antics of Light's many sycophantic acolytes amusing; we've got scenes where characters make exaggerated faces and scream punchlines at the audience; we've got a generally aimless plot that forgoes any goals of actual vengeance to hang around with the half-dozen characters we meet. Everything about this episode seems to be demanding that we laugh, or at least crack an amused half-smile as we fold our laundry and attend to other chores while this white noise plays in the background.

Except, of course, there is no amusement to be found. Whatever jokes that might possibly exist in this script have been buried underneath the ten tons of manure that is our protagonist, Light. This is a notable achievement, considering that Light is a complete nothing of a character that couldn't inspire a genuine emotional reaction if he waltzed into every viewer's room and offered them a lifetime of guaranteed basic income, completely waived financial debts, and a free puppy. He's a vacuous little twerp who exists to exist, and yet the show is completely derailed by this presence, because nobody in the show can shut the hell up about how much they want to love him and smell him and wait on his every need and deflower him and worship him.

In a show with even an ounce of edge, this dynamic would be the joke, but Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon can't possibly entertain the idea of challenging or offending its audience. So even though the circumstances of Light's entire life are stupid beyond comprehension, we can never quite admit it. The girls who serve Light's every whim can be obsessive and weird fangirls, but their fundamental need to vindicate the hero's being cannot actually be questioned. It makes for maddeningly boring television, and I will be happy never to waste another second on this series ever again.