Are Dark Elves your fetish? Are yandere girls? Well, if so, congratulations. This show is for you. If not… well, it's best to simply move on and forget you saw anything at all.

Yandere Dark Elf is one of those shows that knows what it is and who it is pandering to. It has no interest in doing anything else. Every female character is buxom and beautiful and there is a constant stream of cliché anime situations where Hinata ends up with his face buried in someone's crotch or bosom. The plot is simply a way to get from one sexual situation to the next. Full stop.

In fact, this anime is just that side of full-on porn. At least a couple times each episode, you're guaranteed to get a shot of full frontal nudity—either of Mariabelle or the rest of the female cast—through some erotic scene or another. In the HIDIVE streaming version of the series, white dots do cover the minimal amount of area to be “safe” (and some of the more racy lines of dialogue are omitted) but, honestly, so little is left to the imagination regardless, any censorship at all feels pointless—especially considering that the fanservice is this anime's sole reason for existing.

All that said, there is at least the skeleton of an overarching story arc connecting the season together. Hinata likes Mariabelle but is unsure how to respond to just how forward she can be. She is a woman with her eyes on the prize—i.e., Hinata himself. There is literally nothing she won't do—no attempts at seduction she won't try—to be with him. He is, for all rights and purposes, her entire world.

Thus, the story revolves around Hinata trying to rectify his more pure sense of love and how it's “supposed to be” with Mariabelle's super-pushy, pressure-fill loved. This is also the core to the series' humor—as it tends to be either based around Mariabelle's yandere nature or Hinata's innocence.

As sexual content is this anime's key selling point, you'd think that this anime would look fantastic—especially with a mere 12-minute runtime each episode to streamline the budget. Yet, this is not the case. Sure, there a few scenes here or there where an insane amount of attention to detail is paid to portraying Mariabelle and her stunning figure but, for the most part, even the most erotic scenes feel at best average in the quality department. While in most anime, being average isn't exactly damming, in a series where your visuals are directly tied to your anime's sole selling point, this is a big problem. If the art isn't giving it's all to be titillating, then it makes you question the point of this show in the first place.

Yandere Dark Elf is softcore smut, pure and simple—and is designed to be exactly that. It aims at two very specific niches, Dark Elf-lovers and yandere fans and hits it's mark more often than not in these areas. Of course, this means that the anime, in turn, has little in the way of general audience appeal. It's little more than a series of rom-com clichés and character archetypes once the fetishes are taken out of the equation. But it's biggest area of failure is that, while not looking bad, it often doesn't look as good as it should. Viewers are coming to this show to see a naked vandere Dark Elf—and if the images on screen fall short of their imaginations, then the show will fail to hold their interest. It's as simple as that.