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Aims for the stars, misses and shoots itself in the eye. I respect this show for trying. I judge it by how it actually performs, and it performs poorly.

Obviously, this series exists because someone behind it is passionate about motor racing. If you want to see some car racing... go watch actual cаr racing competitions. Stories about sports can’t just be about sports, they have to be actual stories to justify their existence. There are multiple ways to achieve that. It can be Cute Girls Doing Sports. It can be sports-themed battle shounen about Friendship, Effort, Victory. It can be over-the-top camp where the fate ... of the universe is decided by a match of children’s card game. The way Overtake! chooses to go about it is human drama about people involved with car racing. And the drama writing of this show is a failure. In a rather unique way, too – every character is a sociopath, but the story has no self-awareness about this and doesn’t consistently write them as sociopaths. It’s the lack of self-awareness and consistency that is the actual problem, I can’t care about characters whose actions and motivations are lolrandom without being meant as such.

Examples:

One of the two protagonists is a photojournalist. His backstory (revealed in the first episode in a decent showing of indirect storytelling) is that he published a photo of people dying in front of him, got canceled on Twitter for it, and now has PTSD over it, literally shaking and sweating if he as much as points a camera at a person. And this is gibberish. It looks fine if you don’t think about it because all the individual parts make sense on their own, but altogether it’s bullshit.
First, the character didn’t get traumatized by someone dying in front of his eyes. He only got traumatized by people disapproving of the photo on social media. So he’s a sociopath (go watch the Nightcrawler movie, it’s exactly about this premise). I mean, I get what they were going for - publishing an insensitive photo was a shameful display, making the entire profession of photojournalism lose face, so he atoned by committing honorable [career] sudoku via not taking photos of people anymore. He’s still a sociopath who only cares whether the public thinks he did something wrong rather than whether he actually did something wrong.
The real issue is the wanton and tasteless tacking of PTSD onto this mess. PTSD isn’t a magic wand that generates free drama for scriptwriters. It’s an actual thing that happens to actual people. If the character couldn’t film people because he was haunted by the dead he saw through a lens that one time, that would make sense. If he couldn’t use social media because he was haunted by people telling him to KYS there, it would also make sense. Cyber-bullying PTSD triggered by an act of filming people does not make sense. It’s not how it works. It’s bullshit. Just don’t make it PTSD, there is no reason why it can’t just be the guy doesn’t want to film people anymore because he had fucked up by filming people. PTSD here is a frivolous attempt to get free drama points.

Another character is the previous guy’s ex-wife/editor-in-chief. The guy fell apart due to that canceling incident, and that’s why she left him. Over the course of the show, the protagonist gets his groove back, and she seemingly starts falling for him again. So, she divorced the guy when he was at his lowest and needed support, and wants to get him back now he’s successful again. Yeah, she’s a sociopath. And once again, this is not the issue, the issue is that after the divorce she maintained the same emotionally, physically, and professionally close relationship with him. Basically, she didn’t actually divorce him. What is even the point? It’s like the authors wanted the get back together with an ex-wife plot, but didn’t have the balls to have the ex-wife be antagonistic to the main character at any point, lest the audience would deem her evil.

The second male protagonist is a racer, his subplot is a generic “dead parent’s footsteps” cliche. This is not about him, it’s about his rival/foil character from a different team. That rival crashed into the protagonist during try-out races, tanking his career prospects, it was entirely his own fault, yet he can’t stop seething at the protagonist, blaming him for it. For the third time, this guy is a sociopath. And for the third time, this is not the issue, the issue is that he isn’t written like one and doesn’t act like one in other situations. It’s like watching some kind grandma from a slice-of-life show start screaming about Jewish conspiracies, it’s bafflingly out-of-character.

Even the minor side characters can’t stop being sociopaths for at least 5 minutes. Like a “playboy” whose entire shtick is a passive-aggressive assertion of how much better than everyone he is, or an advertiser who is like, “Yeah, I knew you wouldn’t take this job, so I tricked you to come here under a false pretense, and I already paid your boss, so you have to do it.”

4/10 for “this show belongs in DSM-5 or something.”

It’s fascinating how fundamentally, ontologically bad this series is.

“Ontologically" means by its very nature rather than by circumstance. Most bad stories are bad for pedestrian reasons like bad dialogue or bad characters. Theoretically, you could fix those and tell the same story in a way that makes it good. Wataoshi is an entirely different beast, you can’t fix its dialogue or characters because nothing is wrong with those. It’s bad because its themes are repugnant, its premise is stillborn, its format is unsuited for storytelling, and it's an all-around artistic failure.

One half of it is that the show belongs to the otome villainess isekai ... subgenre which is objectively THE single worst storytelling device in existence. The core premise of this subgenre goes like this: a protagonist is reborn in the world of an otome dating sim as a designated villain and they must avoid the fate of being defeated and punished for the original character’s villainly. And this premise is fundamentally dysfunctional because a) it takes no effort to "turn your life around" when it's literally not your life and you are a different person, and b) it takes no effort not to be a mustache-twirling cartoon committing cartoonish acts of evil, just doing nothing is enough. The driving conflict of the genre is solved by the fact that it exists. Probably the most famous otome villainess isekai title is Hamefura, where the protagonist faces “doom flags” and resolves those flags... in about two episodes, after which the story loses all sense of purpose and just does random crap.
Hamefura got nothing on Wataoshi, this story loses all sense of purpose before the middle of the first episode. It reminds me of Orwell’s “1984” in that if you read the synopsis, and then read the actual story, you find out that the story gives you absolutely nothing that you didn’t already get from the synopsis. The protagonist is reincarnated as the heroine of an otome game, but instead of the designated love interests, she is in love with the villainess. That’s it, that’s the joke. It completely plays itself out and gets stale and repetitive within the first ten minutes. The “villainess” also only ever acts like a villainess within those ten minutes, again, because the protagonist completely breaks the script of the world by virtue of existing within it. The premise of the show is dead and buried before the first commercial break. The only thing that is left for it to do is a yuri romance, and that brings me to the second half of the problem:

The astonishing, record-breaking moral bankruptcy.
So the series combines the elements of isekai, otome, and yuri.
From isekai, we get an adult pedophile reincarnated as a child with all their memories intact and given free rein to groom and molest children.
From otome, we get the “rape it till you make it” romance where a psycho stalker keeps harassing their victim until they develop Stockholm syndrome.
From yuri, we get the above with the added bonus of it being a lesbian psycho stalker harassing a straight victim until they turn gay.
Again, it’s amazing how this story hits three out of three with THE most reprehensible themes existing within those genres. I would not be surprised if the later episodes also include daughter-wife grooming and Japanese WWII war crimes denial, in fact, I expect them to do so for tonal consistency.
And no, these things don’t get a pass as comedy, because they aren’t, the show presents itself as a legitimate romance story. So it’s judged as one.

1/10 for anti-art.

P.S. The actual real-life otome games do not even have “villainess” characters, it’s a made-up trope vaguely based on rival characters from shoujo manga. It’s just a contrived excuse to market your story as isekai, because isekai is what sells.
P.P.S. The only good otome villainess isekai title in existence is The Villainess' Slow Prison Life Began with Her Broken Engagement manga/LN. Mostly because it ends in three chapters, and also isn’t actually an otome villainess isekai on any level.

What I expected after the first episode - Discount Bakemonogatari.
What I got - Discount Fate Spin-off.

The Monogatari Series, or, more accurately, its anime adaptation by studio Shaft, has had an absolutely profound impact on the industry. Yet, compared to similar era-defining shows such as Evangelion or Madoka, it spawned a shockingly low amount of straight-up imitations. And it's not hard to see why, an author has to have at least 150 IQ to even attempt to write this type of story, as well as immense confidence not to be afraid of unfavorable comparisons with Nisio Isin. Though IQ below 100 and the Dunning-Kruger effect is ... also an option, Bunny Girl Senpai exists as an ostensive example of how NOT to imitate Monogatari. Undead Girl Murder Farce is not THAT bad, but it’s still way too far from being good. A more accurate comparison would be with Cube x Cursed x Curious - both of these series successfully manage to replicate some aspects of Monogatari while failing as a story overall. What’s also interesting is that these parallels in execution exist despite the fact that the two imitator series in question focus on entirely distinct elements of the Monogatari formula. C3 is an action harem where the protagonist does psychotherapy for girls with supernatural afflictions. And Undead Girl Murder Farce is a supernatural detective full of verbal foreplay between a human-turned-supernatural invincible MC and his aristocratic, sharp-witted Yamato Nadeshiko girlfriend. Which doubles as a description of one more series, Kyokou Suiri, by the way, when I call all these shows “imitations,” I REALLY mean it.

But enough about their similarities, the actual important part is the differences. The unique selling point of Monogatari is the best prose ever created by man and post-modern reflections on the otaku culture. The unique selling point of Kyokou Suiri is the namesake “made-up deductions” deconstruction of the murder mystery genre. And this is where the troubles with Undead Girl Murder Farce begin, it just doesn’t have a unique selling point. It’s set in the XIX century Europe, except it’s not really the XIX century Europe, but rather The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen cinematic universe, with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Arsene Lupin and so on appearing as characters. Which has been done to death. There is also the fact that the supernatural in this universe exists in the open, as an organic part of society, but the story barely explores this aspect. The series just doesn’t really do all that much, and what it does, it doesn’t do very well. Nothing illustrates this better than putting the titles of all these shows next to each other:
Bakemonogatari - Ghostory - a pun and a factual description of the content.
Kyokou Suiri - Made-up Deductions - also a factual description of the content.
Undead Girl Murder Farce / Cube x Cursed x Curious - this is just trying too hard to advertise the expected quirkiness of the genre without any meaningful substance of its own. It’s shallow and derivative. Like, the word "farce" has an actual meaning, and there is nothing in the show that fits it, it is not a farcical show, using this word for the name is just pretentiousness.
The only well-made part of the story is the banter between the protagonists (which is the single easiest step of the formula to imitate, even Bunny Girl Senpai had decent banter). Outside of banter, the writing is subpar. Including, but not limited to:
The characters aren’t developed and act nonsensically at times, like when an entire family barely flinches in response to their relative getting killed after being revealed as a murderer.
The dialogue often exists to dump plot points on the audience with no regard for how natural it is to actually say those things at the moment.
Old-timey murder mystery cliches, like telling a person’s entire life story based on the stains on their clothes, are mindlessly reproduced without anything meaningful done with them.
An abject failure of the murder mystery element, it’s full of contrivances and plot convenience. It even commits the biggest sin of detective fiction: not telling the audience all the information necessary to solve the case. For example, the circumstances of one murder depend on the mansion’s layout - a layout that wasn’t actually shown at any point before the reveal.
Every single memetic XIX-century character (Sherlock Holmes, etc.) in existence is vomited into the same story arc with no sense of restraint.
Gratuitous battle shonen cliches, a character can’t just be a demon slayer by himself, he has to be a member of a special Demon Slayer Corps full of nakamatachi with distinct silhouettes straight from Kimetsu no Yaiba. The series gets progressively more battle-shonen-esque as it goes.

The direction of the adaptation weirdly parallels the writing. It’s lacking in all but one aspect, which is the pacing. I think everyone and their mother have commented that every episode feels like it only lasts 5-10 minutes, it’s very engaging. But outside of pacing, the direction isn’t all that much. The series director is Omata Shin’ichi, a Studio Shaft graduate also known for Kaguya-sama and Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu. You can clearly see this with the visuals of the show being full of recognizable “shaftisms,” yet those feel like mechanical surface copying without any underlying substance, especially when measured against other ex-Shaft directors such as Itamura Tomoyuki (Vanitas and Youfkashi no Uta) whose “shaftisms” look like a genuine artistic vision.
For example, the "glitchy green screen" and the "archaic wipe transition" effects are just failed "ironically bad" stylizations. Because stylizations are supposed to have style to them, there is nothing stylish about a wipe transition, anyone can do them in Windows Movie Maker, it takes no thought or effort. And wtf do green screen effects have to do with a murder mystery set in the XIX century? It's the last genre you'd expect to see CGI special effects in, there is no thematic connection, again, it's just pretentiousness.
The director also took the worst possible lesson one could take from working on the Monogatari franchise: how to fuck up the narrative by arbitrarily changing the arc order. The anime starts with an (original?) lore-dump episode that irreparably ruins the actual first arc of the story (episodes 2-4 of the anime) by retroactively turning all the plot points revealed there (for the first time, in the proper order) into pointless repetition (like the reveal of which exact supernatural beings the main couple are), as well as deflating many intended to be tense moments (like when the main character who’s been acting as a goofy clown for the entire arc reveals himself to be an insanely strong fighter in the arc finale - but we’ve already been spoiled on that by the first episode).
And then there are fight scenes that are pure cringe, with characters double and triple jumping in the air as if it’s a match of Super Smash Bros.
On top of all that, the anime is hamstrung by being single-cour, we just see a few disjointed criminal cases, without any meaningful progress to the overarching narrative (assuming the original source material even has any).

4/10 for a subpar adaptation of subpar source material.

The show has a chill iyashikei atmosphere.
The MC's behavior is logically driven by his experiences in the pre-isekai salaryman life, he empathizes with exploited workers and appreciates sensible managers.
He uses a gun with elemental-affixed ammo, and he heals people by shooting them with healing bullets.
The main girl is a cinnamon roll with a giant hammer that ends her sentences with “nanoja,” and she and the MC have an incredibly wholesome, mutually empowering relationship.
She also can bake a cake or make ice cream over a campfire.
Commercial break eyecatches have characters drive the title of the show around like a car while saying “vroom, vroom.”
There is ... a bunny girl obsessed with carrots.
Said carrots drop from slimes that wear Santa hats, and every single product and material in the world can only be acquired as loot from monsters, and the entire world’s economy revolves around loot from monsters, and entire towns specialize in chosen items like meat or vegetables for economic efficiency, and when there is a dungeon that drops both meat and vegetables then Meat Town and Vegetable Town enter a trade dispute over property rights and devise plans to sabotage each other by sending adventurers with bad drop rate stat to slay rival town’s targets of interest to deny them value, and when the dungeon boss spawns, they deliberately avoid killing it because keeping it alive is more beneficial in the long term, and this keeps going because this is what creativity and originality are.

These all are ostensive examples of good writing.

9/10 for a well-written isekai series.

This show is such an abysmal artistic failure, you’d think it was directed by Ikuhara.

The horror is Five Nights at Freddy's tier, meaning it literally just isn’t horror, but something that exists for middle schoolers to pretend-scream at in order to fit in with their social group.
But then the horror is embarrassingly poorly mixed with comedy, resulting in one of the most tone-deaf and jarring stories I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It’s not even something hard to do right, Another demonstrates how to successfully mix horror and comedy. Hell, even Blood-C, if you interpret its over-the-top gore as intentionally comedic, does a ... better job mixing horror and comedy than Dark Gathering - that’s how bad it is. And that’s because the comedy here is slapstick you’d normally expect to see in a Weekly Shounen Jump series, it’s not just Five Nights at Freddy's, it’s a crossover between Five Nights at Freddy's and Gintama. And this comparison goes much deeper than just the comedy - everything else about Dark Gathering’s writing, storytelling, and characterization is boilerplate battle shounen. Which doesn’t work because horror and battle shounen is not the same fucking thing. If you ever rolled your eyes at Gintama doing “serious” DBZ bullshit, imagine how out of place it looks in a supposedly supernatural horror show.
And then it’s all made worse by the painfully unfitting art style. The main characters are college students, but borderline chibi art makes them look like nine-year-olds. A moe show like K-On can barely get away with that, in anything allegedly serious it looks jarring, in a horror show it looks idiotic. Also, the keyword there is “borderline.” If a show went full superdeformed style, it could at least pretend it’s an intentional stylistic choice. Again, Shiki used intentionally exaggerated character designs, and it worked well enough for what that show was trying to do. But this is not the case here, Dark Gathering’s characters don’t look stylized, they look like generic moe children. The art isn’t intentional, it’s incompetent.
And then it’s all made EVEN worse by the protagonist, who is less from a battle shounen and more from an isekai web novel. By which I mean he is a cringe-inducing Mary Sue who has the entire world revolve around him in defiance of all sense and logic. Literally the first scene of the series has some random girls commenting on how smart and cool he is, then 5 seconds later his inner monologue claims that he has crippling social anxiety to the point where he skipped the entire high school as a shut-in, then 10 seconds later he effortlessly lands a tutoring job. He also constantly acts like a deranged schizo in public (because he sees ghosts no one else can see) yet no one really questions it. So, add another one to the mix, it’s Five Nights at Freddy’s x Gintama x K-On x Mushoku Tensei.
Speaking of which, on top of all that the show couldn't miss a chance to be EVEN WORSE by virtue of adding some gratuitous fapbait. Of the tentacle rape variety. A character in a supernatural horror show gets murdered by supernatural spirits? Let’s make them get tentacle-raped to death. Five Nights at Freddy’s x Gintama x K-On x Mushoku Tensei x [your favorite tentacle rape hentai title]. Genius.

1/10 for physically painful to watch.

The anime version of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.”

Winter 2023 marks the truly historical moment when the anime industry has finally figured out how to make generic isekai that isn’t utter trash. The secret ingredient all along was having a protagonist with some actual personality rather than a basement-dwelling incel. In just one season, we have such isekai protagonists as a professional handyman, a legendary king, or, in the case of this show, an onmyouji from a fantasy version of ancient Japan.

Now, there is a meme that Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” is the first-ever isekai novel. It’s nothing ... but a meme, yet that novel and this anime have fundamentally the same premise. Take a cliched fantasy setting, add a protagonist that normally belongs in a completely different kind of story, watch how he fucks shit up with his out-of-place skillset, toolset, and above all else, mindset. Seeing a 19th-century engineer wrecking medieval knights with dynamite and electricity is the same kind of fun as seeing an oriental occultist wrecking medieval-Europe-inspired-JRPG with curses, ayakashi, paper talismans, and machiavellian scheming.
Just this single change of protagonist is enough to shake up the entire dynamic of the genre. Even if all the other elements of the story remain cliched, a unique main character completely recontextualizes them. For example, the protagonist regrets his previous life and wants to have a redo. Except he wasn’t an otaku shut-in that regrets masturbating to anime figurines, he was a mastermind occultist that threw his weight around too much, made too many enemies, and ended up betrayed and murdered in a political conspiracy. His version of “redo” isn’t to have sex, it’s to take the chill pill and follow his occult pursuit without getting involved with the fates of the world. Likewise, the supporting cast is just girls that make up the MC’s harem. Except he doesn’t treat them as a harem, he treats them as acolytes, that is, half retainers, half pupils, half daughters. I’ve seen so many unthinking complaints about the protagonist being dense in regard to one girl’s crush on him. No, he isn’t dense, he is 20-30 years older than her and treats her like an adopted daughter, and, I know this might be shocking for isekai-watching weebs, but when a normal 40-year-old man hears his 15-year-old daughter describe what kind of a man she wants to marry, his first thought isn’t supposed to be, “wow, she wants to marry ME.” Such recontextualizations are more than enough to make the story feel fresh.

What really brings it all together, however, is quality writing. Other isekai shows I’ve mentioned earlier still aren’t worth watching despite interesting protagonists because their writing simply isn’t good enough. This show makes its story work by putting intelligent thought into it. The very premise of the protagonist having to TRY to be chill already implies that it’s not an attitude that comes to him naturally, deep down he believes that with great power comes great responsibility, so he can’t walk five steps without trying to bring the dead back to life or thwart demonic conspiracies - attracting unwanted attention (everyone with half a brain suspects him to be some kind of a demon) and having companions calling him out on straying from the original goal. The harem members also have actual lives, goals, and motivations not limited to wanting to be MC’s property (ironic, considering one of them is a literal slave).
The slave girl’s storyline is particularly high-brow, the protagonist pretty much spells out, “you’re not obligated to suck my dick just because I treat you with basic human decency, your life could have plenty of possibilities if you were allowed to actually go and live it” (a polar opposite of the usual isekai incel mentality regarding the whole slave girl trope); and furthermore, the arc’s antagonist is a very nuanced take on the douchebag prince archetype (Joffrey Baratheon) in that he isn’t so much evil, as terminally self-entitled to a point where he genuinely believes he’s the good guy for “rescuing” (kidnapping) the slave girl. Interesting antagonists is one of the strongest points of the series in general.

The only notable flaw of the story is being backloaded - the introductory episodes are not nearly as interesting as the second half of the show.

9/10 for a formulaic isekai that is actually watchable.

Tomboy romcom, right? Wrong. Tomo-chan is not a tomboy and her namesake series is not a romcom at all.

Tomo-chan wa Onnanoko! is a stereotypical case of a story that is genuinely deep and thought-provoking but doesn’t beat the audience over their heads with how smart it's supposed to be, leaving pretentious pseuds not able to see any depth at all and thus dismissing it as a generic *insert-genre-name-that-vaguely-fits-here*.
Here is a concrete example:
The protagonist spends the opening ten minutes of the show worrying that her love interest Jun doesn’t see her as a girl. Then the perspective switches to him. Jun learns that Tomo has made ... a new male friend, gets jealous, and demands an explanation from her. She shows him a photo of a lean bishounen with long eyelashes and Jun sighs in relief, “oh, it’s a girl.” Why did he think that? Because Jun doesn’t just see Tomo as a girl, he sees her as THE girl, the very concept of a girl inside his mind is just Tomo. That’s a five-second-long scene that fully spells out the entire dynamic and the driving conflict between the leads, this scene belongs in Merriam-Webster under the definition of “depth.”

The major reason for the shallow dismissals is the presence of the so-called romcom cliches - a tomboy, a childhood friends couple, a dense male lead, etc. Except none of those things are even remotely cliched if you’re capable of engaging with a work of fiction on any level beyond the most superficial one. Reducing this series to a cliched romcom is the equivalent of reducing Monogatari to a cliched harem because your monkey neuron activation has managed to notice that Senjougahara is a “tsundere,” Kanbaru - a “tomboy,” etc. No, actually the *entire* point of Monogatari is that people are complex beings that can’t be reduced to simple categories, and the story blatantly spells it out for anyone capable of minimal reading comprehension.
Likewise, Tomo-chan wa Onnanoko! literally spells out what its story is about. Hint: read the fucking title. Tomo-chan isn’t “a tomboy.” Tomo-chan is a complex, multidimensional human being whose personality is a logical product of her genes, upbringing, and social environment. She is *a girl.* Her hair isn’t short because weebs in the audience find short hair hot, it’s because she is doing sports. She is doing sports not because weebs find toned midriffs and spats hot, it’s because she is from a professional sportsman family and her entire life revolves around doing sports. The main conflict of the series, being bro-zoned by her love interest, is the consequence of Tomo having a superficially unfeminine character, but actually a very feminine mind - and unable to reconcile one with another. The series isn’t “a romcom.” The series is a psychological drama about self-actualization, which happens to have teen romance as a premise, and is funny at times. Never mind Monogatari, its closest equivalents are Kuzu no Honkai and WataMote.

Another reason why calling the series a generic romcom is an intellectual equivalent of calling Mt. Everest “some hill,” is a gigantic, universe-spanning chasm in the writing quality between Tomo-chan and whatever usually comes to mind from the description “generic romcom.” The story progresses with consistent pacing and concludes when its central conflict gets resolved, both the main ship and the side ship sail, and every major character completes their own arc. It’s absolutely delusional to equate this to a genre notorious for stories being dragged out for hundreds of chapters past their logical endpoint by editors not allowing demotivated writers to kill their cash cow (see Kaguya or Nisekoi), and where the idea of development is introducing a new harem member or some soap-opera-tier contrived melodrama (see 5-toubun or Nisekoi again). Here is an outline of each major character arc, as more examples of storytelling depth:
Tomo. Her arc is about realizing that she doesn’t need to change who she is to be accepted, this is why I compare the show with WataMote.
Jun. He’s a case of more “cliches.” No, Tomo isn’t his “childhood friend,” she is literally his entire life, and no, he isn’t “dense,” he’s not feeling worthy and is afraid that trying to change the nature of their relationship might fuck up what they have.
Misuzu. I-want-her-to-step-on-me “cliche” torn between her desire to support the romance of her only friend, and the fear of getting sidelined as a third wheel.
Carol. Human cotton candy on the outside, an actual feeling, thinking person on the inside that struggles to make others see her as more than her surface (pretty symbolic).
There isn’t a single romcom featuring an even remotely this complex of a cast, again, unless you consider Monogatari or Kuzu no Honkai romcoms.

Finally, a few words about the quality of the adaptation, because I’ve seen people talking about it, and by talking, I mean saying dumb shit. The anime adaptation is pretty barebones and doesn’t really elevate the source material much. Not going above and beyond, however, does not make an adaptation bad, this is just disingenuous when actually bad adaptations that ruin the appeal of the source material exist, see Ex-Arm or Kanojo mo Kanojo. Elevating the source can indeed make an anime better, but expecting this as a baseline is an absurd entitlement. To begin with, any anime adaptation inherently adds something to the story in the form of color, movement, music, and voice acting. Tomo-chan’s anime does all that on a perfectly competent level, for example, they’ve got an American of Japanese descent to voice an anglo character in order to get a realistic foreign accent.

11/10 (on a 15-point scale) for a literary masterpiece.

Violet Evergarden, except actually good.

“I have no trouble communicating with women” - the protagonist.
“Wtf, how am I supposed to self-insert?” - weebs that were expecting a generic isekai / battle harem.

First, this show isn’t a battle harem academy despite the superficial appearance of one, it’s a slice-of-life comedy.
Second, it’s self-insert fiction in a very old-school western way, like Harry Harrison’s and Robert Howard’s books. The protagonist is a gigachad with bodybuilder's muscles, mad sword & sorcery skills, a multitude of diverse talents, and an ability to unhook bras with his eyes. Basically, he’s Conan the Barbarian - a self-insert in the sense that the audience ... would like to be like him - and *could* realistically imagine themselves in his place because everything about this character's talents is actually entirely rational from the writing perspective. The bodybuilder’s muscles come from hours of on-screen exercise, the fighting skills come from getting coached by genius mentors and years of military service, etc. When he restores an abandoned garden as a hobby project, this is done with weeks of manual labor (again, shown to us on-screen) - not with a Lvl. 999 Gardening cheat skill he got from a goddess as a reincarnation perk. The audience can imagine themselves achieving the same result if they put in the same amount of effort, had the same circumstances, etc.
The issue is, this isn’t a Conan the Barbarian novel, this is an anime, and [harem] anime does self-insert fantasy in a fundamentally different way. Harem anime self-insert characters usually are pathetic losers with no redeeming qualities whatsoever who magically luck into success with zero effort on their part. That’s because such anime knows its target audience, in particular, it understands that the idea of putting in any effort or having any talents scares and confuses them. This contradiction between the approach and the medium is the reason why we get to hear these laugh/cringe-inducing cope takes from self-inserters about this protagonist being “generic” or “unrelatable.” Yeah, imagine relating to having no trouble communicating with women, the mind boggles.
Anyway, these takes are straight-up gaslighting. Not only is this protagonist a well-written, well-developed character, there is also not a single other character similar to him in all of ~1100 anime titles I’ve seen at the time of writing. What makes him particularly unique is the personality of a smooth-talking idiot savant. Here’s how this fine chap introduces two girls to each other:
“This sweet angel is Elisa. She's got an exceptionally beautiful heart, excels at being considerate in subtle ways, studies hard, and is vastly knowledgeable.”
“And then this one-of-a-kind lady who loves and is loved by these transcendentally wavy twintails is Claris. She has the highest level of elegance, with which she expertly weaves perfect sweetness into her otherwise cool demeanor.”
Now’s a good moment to mention that you can actually find a similar protagonist if you try - and that protagonist is Violet Evergarden. Both The Iceblade Sorcerer and Violet Evergarden are stories about a veteran child soldier returning to the civilian world and trying to catch up on normal late-teens life while struggling with the demons of their past. Except Violet is an absolute caricature of a naruto-running autistic robot dog (seriously, I was expecting a reveal that she is a literal combat robot like Terminator, it would’ve made so much sense), whereas Ray is a realistic, well-developed character. One aspect of which is being naive and socially oblivious as a consequence of spending formatting years on the battlefield. If someone tried those lines above on women in real life, they would come off as sleazy, but Ray gets away with it because those lines are consistent with his overall behavior both for us, the audience, and for the characters within the story. He doesn’t mean those lines as compliments, they are his genuine unfiltered thoughts, and he isn’t worldly enough to think of the implications.

Also, if those introductions made you chuckle - that is entirely intentional. The show is unapologetically goofy and tries its best to be fun. Because, as I’ve said above, it’s a slice-of-life comedy, not a battle harem - as long as you actually open your eyes and look. It features none of the battle harem academy tropes, notably, it has pretty much zero fanservice (of the teen-boy-eroticism kind you’d expect in a battle harem specifically), opting instead for imaginative animation sequences and low-key bizarre, but wholesome comedy. The Iceblade Sorcerer has more in common with Bocchi The Rock and Yuru Camp than with something like Mahouka or Rakudai Kishi. When some random muppet-looking house spider came into the frame saying “I want to have wings,” my mind immediately jumped to pinecones from Yuru Camp saying “konnichiwa.” As for the way the series handles self-insert fantasy - how many socially-anxious teens do you think were like, “Bocchi is just like me, fr fr no cap” while watching Bocchi The Rock? The Iceblade Sorcerer is self-insert fiction in the same way Bocchi The Rock is self-insert fiction.
Also, I’ve seen complaints about animation quality - those are daft and philistine. The show is very visually engaging with visionary and competent direction. Its sound direction is top-notch too, particularly how it uses insert songs to set up the mood.

9/10 for an entertaining cartoon.

“I've always thought about this, but she's way too sensitive! ...I've never been this close to her before. She smells so damn nice! She feels so soft too! And what thick thighs she has. It smells of flowers, fruits, and sun from her which is different from soap... A calming scent and warmth, as if I were surrounded by nature... Wait, that's not it! I'm surrounded by natural flesh, not nature itself! This is bad! I'm starting to feel funny! Is this her mana's doing too?!”
- the protagonist’s inner monologue during the classic To LOVE-Ru gag of a girl tripping and landing with her crotch ... onto his face.

Futoku no Guild is that one scene from Konosuba where Aqua and Megumin get molested by giant frogs stretched out into an entire series. What’s amazing is that it actually works, thanks to absolutely top-notch writing.

First, let's get the elephant out of the room and into an ivory processing factory. This show is very lewd. Being lewd, however, is not the same as being vulgar (here’s a quick guide on how to tell that two words mean different things - they’re two different fucking words). A lewd show still can be classy and/or wholesome, while vulgarity is the opposite of those things. See the epigraph, this is about as classy as you can be in response to a faceful of vagina. In contrast, something like a panty shot is comparatively less lewd, yet much more vulgar because of the non-consensual peeping aspect. And while one’s personal tolerance for how lewd a show can be without turning vulgar is entirely subjective, the actual level of a show’s vulgarity is entirely objective, it can be objectively quantified by comparison with other shows. Redo of Healer, Futoku no Guild, and Bakemonogatari are three examples of lewd anime, and if asked to sort them by their vulgarity, you'd need to have some sort of brain damage to give an answer that wasn’t Redo of Healer - the most vulgar, Bakemonogatari - the least, and Futoku no Guild - in-between. Furthermore, lewdness and vulgarity aren’t even directly connected, it’s a matter of how you handle the subject matter. From recent examples, Uzaki-chan and My Dress-Up Darling are two shows that are much less superficially lewd than Futoku no Guild, yet much more vulgar because of how they handle their lewdness - as a source of fap bait, they’re pretentious censored hentai. Futoku no Guild is the polar opposite, it’s very lewd on the surface but uses that lewdness as a source of comedy, which naturally leads to a higher degree of writing quality and integrity, as making your audience laugh is a much more intellectually demanding task than making your audience masturbate. So, here’s what makes Futoku no Guild’s writing highly intelligent:

The protagonist.
Given how lewd the show is, it would’ve been so easy to make the protagonist a faceless cumbrain so that the coomer audience could self-insert into him (like Highschool DxD’s protagonist). Kikuru is so much better than that. He’s the straightest man that ever straighted (in the tsukkomi sense, not in the not-gay sense). He’s entirely unamused by all the lewd bullshit happening around him, and his unexpectedly classy and sensible responses are a major part of the show’s comedy. He is also a refreshing sight as far as fantasy anime protagonists are concerned, being a highly competent professional that relies on his wits, training, and experience. Kikuru shares more in common with Goblin Slayer than with your average Kirito clone. This matters because the series follows Konosuba’s formula of being a light-hearted sitcom most of the time, but switching into action hype mode for major boss battles - and the action scenes here are better than in the majority of “serious” action titles. We even get genuine character growth with occasional emotional moments on top of everything else.

The girls.
Futoku no Guild unambiguously belongs to the “Konosuba’s bandwagon” genre like pretty much every single isekai/fantasy comedy made in the last seven or so years. Seriously, try to name three titles of this kind that do not include a ditzy Aqua-like goddess. Again, Futoku no Guild is far above just copying Konosuba, it builds something of its own on top of the existing foundation. For example, the ensemble includes two “Megumins” (haughty nerd mage) and two “Darknesses” (bubbly warrior bimbo), yet each of them has a distinct and well-developed personality. Since the principal cast is so big and varied, the show can allow itself to swap the characters in and out, focusing on just a few at a time, exploring their unique chemistry and the unique sort of situational comedy their interactions bring.

The worldbuilding.
There is a reason why the world of Konosuba is colloquially referred to as Fantasy Australia, but 90% of isekai titles get bashed for being generic. Good worldbuilding is absolutely crucial for a show of this genre to feel fresh. When the protagonist enters the adventurers’ guild and you see the receptionist behind a desktop PC, while a pair of chipmunks in overalls are nonchalantly vacuuming the floor, you know this isn’t your average isekai.

The story.
The main premise of the series is that the local JRPG monsters that the characters are supposed to be slaying are suddenly focused on molesting female adventurers instead of killing them. And the story acknowledges that this is, in fact, what is happening. The MC questions why the monsters are behaving in such a bizarre way and tasks himself with investigating it. He also wants to quit his job but feels obliged to train his replacements - also a goal that he meaningfully works to achieve over the course of the series. Unlike many similar ecchi shows (such as Ishuzoku Reviewers), this one has an actual story and a sense of progression, which saves it from getting stale after a couple of episodes.

The comedy.
Genuinely clever and imaginative, not limited to just “haha, boobs,” and absolutely nailing the comedic timing. I can’t repeat this enough, it’s both in the style of Konosuba, and, more importantly, on almost the same level of wit.

The ecchi.
Just to make it clear, you absolutely can turn your brains off and watch this series just for the THICC art. The THICC here is beautifully drawn and the ecchi scenes are hot. The show is a ton of pure fun.

9/10 for a high-quality erotic comedy.

How not to do marketing.

First of all, PSA: this series is a gun bunny blood opera - Black Lagoon, John Woo, Quentin Tarantino. Hot chicks in fetish getups dual-wielding pistols and murdering each other in campy over-the-top shootouts. The creators decided to completely hide this fact from all the promo materials, probably thinking it was clever. It’s not clever, it just makes the potential audience miss out on the show. I am the target audience of gun bunny shows, I had seen all trailers of this series before the season started, and I had decided to skip it because those had given me a completely ... wrong impression of what this show was about (I picked it up later after hearing from other people who saw it). This marketing failure matters because it mirrors the creative failure of the actual content of the series - it thinks itself far more clever than it actually is.

Camp is effectively a form of deadpan comedy. A campy show, ironically, needs to take itself seriously in order to work. Black Lagoon takes itself seriously, so when over-the-top bullshit starts happening, it’s unexpected and impactful. Akiba Maid Sensou does the opposite of treating itself seriously, it can’t help but make obnoxious winks and nods to the audience all the time, which ruin the immersion. It’s like a comedian that starts giggling and asking “get it?” in the middle of telling a joke before the audience hears the actual funny parts. Maybe the joke itself is great, but not with a botched delivery like that. When a gunfight’s choreography is synched to a poppy maid-themed song playing in the background, this is funny and cool. But when the gunmen break out into literal dance moves for that song, it’s immersion-breaking cringe.

A shame, because the series has all the ingredients to be good. The “maid cafes as yakuza clans” premise is fun, the buddy cop duo of main leads have good chemistry, and the situational comedy is funny when it’s not overdone. It’s just that it is overdone all the time.

4/10 for “good concept, bad execution.”