There's a part of me that feels there's a much better comedy buried underneath this tale of fantasy melodrama. We have a klutzy warrior girl who doesn't know her own strength and a weird girl who thinks she's a cat. A leading maid's underlings try to trollishly and absurdly seize power, and send out letters telling her to get wrecked like a Twitch-addicted teenager. The villains are so archetypally conniving that their cookie-cutter nature and eventual comeuppance could have made for something slapstick-y. The final fight has characters try to one-up each other through varying degrees of this-isn't-even-my-final-formisms and weapons that get so increasingly hyperbolic in nature that it all feels more like a parody of what it's supposed to be. All of the pieces necessary for a decent slab of comedic delight are there. But this is one of those anti-hero stories where the lead's initial banishment from the party turns into a tale of revenge, meaning it has to play itself off as something serious.

An anti-hero story this definitely is, to the point where our (anti-)hero is named Light, and on occasion, he proudly declares that everything is going according to plan. Light expresses desires to ascend to godhood at the end of one episode; he never quite does, despite becoming more powerful with every passing episode. It also doesn't help that his Kirito-like design renders him so docile that it's hard to take his anti-hero personality all that seriously. At least Light Yagami knew how to ham it up. My Gift Lvl 9999 Unlimited Gacha's Light is so dead-serious and straight-faced that there's hardly a single nibble of pork on the bone here.

Light summons more and more characters out of his Gacha ability, although most of them are shoved to the side and exist more as NPCs than real characters. The second episode is the most developed some of these characters get, and to My Gift Lvl 9999 Unlimited Gacha's credit, they exude enough personality to seem just a tad bit more than just stock. Afterwards, they mostly disappear from the anime altogether, randomly coming back either as a means to the narrative's end, or being randomly inserted into some scenes just to remind you that somehow, they are still here.

The gimmick here is that Light has a special gacha ability, and it is the very reason he is recruited and then later rejected from the party. It's barely utilized. Somehow, Light can only cast weak gachas until after he gets banished from the party early on. Upon being left for dead, Light can suddenly whip out powerful characters, weapons, and spells on a whim. I get that the point of this type of anime is meant to be a power fantasy where the main character gets stronger and stronger as it goes on, and it is satisfying to see his former partymates who didn't think too much of his ability get their just desserts. It still rings out as too lucky a coincidence that Light can pull powerful gacha after powerful gacha immediately afterwards, all because the narrative demands it. Now, I ain't no Tumblin' Dice ace-level gambler, and I have proof: after somehow (accidentally) rolling Venti three hours into Genshin Impact, the rest of my gachas were spent on mid-tier weapons. And then I stopped playing.

Everything else you would expect a series like this to do does exactly that. The usual fantasy landscapes provide the battlegrounds for the usual fight scenes that go on a little too long to retain any possible intrigue; one battle goes on for two-to-three episodes for needless padding. The bad guys are flatly written two-timing bastards, and the magic weapons and items Light pulls out of his gacha don't have any visible uniqueness that separates it from ordinary non-gacha'd magic. Some of the art ain't half bad—I liked how vivid and detailed Light's throne room is. Contrastingly, the tower setting of the final few episodes has some of the most barren and lifeless backgrounds the anime has to offer.

The final half of the anime has a group of bourgeois elves enslaving humans. Light delivers proper judgment onto these elves by the end, which makes My Gift Lvl 9999 Unlimited Gacha an anti-slavery show, although I'm not sure how noble it is since Light's real means of disposing of them is to exact revenge for abandoning him. The emancipation seems to be an accidental happenstance as a result. Light's thought process is essentially, “I just wanted revenge and have these elves suffer in absolute agony, but also I found out they are racist, and I freed some slaves as a result of my selfishness, so that makes me a hero in some roundabout way, I guess.”

I thought this show would be generic when I first watched the trailer. But then I saw the first few episodes and thought they were promising enough. I was looking forward to something I thought would reveal itself to not be half-bad. Turns out I was right the first time.