My Next Life as a Villainess started off really slow for me, got a really good mid-season peak, and then dropped hard and fast. Following along with many predecessors in the Light Novel anime adaptions, I feel like it must have had way too much content from the books to successfully reduce to a 12-episode show. Now I have not read the books, so this is just a general feeling I’m getting of course.

You start with the short prologue, didn’t do anything amazing for me at all. But it introduced the basic concept of the show and the characters. Your fairly standard stuff, and I didn’t have any real issue with it at all. Wasn’t amazing, wasn’t terrible, just kinda standard.

Then you get to the meat of the show, that rather good middle section. You get some more character introductions, and a bunch of enjoyable slice of life stuff. Character building and world building, and I loved most of it. But at this point I also had my major issue with the show appear, and it never got solved. Way too many characters to ever develop over the course of 12 episodes. I still don’t really remember half the characters names outside of the two main male leads Gerald and Keith. I couldn’t tell you who they were, or what they added. Guess I could say the general trope the characters fill, but even than I forget a number of them because they just don’t get enough screen time. I feel that if you want to have a massive harem cast of seven people, you need to have a ton of episodes to fully explore everyone and really make me remember them. They each need to be unique and interesting in their own ways, and fully explored. But as it stands with 12 episodes, most of them just weren’t. They got a trope assigned and figured the audience would recognize the trope and understand who they were meant to be.

To wrap up the show we get the final arc, which was the most whiplash moment in a show I’ve felt in some time. You go from enjoyable slice of life fun stuff. To suddenly having kidnapping and the evil villain and dark magic. This didn’t feel like the natural progression of the show at all, and instead felt out of place. Like I was missing 6 episodes of slow progress of dark and evil things slowing progressing in the background that slowly starts to interfere with the fun slice of life stuff. It just generally doesn’t work well, and really hurts my thoughts of the show.

Onto characters for a bit, general trope characters to fill the harem spots. Not in any way super amazing or special I feel like. Katarina being a dense idiot is just a gender swap of the normal male isekai lead. Really for characters in general I guess I could say that is what the show was. They took the classic isekai harem and just gender swapped everyone and called it good.

Visually the show was rather good. I don’t think it stood out in any outstanding way, but I wasn’t annoyed or disappointed in the visuals at any point. Don’t think it will win any awards, or be remembered in the future, but it works well enough for a current show.

Overall, the show didn’t do anything new or special for me at all. You have a traditional isekai harem but now gender swapped, it works fine. I don’t think it has any massive issues, but don’t go in expecting the best harem you have ever watched. So yea, gets average scores from me for being a competent show but not overly great.