This Review is spoiler free with only vague details, with the exception of the last two lines.

Eminence in Shadow is a show that sets up a really cool concept of a guy trying to fulfill a power fantasy for no apparent reason other than to be powerful. Our main character has no plan 90% of the time and comically spews bullshit that just so happens to be true. He isn’t an edgelord, which honestly I’d be OK with, he’s a guy desperately trying to be as edgy as he possibly can. What is even worse is our main character’s hollowness echos off the backs of the side character that are full of well… CHARACTER! Honestly as with Bleach, this show would be better off without the main character as a whole in my opinion. He ruins any immersion into the world as we are constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY (like every episode), are reminded that he is barely intelligible and his only motivation is to be edgy. The problem with this of course in true isekai/harem form everything he does is misconstrued as sheer genius, even though honestly he doesn’t even care that the people around him are even there.

Which brings up another point entirely, the MC doesn’t care about anyone. Great example, at some point he just disappears, abandoning literally his whole organization for some “self reflection.” During which a sequence of events beginning with his dumb friends finding tickets to an exclusive event in his room while he's gone and then RANDOMLY asking a girl who just so happens to in his shadow organization out because guess what? They are all super hot! This ends in them magically creating a mission he didn’t assign them, and then thinking that he did all of this as a master plan to get them some leisure time that they sorely deserve. All of this from him just abandoning them after failing to greedily take all their money from them. Honestly after watching this to completion I genuinely wondered if our boy was in a coma, and that the reason everything just always magically works in his favor is because his mind makes it so; which saying this now I kinda still believe?

Combine all of this with the main antagonist group of literal clowns, who never really challenges the MC or his organization whatsoever. What starts as an occult group of nobles experimenting with “demons” blood ends in a highly technological group of scientists experimenting with a multiverse and disguising it all as just demons and magic. In fact it would seem that half of the organization is truly just under the impression that they are just dealing with demons and magic, and have no concept of the greater picture AT ALL. This results in literally every antagonist that appears pulls the same exact move of “oh I’m powerful on my own gets defeated Fine I’ll use this secret powerful drug to win still loses” which honestly is just too stale and formulaic for my taste.

TL;DR There are really great fight scenes, some very cool twists, a beautiful cast of very unique and interesting women, and a complete lack of delivery on anything cohesive that you could call a story due to an extremely poorly written main character with zero character progression. This delivers a mediocre at best isekai with no real depth anywhere to be seen, which is a real shame. Maybe that’s the point, but it doesn’t make for good entertainment.

P.S. I know this won’t be a popular opinion but if you honestly think about it I’m not wrong.

P.S.S. SPOILERS! At the end of S2 we abandon the entire world which we've set up across the last 30 episodes or so to start creating a new one that's some form of post apocalyptic? I'm gonna watch outta sheer curiosity but man this hurts my brain.