The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen: From Villainess to Savior Season 2

In the otome game Our Ray of Light, Princess Pride Royal Ivy is a ruthless villainess and last boss, who seeks to doom everyone around her. But now, an 18-year-old from our world has reincarnated as her, and seeks to avoid this terrible fate. As Pride turns 16 and meets her fiancé, time is gradually running out.

The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen: From Villainess to Savior Season 2 is based on the light novel series by author Tenichi and illustrator Suzunosuke. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Tuesdays.

I tend to like villainess shows. Sure, as a subgenre, it tends to have its shortcomings—in particular, I wish more of these so-called villainesses actually leaned into their roles and went full Regina George with it—but broadly speaking, I've still enjoyed them more often than not. So, it's rare for a show like Heretical Last Boss Queen to bore me as much as it has so far. The core issue plaguing the first season, in my opinion, is its complete and utter disinterest in doing literally anything original. From top to bottom, everything about this show screams “The My Next Life as a Villainess we have at home.” Even one of the love interests is literally named “stale.” And alas, the first episode of this second season is no different.

I think a trap that a lot of reincarnation anime fall into is showing us so much of the post-reincarnation childhood of the protagonist. More specifically, while it's rarely taken to the extreme it is in shows like Hell Mode (and to be clear, this is much to Hell Mode's detriment), you can usually expect to see the protagonist really begin their post-reincarnation life around age 8 or 10-ish. But the thing is, those early childhood years tend to be really boring, and with only a very small number of exceptions (EX: My Next Life as a Villainess) does it actually feel like these episodes are entertaining enough, or at least plot-relevant enough, to actually feel like they need to exist. More often than not, these shows feel like they could've (and should've) just dumped the protagonist no earlier than their mid-teen years. Heretical Last Boss Queen, naturally, is exactly the kind of show I'm talking about.

This show very obviously wants to be a reverse harem, and now that Pride is 16-years-old (in-universe, at least—mentally, she'd be 34) and has a fiancé, I'd be willing to bet we're going to get more of that in this season. And that has some potential, but oh the trudge we've gone through to get here. See what I mean? The pacing of this show is way slower than it needs to be, both in the previous season, and even in this first episode. Being so glacial, it kills basically all the momentum it even might've had before it even begins. Combine that with utterly unmemorable characters and a basically non-existent story, and there's just nothing about this show that makes it feel worth watching—there's so many other villainess anime that do what this one obviously wants to, but so much better.

It'd be great if this season proved that the juice is worth the squeeze, but given how utterly bland and unoriginal it's been up until now, I'm more worried that it's just going to end up more exhausting than anything else. After all, it's exhausting just for the audience to get to this point. Season 1 feels like it could've just been compressed down to three episodes. Better yet, Pride could've been older when she realizes she's reincarnated. If this anime isn't going to do anything fresh or different, the least it could do is play the villainess anime greatest hits album well—and so far, it hasn't even been doing that.